World building

During a feedback session the other day, (I’m currently taking Unthank Book’s How to Write a Novel online course. More on that to come) someone suggested that the world building in my novel was strong.

My what?

I don’t do world building. World building is for fantasy writers. World building is for science fiction writers. I’m writing historical books.

I understand I’m splitting hairs here. I understand the point he was trying to make. Few people know much about 1930s variety theatre. But I’m not building it, I’m recreating it. I have problems with world building or what I call ‘twiddly knob syndrome.’

I’ve just read Ursula le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness for my reading group. I was looking forward to it because of her reputation, and because this year we’ve tried to read more sci fi and I’ve enjoyed it, much to my surprise. I’m afraid Le Guin reminded me of everything I dislike about sci fi and fantasy genres. (I’m being really broad with these as descriptions for this post – just humour me.)

I hate world building. I hate endless descriptions of new languages, new worlds, new systems, new bloody spaceships. I hate all the twiddly knob descriptions. I just want to know about the characters. This is not a reflection on the writing of those authors who do this – le Guin, clearly, someone suggested Tolkein (never finished one of his books – are you seeing a pattern) and another reading group choice springs to mind – Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. These are all clearly great authors. It’s not them, it’s me.

There are loads of readers who love this stuff, who get right into it and the slow pace while they immerse themselves in this world is exactly what they want. But it’s too much for me. It’s a hard slog. But it does make me wonder about the books I do like that stray into fantasy – how did they do it? How did they get my interest and still explain their new world? I have to do some re-reading to investigate.