Why your fantasy worlds aren't working for you

Hey!

I sat down in one of my creative writing university classes and this week we were peer-reviewing others' work. We would each take turns to have what we had written projected onto a screen so that we could all read and make comments. It sounds scary at first but it is great for trying to improve your writing as you get instant feedback.

The first piece that was projected on the board was good, I am not going to pretend that it was awful, but it just had one thing wrong with it. The writing was supposed to be an opening chapter, but the first one thousand words were all describing the setting.

You might be sitting there thinking, "What's wrong with that?" I would agree with you. Older fiction could get away with having a longer introduction, allowing the writer to slowly introduce the reader to their world. However, with the reader having a much shorter attention span, you need to hook them right away.

🎣Understanding the 'hook'

Have you ever watched a film and been thrown straight into the action? It doesn't have to be a fight scene, it can be slower, but it just has to make you as the reader ask questions. This is what we see as the 'hook.' The opening of the story needs to draw the reader in and the most common way recently is to introduce the reader to a character and a bunch of unanswered questions.

Let's get back to this creative piece. As I said, nothing wrong with the writer, it was just the fact that they didn't understand why their heavy description wasn't a good thing. When I asked them, their defense was "Tolkien did it."

I hear this quite frequently and it bugs me. Tolkien was published in the early to mid 20th century. They didn't have instant access to entertainment like we do with technology. As much as I would like to ignore that fact and write what I want, if you want to be somewhat successful then you have to consider your audience.

Before I go any further let me just clarify: if you are writing solely for yourself, then don't worry about any of this. But if your intention is to get published, then you have to consider your audience at least. You may feel its okay to sit through three to four pages of info-dumping as you are the one who wrote it. Other people will simply grow bored and move on to the next book on their TBR.

⏰The competition for time

Similar to most forms of entertainment, you are competing for time. A reader chooses to spend time reading your novel over someone else's. In that very decision, you win.

Every wonder why movies such as James Bond do well? Because they know how to perfectly execute on the 'hook' part that I mentioned earlier. We can't all write like Tolkien any more. We can still try to create worlds that live up to the scale of Middle-Earth, but we have to let them simmer throughout the plot and introduce the features as we go.

We need to perfect the art of drip-feeding the reader with world-building until they get addicted. That is how recent authors who have become successful have managed it. They don't neglect world-building, rather that they wrap their story in it, letting it lift the plot up.

The setting is one of the most important parts of a Fantasy or Science Fiction story, but it needs to be subtle. Info-dumping straight away only serves to confuse the reader.

🗺️My advice for exciting world-building

What has worked for me is to take an interesting part of the world that is different from our own and have the character interact with it. It doesn't have to be a direct conflict for the central character in the scene, but they do have to acknowledge it and hopefully, if they are someone who lives in the world, overcome it in a simple but exciting way. This is how Fantasy becomes brilliant.

That's all from me today,
Fin :)