I’ve been writing a ton of fantasy short stories lately, and bouncing between so many worlds has made me think about the mechanics of worldbuilding. After the last few weeks, there’s one lesson in particular that I wanted to explore:

Good worldbuilding comes from interaction-based worldbuilding that connects your characters to the world either emotionally or physically. Doing so adds depth to your characters, imparts life and texture to “tableau” shots, controls pacing, strenthens momentum, and makes exposition compelling, natural, and subtle. If that sounds arcane, that’s fine: I’m about to explain.

I’ll start by giving some disclaimers and defining some terms, then explaining what I mean when I say your characters should interact with the world. After, I’ll show how and why it improves your writing using excerpts from Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora. Then, I’ll talk about how interaction-based worldbuilding can help control pacing, keep the story moving, and connect your cast to the world before discussing some of its downsides.

Now, on to those disclaimers and terms:

First off, while this article is focused on fantasy writing, it should be useful for all writers from lit-fiction authors to playwrights and screenwriters. No matter what you write, you’re still building a world and showing it to your reader… even if it’s just your hometown from a week ago.

Second, if we break worldbuilding into two different acts—“creation,” where you craft the details of your world, and “presentation,” where you show that world to the reader—this article would be focused on “presentation.” That said, it should indirectly improve your ability to “create” a world by forcing you to think about it in greater depth.

So, with that covered… what do I mean when I say your characters should interact with the world? Well, many writers write their stories in “stages.” They’ll tell the reader about the world, maybe some details about the culture, then drop their character into that world and start the action. Something like this:

It was hot in the city, cloudless and bright. The heat hung in the air like fog, and the light turned the city’s gilded spires and walkways into something like a bonfire. Few left their homes, cats and dogs huddled together in the shade. Our hero, Thatdude, walked down the main street, looking for a place to get a drink.

Me, thirty seconds ago.

Is this bad? Not necessarily, given that I popped it out in thirty seconds as an example of what not to do. Still, it isn’t compelling; it’s just a list of details, a physical, primarily visual description of the city. I call these “tableau” shots. Even when Thatdude is introduced, we don’t have any reason to care about him. He has zero personality. All we know is that he’s looking for a drink, which isn’t revelatory in a hot city.

But what if we made Thatdude interact with the setting?

Thatdude hated the city heat. He shielded his eyes from the bonfire-like light glinting off the gilded spires and walkways, grimacing in anger more than pain. The streets around him were deserted; a cat and dog huddled together in the shade of a fallen palm tree. “They’ve more sense than humans,” he thought. “They know to work together.”

Me, ten seconds ago.

It’s a little clumsy, to be sure, but much better. First, we got boatloads more information in the second example than the first, despite it being one word shorter. Second, we got to know more about our character, even if it’s only minor details. And third, we got the same visual representation of the setting (from a different vantage point), but it was far more interesting. All this is a result of simply allowing the character to interact with the world; physically, when he’s walking through the streets or shielding his eyes and emotionally when he’s talking about the animals or expressing his hatred for the city.

In other words, instead of detailing the setting then telling the reader what your character is doing in that setting, you can make the work more dynamic and interesting by showing the reader the setting as the character interacts with it. If you’re still confused or skeptical, don’t worry; we’ll explore a few more examples to clear this up.

Let’s start with an excerpt from Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora. Scott Lynch is a master at presenting his worlds, and you can learn a lot from just a few paragraphs of his work. In the following excerpt from the book’s prologue, the author is talking about how a character named the Thiefmaker finds the orphans he trains…

Plagues were a time of special opportunity for the Thiefmaker, and the Catchfire orphans had crawled away from his very favorite sort: Black Whisper. It fell on the Catchfire district from points unknown, and the quarantine had gone up (death by clothyard shaft for anyone trying to cross a canal or escape on a boat) in time to save the rest of the city from everything but unease and paranoia. Black Whisper meant a miserable death for anyone over the age of eleven or twelve (as near as physikers could figure, for the plague was not content to reap by overly firm rules) and a few days of harmless swollen eyes and red cheeks for anyone younger .

Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora, Page 5

Exposition is hard to do right, and this paragraph is a stellar example of how interaction can make it compelling and natural. Many writers would’ve omitted the first sentence of this paragraph and gone straight to explaining the plague and how it affected the city. Lynch, instead, frames this chunk of exposition by making it interact emotionally with the Thiefmaker. He opens by telling us that plagues, of all things, are good for the Thiefmaker. He even has a “favorite sort!” After that, the reader is naturally led to ask why he likes plagues, and why this kind of plague is his favorite. The exposition doesn’t break the flow of the piece—it answers the questions asked by the emotional action of the character. In a lesser way, it also tells us more about this character and his world. How jaded does someone have to be to see plagues as an opportunity, and what kind of world can produce a person like that?

That leads us to the issue of character. Just before this next excerpt, we’ve been told that Locke Lamora, one of the book’s two main characters, is running a con, and he plans to win the mark’s trust by getting strangled.

They were in the dead-end alley beside the old Temple of Fortunate Waters; the temple’s prayer waterfalls could be heard gushing somewhere behind the high plaster wall. Locke clutched once again at the harmless coils of rope circling his neck and spared a glance for the horse staring at him from just a few paces away, laden down with a rich looking cargo of merchant’s packs. The poor dumb animal was Gentled; there was neither curiosity nor fear behind the milk-white shells of its unblinking eyes. It wouldn’t have cared even had the strangling been real.

Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora, Page 41

Setting aside how inherently interesting this premise is (tell me, when was the last time you read a fantasy novel that opened with a character pretending to get strangled for a con?), it tells us a decent amount about Locke’s character. Primarily through his description of the horse standing nearby.

The novel is written in close third-person. Describing the horse as a “poor dumb animal” isn’t an objective statement, it’s Locke’s opinion. By this point in the novel, we’ve learned that this city is rough, and Locke has had a particularly hard life. Despite that, he still has enough kindness to feel sympathy for and get distracted by an animal whose mind has been stir-fried. This means that either “Gentling” is exceptionally cruel (which tells us about the world) or Locke is softer than you would expect from a con artist currently pretending to get strangled (which is an important revelation about his character). And, in that second point, we see a contrast between this and the characterization of the Thiefmaker from earlier.

Before, the Thiefmaker’s opinion of plagues forced us to ask what kind of world could make someone so cruel. Here, we’ve already gotten a sense of the harshness of the world and, because of that, Locke’s gentility is a notable contrast that wouldn’t have the same impact if we didn’t already know about the world. The first interaction defined the world, the other used the world to define the character.

But, there’s a caveat, here: Especially when the character’s emotional interaction with the world is subtle, the narrative distance of your prose can affect how this trick works. Lies of Locke Lamora is written in close third-person, meaning that what we see in the prose can be viewed as the perspective of the main character of that section. Generally speaking, the closer your perspective is to your characters, the more impact this trick will have, and the subtler you can be.

So far, we’ve (mostly) explored emotional interaction. For the last trick, let’s move on to the physical world and how it affects “tableaus.”

Jean Tannen let his right hand trail in the warm water of the canal while he took another bite of the sour marsh apple held in his left. The forward gunwale of the flat-bottomed barge was a choice spot for relaxation in the watered-wine light of early morning, allowing all sixteen stone of Jean’s frame to sprawl comfortably—keg belly, heavy arms, bandy legs and all…

…Other barges, heavily laden with everything from ale casts to bleating cows, were slipping past the two of them on the clay-colored water of the canal. Bug was poling them north along Camorr’s main commercial waterway, the Via Camorrazza, toward the Shifting Market, and the city was lurching into life around them.

Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora, Pages 43-44

You’ll notice I didn’t give you an introduction to this excerpt. And yet, I’d bet that you still got a clear idea of where we were. Instead of describing the setting to us and dropping Jean and Bug into it, Lynch opens with Jean’s hand drifting in the warm water, a concise bit of information that gives us a textured sense of place complete with movement and touch. Then, to “zoom out,” he shows Bug poling the pair ahead through the waterway, tells us their destination and subtly tells us the time of day by saying that the city is “lurching to life around them.”

Without our taking notice, Lynch has given us a complete tableau. We know the time of day and the weather, their location in the city and its significance, and even a little bit about the dynamic between the characters, all while keeping the story in motion and keeping the characters connected to it.

That connection is, I think, the most valuable part of interaction-based worldbuilding. All of us have watched movies, read books, and played games where the characters seem tacked on to the setting. They connect to it every so often, but mostly feel like paper cut-outs pasted onto a fancy backdrop. Making your characters interact with the world shatters that divide and brings the whole thing to life. And, by thinking about worldbuilding in this way, you have to consider your world in a much more textured, lively way and get you “deeper” into your world.

Likewise, interaction-based worldbuilding is great for managing pacing by keeping your work in motion. Tableau shots and exposition (the normal kind, anyway) both slow stories down and make them freeze in place. When your characters interact with the setting (especially physically), you can provide exposition without slowing things down, because they still have a sense of movement.

But, like any other tool in your writing utility belt, interaction-based worldbuilding shouldn’t be used indiscriminately. Too much of it can botch the pace of a work and keep the reader from catching their breath. They’ll start to miss things and the textured, compact value of interaction won’t be noticed. What’s more, tableaus have a long history of being used to control the pacing of a story. J.R.R. Tolkien is an absolute master of this, using beautifully written depictions of settings to give the reader a breather after rough scenes or give us a sense of travel time as the Fellowship moves from one place to another.

Nevertheless, without making your characters interact with the world emotionally or physically, you’re missing out on golden opportunities to round out exposition, breathe life into tableaus, show more detail about your characters, and control pacing while keeping your cast connected to the set. Think about this next time you write and see how it affects your piece. And, next time you read, look out for writers who use interaction-based worldbuilding and ask how it makes you feel.

That’s all, folks. Feel free to make comments, ask questions, or share on LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, or anything else—I’ll probably answer pretty quick on LinkedIn or Twitter. And hey, if you ask a good question or get an interesting conversation going about craft or theme, it might spark my next post!

Happy writing!

Featured Image Courtesy of Reinhardi