Joseph Carrabis – Page 157 – Joseph Carrabis, Author Blog

World-Building – Revealing Settings Through Relatable Characters

Every time you have an opportunity to show something most people aren’t familiar with, do so to add color to the story provided you can do it in a way the reader understands and can relate to.

Ground the unfamiliar with the familiar

You have to ground the unfamiliar with the familiar so that readers can relate to it. Example: A reviewer wrote of The Augmented Man‘s protagonist, Nick Trailer, “His struggles were easy to relate with and, honestly, I found myself hoping to see his happy ending by the end of the novel.” The “reader wanting the hero to succeed” is key to world-building as it demonstrates the reader is emotionally involved with the character individually and the story in general.

A familiar example of grounding the unfamiliar with the familiar comes from the original Alien movie. The opening scenes are of the crew waking from suspended animation. Quite unfamiliar to most people. But the next scene is the crew in the mess complaining about being woken up, how crappy the coffee is, are they going to get extra pay for this extra work, et cetera.

The unfamiliar grounded in the familiar. The crew may have just woken from suspended animation on a deep space ship but they’re just like your friends in the corner bar grumbling about work, they’re your co-workers in the company cafeteria complaining about crappy food, they’re your workmates wondering if the company’s going to pay them for any overtime coming from making an unscheduled stop on their delivery route.

In short, most people accepted the unfamiliar in Alien because whatever happened, it was happening to people they could relate to and understand; the unfamiliar was grounded in the familiar.

The heart of any story is believable characters either succeeding or failing to achieve their goals. There is a general rule about people; what people do rarely changes. How they do things changes. Example: people gossip. One hundred years ago people gossiped by gathering in the general store, the local pub, in the park. Now they gossip on their mobiles, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera. People have gossiped since we climbed down from the trees and stood on our hind legs. How they’ve gossiped has changed over time.

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Shaman Story Chapter X – Passing

Read Shaman Story Chapter X – The Immensity of Now.

Shaman Story Chapter X – Passing

Uncle John walks with me to the edge of his field where his beans grow broadleaf in the shadow of trees. I know most trees. Sometimes a new one grows overnight and Uncle John and Buppa take me through the seedling through its roots into the soil to feel the cool earth.

“There’s someone wants to meet you, Gio. You like that? It’s okay if we say hello?”

“I like that.”

A tall, tall man walks out of the woods edging Uncle John’s field. He moves quietly, his footsteps like whispers, and steps carefully, as if his rich brown sandals sense what’s beneath them, making sure nothing is harmed, nothing is crushed. He wears garden-green silk stockings and his violet trousers flare with each step, and it seems he walks with the earth, not on it.

Uncle John and I sweat from our walk in the warm sun but the heat doesn’t bother the tall, tall man. His shirt ripples like vanillaed cream in the slight breeze, and the black lines on his violet jacket frill like feathers while the jacket ruffles. His broad, banded white and yellow hat hides his face but his elegant beard, trimmed so precisely to his chin, has gold and white highlights in it, depending on how it catches the sun. His bowtie is gold and lavender, rimmed with black.

“Say hello, Gio.”

I offer my hand.

The man bends slowly, gracefully. A cloud of earth smells, growing smells, Buppa’s garden, Mrs. Minerva’s hives, John and Mary’s fields, Chan’s medicines, Beautiful Painted Arrow’s flatbreads, chamomile, rosa ragosa, rose of sharon, and clematis surround me. Insects buzz around him, under his hat. Some crawl up his silk stockings, pants, and jacket. A spider builds a web between his chin and bow tie.

We shake. His hand is soft and reminds me of lavender leaves. I look down. My hand is wrapped in a flower petal.

His other hand lifts off his hat. His face is a sunflower, his eyes bright yellow stella d’oros, his beard corn hairs flowing with pollen.

The wind tickles my ears. “Hhhelloh Geeeooh.”

A new friend! “Hello!”

He stands up, pulls away, moves over the earth, carried by the wind, back to the trees. He leans against one, a mid-size oak. His legs merge into a single stalk, his shit and jacket become petals and blooms, flowers burst from his hands, his hat scatters pollen to the sun.

The mid-size oak is embraced by a climbing clematis.

Something about the oak.

The Augmented Man Video Series Episode 5 – “Tell Me About Her”

Episode 1 – “Good Run, Trailer?”
Episode 2 – “Massively Scarred”
Episode 3 – “Learn Chess, Yes”
Episode 4 – “To Feel”

Sabine Rossbach
Joseph Carrabis
The Augmented Man

Hyacinthe Feeds

Patterns.

The Wild is full of patterns.

Learn those patterns and you can be The Wild’s friend.

Over all our years of interacting with raccoons, we’ve come to know their patterns.

Especially those that aren’t listed on “official” websites as “raccoon behavior.”

But realistically, why should The Wild follow the guidelines of some “official” website?

We watch Hyacinthe and know what it means.

Kits, soon.

For now, she dines.

Enjoy.

World-Building – Getting Readers Interested in Your World

[Much of this series is excerpted from a post on Phoebe Darqueling’s blog]

World-building is an interesting and amusing phrase to me. I don’t think it existed as such when I started writing professionally (1970s). Perhaps people understood it without naming it as such. Consider authoring concepts such as atmosphere, character, description, dialogue, narration, pace, plot, POV, scenes, setting, structure, style, tone, viewpoint, … are we whirling them all into the single term, world-building? Okay, so long as we recognize the whole is the sum of its parts and a weakness in any one of them is a weakness in all of them.

World-building is the art of getting readers more interested in your story than they are in their own story.

World-building is in all writing, fiction and non-fiction, because (to me) “world-building” is the art of getting your readers to accept the story’s mythos as more real than their daily mythos (meaning the story’s reality is more engaging and actualizing than their daily reality). I’ve read biographies and histories and been caught up in them, lost track of time, forgotten to eat, read until my eyes closed and then dreamt about what I read. Likewise I’ve read fiction that I’ve put down and forgotten to pick up again because I couldn’t care less about what was happening in the story.

I’m told I do lots of world-building in my work and ask, “Can you show me where?” Most can’t because I work to share a story’s reality through the development of the story itself, not in expository lumps (an “expository lump” occurs when the author tells the reader something rather than providing the reader with sufficient information to experience it. World-building case in point, the first paragraph of one of my works-in-progress, Gable Smiled, is:

Valen patted Gable’s muscular neck as they trotted into Lensterville. They’d been ten days out, mostly soldiering Sipio’s vast Northern Plain, and this time of year that meant heat with a capital “H”. Valen could feel his own sweat trickling through the hairs on his chest and back, and every time his Ranger-issue travel cords relaxed around him, his scent rose like steam washing his face.

Consider how much the reader learns in Gable Smiled‘s opening paragraph: