Plot Outlining Versus World Building

[Strain Of Thought]

So, I've been working on an idea for a Space Opera sort of story for a long time now. I began with a rough plot rather than rough world, and I think that has helped me; the world has changed a lot since I began fleshing it out and generally these changes have been to accommodate the story. But I've run into a problem where plot development is dependent on world development, and I can't get to the point where the world building feels essentially done, and serious writing can begin.

An example:

The protagonist acquires a very small starship from the ruins of a lost civilization near the beginning of the story. This ship is extremely plot relevant in that it allows the character to make a vital journey. After that, the ship could hang around for a while, or I could ditch it and have the characters get nicer transportation without much trouble. But because of where the character gets the ship, everything about it says something important about the lost civilization in question, which is of some importance. Therefore I feel unable to decide the ship's capabilities until I have completely fleshed out the civilization behind it. Without knowing what the ship can do, I am unable to work on certain later sections of the plot. But the lost civilization exists to further the plot, and I won't know the little details about it until I know what I need it to be. So I'm running around in circles trying to find what to establish first.

I've really just gotten sick of world building, but I feel unsure making up plot elements without the world to back them up in place already. I want the plot to rely closely on the setting it takes place in, but it feels like I'm going to have to just decide what will happen in certain situations and justify it with a hand-wave, because I can't figure out everything in the world beforehand. I don't want to do things that way. Can anyone suggest a better approach?

 

[reiver33]

Do you as the author need a grounding in your world view to proceed, or do your characters? Unless you're dealing with a remarkably uniform world society there will always be exceptions to the 'norm' somewhere that could be used to retrospectively validate your plot developments. I know it does sound a bit 'wave of the hand', very few citizens would know enough about their world to gainsay every unusual/uncommon practice - just blame the bloody foreigners!

 

[Strain Of Thought]

Reiver33 I must apologize but I can't really understand your suggestion. The story in question is, as I said, a Space Opera, and takes place across several star systems. At the start of the story, the protagonist isn't even aware that those other star systems exist. I'm not talking about cultural norms; I'm talking about technological level and the principles upon which equipment operates. You're not suggesting I just say that "people down south use tachyons in their warp drives instead of quarks"? That's exactly the sort of technobabble I despise most!

Maybe I should add that it is my goal to make this fairly hard SF. If one group has a technology and the other doesn't, I need to know why. Physics is going to work the same for everybody and their equipment is going to operate on the same principles.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Sometimes I leave out details that I don't need to know yet ... believing (and so far it's worked) that by the time that I do need to know, an answer will have developed independently as other parts of the story come together.

So my advice would be, if you think you've done enough world-building for now, get on with the story. The story might turn up excellent possibilities that would never occur to you at this point. If not, and you stall again because it turns out that you really did need to work that part out ... well, you can worry about that when and if the problem actually arises.

 

[Dozmonic]

Do the characters need to know everything about the ship immediately? Research usually takes time and they can discover one aspect after another.

Do you need to create the whole backstory of the civilisation who created the ship right away, or can you just create the relevant points to your story? Which part in the world creation is hindering you? Are you able to do creative exercises to find your answers?

If it's a basic question of no real ideas about the civilisation, you just have the concept of learning about it from the spaceship, then consider the type of people that built the ship. How would a ship built by Aztecs look compared to one built by the Egyptians, the Chinese, NASA etc? Look at aeroplanes. NASA spent loads of money working out how to get biros working in space, Russia used pencils. Take a few ancient civilisations and work out what their spaceships would look and feel like compared to others and then perhaps you'll come up with an amalgamation of civilisation and culture types with which to create this ship's nation's culture.

I like to think of my writing like sketching. You go over a piece a lot of times and you start by thinking in broad terms and then narrow it down to the details. So although you've specified you want a high level of knowledge about why this culture developed in this way, you don't necessarily need it YET. You can have what developed for your story and brainstorm reasons why at a later point. Like archaeology, "here's a wall where we expected a ditch, why?"

 

[Strain Of Thought]

Thank you guys for the replies! Reading them is helping me think! You have convinced me that the Lost Civilization is in fact as vital as any other part of the story. Some members of the species that built it are still alive, and are important characters, but as their civilization is mostly gone I wasn't too concerned with it. It has changed greatly, repeatedly, since I began working on the story and I think that my intentional vagueness in the OP was not helpful.

I believe now that what I need isn't general direction, but more help brainstorming. So instead I'm going to describe two issues I'm having early in the plot in greater detail and see what you guys can come up with.

The current outline of the opening chapters is something like this: a fledgling interstellar civilization is all but wiped out when their home star abruptly Supernovas. (Yes, this is a plot point) The blast radius is great enough (tens of light years) that all (or nearly all) of their colony worlds were sterilized. The first setting in the story is a marginally habitable planet just outside this blast radius where either a small outpost existed, or where the crew of a surviving starship decided to ground themselves after seeing that they had nowhere else to go- possibly both. The story begins when the protagonist, a human child, falls out of the sky in an escape pod, is found by the- well, let's call them the Unfledged- and ends up being raised by them. The Unfledged aren't positive that they are the last of their species but they've been unable to make contact with anyone in at least two generations- which is not saying much because there is no faster-than light communication without a starship to carry it. However, with prolonged investigation of the ship's log contained within the escape pod they are able to piece together the route of the human ship and estimate the location of the nearest human settlement. For various reasons (and this bothers me because I want them to have one CLEAR reason) the Unfledged decide to construct a very small, single-seat starship from parts available and send the human foundling out for help.

The two elements in this section of the story that I am hanging up on are the escape pod and the small starship. My concerns with the starship involve what it's being built out of or cannibalized from, and why it hasn't been done before- in the version where the Unfledged are a starship crew, my basic idea is that the small ship is much more economical in terms of both fuel and life support than the original vessel was, and is probably built out of the frame of a shuttle with one of the original ship's FTL drives taking up most of the interior space. (This would make it very overpowered and a good vehicle for the hero of a story.) That way the Unfledged are putting the ship together so it can complete a specific, predetermined journey, the route of which they wouldn't have had available to them before the escape pod came. Further complications arising from determining the small starship's specifications involve my descriptions of the day-to-day life of the Unfledged, which is highly dependent on how much technology they have been able to retain.

My problem with the escape pod is why the heck someone would put a kid in an escape pod all by their self, no matter how severe the emergency was. In every reasonable scenario I can think of it makes more sense to just get in the pod with the kid. Single-person pods strike me as extremely impractical considering the sophistication necessary for an atmospheric re-entry, and the child is not so large that an adult wouldn't fit in there with them. Even if the adult planned to stay behind to distract some pursuer, how could they possibly hope for the child to survive on the surface by themselves? I have vaguely planned for the starship the escape pod came from to have been a long-range survey vessel that was attacked and boarded, but I'm willing to go with anything that works better with the rest of the story. There are two reasons I need the child to be alone: one, if the child is raised in the alien society then they can approach the setting's human society as an outsider, which gives me a neat angle for examining various Space Opera tropes, and two, much of the tension of the opening plot is built around the ontological mystery. The kid doesn't know where they came from or how they ended up there, and they don't know what they will find when they get in that Starship and try to re-find human civilization.

 

[Peter Graham]

But because of where the character gets the ship, everything about it says something important about the lost civilization in question, which is of some importance. Therefore I feel unable to decide the ship's capabilities until I have completely fleshed out the civilization behind it.

I think that it is important to remember that you are primarily writing a story rather than building a world. As I've said many times before, writing a work of fiction is not the same thing as writing the equivalent of a Haynes instruction manual for the Mark II Ford Capri.

You could have the finest world going, internally cohesive, consistent to the last scientific iota and so credible that one cannot believe you couldn't just jump on a plane and go on holiday there, but ultimately if you cannot write a character, or a line of dialogue, or an engaging story, it will all be for nothing. There are elements of world building which may be important in writinng the story, but the story always comes first.

So if the ship needs to be able to do X, Y or Z, so be it. When (or if) the time comes to square that with the details about the lost civilization, you have always got your imagination to fall back on. You'll be able to sort it out when you need to, so don't worry about it now. Get the action rolling and everything will fall into place.

By way of an example, people would sniffily say to Tolkien "but the mountains of Mordor couldn't possibly have developed like that. It doesn't make geological sense." To which his answer was along the lines of "I don't care. That's how they need to be."

Regards

Peter

 

[The Judge]

I could only come up with one idea following on the human ship being boarded etc which is that the child isn't in fact alone, but the other humans in the pod have died of injuries between leaving the ship and reaching the planet. I don't think that this will cause any difficulty with the mystery - after all if the pod contains the ship's logs there must be some info about the humans. In fact you could have the child growing up with pictures of the dead humans and trying to discover whether they are related to him (DNA testing not having been carried out by the Unfledged.)

Other than that, here are some random ideas:

* the child deliberately activates the pod - for instance he is a moody pre-teenager and hates everybody and wants to get away; or he is being pursued by one of the crew who is being sexually aggressive - but he doesn't realise that once jettisoned the pod cannot be re-claimed by the ship. (A kind of cry for help which goes wrong.)

* the child accidently activates the pod - perhaps there has been a malfunction and someone has been working on it, the child goes inside to play (eg there is a game of hide and seek with the other children) and sets off the mechanism. Because of the malfunction no one on the ship knows it has gone.

The trouble with both of these is that at some point the ship should come looking for the child, which means you then have to brainstorm reasons why the pod can't be found.

* the child is believed to have some kind of fatal disease which is both incurable and highly contagious, so the decision is taken to kill the child - but his mother has to give him one chance of life and sends him out into the void.

* the adults in the crew have been infected by the fatal disease, but the child is for the moment unaffected due to his age or some other temporary protection and the choice is between sending him out into space or watching him die when the protection ends, and again his mother chooses the one chance of life.

Hope these might at least give you some ideas to play with.

J

 

[Strain Of Thought]

You could have the finest world going, internally cohesive, consistent to the last scientific iota and so credible that one cannot believe you couldn't just jump on a plane and go on holiday there, but ultimately if you cannot write a character, or a line of dialogue, or an engaging story, it will all be for nothing. There are elements of world building which may be important in writinng the story, but the story always comes first.

Peter, thank you very much for the reply. I am familiar with the problem of perpetual world building, and I have done it myself before, but I honestly do not believe that that is the problem I am having at this time- or I misunderstand the definition of world building. If I had to name it I would call what I am doing perpetual plot summarizing. I have most of a story, but I am having trouble getting the facts to match the story, so to speak. It is not a simple story.

It is very important to me that the story appears to flow naturally from the facts. When I read for pleasure my greatest complaints are from manufactured situations that should have resolved themselves without the events of the story ever needing to occur. In addition, what I enjoy most is when the technical aspects of a situation are so well spelled out that I am able to get inside the character's head and see how they perceive it. My very favorite parts of The Lord Of The Rings are when the party stops and discusses which route to take next, and I can flip back to the map and understand exactly what issues the characters are discussing. I am a big fan of Hornblower and Aubrey-Maturin for just the same reasons; when you read those books (provided you have a guide to sailing ships handy) you can actually understand what's really going on. The rarity of this sort of insight in contemporary science fiction frustrates me a great deal and I am trying to write something I would actually like to read. Many of my sentiments about SF are reflected in the The Tough Guide To The Known Galaxy, for example the entry on charts.

So each time something happens in the plot, I want to know why it's happening the way it is and why it isn't happening in some other fashion, or even not happening at all. I've completely broken down the plot and world repeatedly and started over in an attempt to make the plot flow from the world instead of looking like it's being railroaded through- and I really had to because the story just didn't work. If there is a danger out there, why don't the authorities take care of it? If the authorities are so ineffective then why has anything managed to hold together at all? So I have to know the authorities and the danger very well in order to explain, at least to myself, why this opportunity for heroism exists. My protagonist isn't going to just declare them self the defender of the galaxy and fly around blowing stuff up.

I had several versions of the small starship's background before, and most of the problems I was having were with the ones I have not described in this thread- the basic problem was that the small starship just seemed too advanced considering the conditions under which it was built. This thread really is helping me immensely and I think that it will be best if I go with the version cannibalized from the parts of a previous starship as that settles the matter of where the materials came from best.

EDIT: Judge, thank you for the suggestions! I'm not sure if I thought of the other passengers in the pod dying before, but if I did then I must have quickly dismissed it as too morbid. Given how bloody I was willing to make the scenes leading up to the escape I think I'm going to have to re-examine that angle.

I did think of the second and third ideas, and did not like them for several reasons including the ones you mention. I believe the survey vessel has to be destroyed or the crew all killed in order to prevent the Unfledged on the planet, which is very close if they are not already in orbit, from making contact with outsiders and taking the whole story off the rails. One of my ongoing problems is figuring out why the attackers do not contact the planet either, but my general sense is that they just aren't interested in a planet which does not obviously contain sapient beings with advanced technology- the existing settlement there is far too small to be casually detected from orbit.

Your fourth and fifth ideas are very interesting and not like anything I have thought of. I do not see how I could use them but I will definitely think about them for awhile.

 

[Sapheron]

Take the simple approach; this little ship he finds is battered to hell and back. It's gone through the fall of the civilisation that made it and who knows how long after that against the elements and natural disasters and the like. Maybe it's capabilities could have ended up a little different to what they were?

 

[Dozmonic]

I haven't read the other ideas posted so if some are repeated, I apologise, but I thought I'd get them down while I had the problem fresh in mind.


Escape Pod

The child could have been fired off either purposefully or accidentally. Purposeful reasons could be that there wasn't room for more people on the pod, or there weren't more people around to put on the pod. Perhaps it was during a disaster and it was it was a father saving his son as he worked the controls to fire the ship off. Perhaps it was during a time of attack. Perhaps there were biological reasons, it was feared he had a disease or mutation that meant he was no longer wanted where he was. Perhaps he was a biological weapon sent elsewhere but ended up not landing there. Perhaps it was a punishment for crimes against society or religion. Perhaps it was religious fanatics sending him off as a sacrifice or a lesson, he could have been the son of someone important. Perhaps he was on board a space station and something happened there that meant immediate evacuation and he was the only one who made it to that escape pod.

The accidental reasons could be that he was in the pod, perhaps exploring, perhaps being shown around or whatever, and a malfunction meant he was fired off. Perhaps another pod was meant to be fired but his was fired off instead. Perhaps he was a stowaway and the pod, although capable of carrying a person, wasn't intended to at this point. Perhaps he made a mistake that meant the pod got fired off.


The Ship

If the Fledglings have their own spaceship then perhaps it is damaged or has no fuel source. They need raw materials to be processed for repairs and for fuel.

How many of the Fledglings are there? How hospitable is the planet they're on? Survival comes before exploring and if they're an outpost with limited resources it would take time for them to develop the tools or fuel sources for the space craft. If they crashed then they would have only what tools were available and a more urgent need to find food, water and shelter.

Are they aware of the supernova? Perhaps they haven't attempted to return sooner because they don't know if there's anything to return to. Perhaps there are other more interesting things nearby that they would have chosen to explore first. Perhaps there have been political divides amongst them slowing their progress. Perhaps deaths have meant skills have had to be relearned and thus slowed them down.

Limited resources would mean limited capability to produce a larger ship. Even if they're somewhere where money isn't relevant they still have lives to live and bare necessities to take care of and space age technology isn't striking stones together to build something so it all takes time, people and resources.

 

[Blackrook]

Well, your idea is similar to Stranger in a Strange Land. Maybe you should read that book to get more ideas.