CYOW 2: What Do You Have? What Do You Like?

also: systems of power, and the return of the soup

It’s been a couple weeks now since the second session of Choose Your Own World, my pair of worldbuilding seminars. Thank you so much to those who attended, you made the whole thing a joy! If you missed them and want to tune in, they’re now up on Twitch here.

If you just want to know what I talked about, though, you’re in the right place.

SYSTEMS

My quotable quote was: “a system is a description of who holds power and how they hold it.” Systems are governments, religions, companies, schools, criminal organizations, book clubs, unions, you name it. Wherever people organize, there’s a system in place. And fictional worlds are a series of systems, even when those systems are weak or ineffectual. (In which case you have to ask yourself: what made them that way? Will the plot have to center in some part around rebuilding or strengthening them?) Once you build one system, you can start extrapolating from there. In the world we were building (revenge story set in dystopian society controlled by genetically enhanced people), we had a strong government system implied in the premise. In building out this world, my tasks will be: to determine what laws, if any, there are against the pursuit of individual vengeance; to decide what kind of genetic enhancements we’re talking about; to figure out what kind of government this is (dictatorship? monarchy? oligarchy? republic? pure democracy? etc.). Those decisions will affect character— their social status, their capacity to rise, their freedom to move through the world, their involvement with any ~shady characters, their trust in the system (or lack thereof)— and they’ll affect plot (to what extent will the system intrude on the plot and make things difficult for the character?).

System decisions also ripple outward to affect the rest of the world-building. A government, for example, impacts…laws. Buildings. Names of places, of people. News. Holidays. Education (itself another system). Religion (same). The interplay of government against the other potential power centers is also something to consider— does the government permit autonomy in schools, or do they oversee them? Do they work in concert with religious figures— or do they restrict them? Now you’ve gotten the snowball rolling downhill. Just keep following it to the bottom.

BUT HOW DO I CHOOSE?

If the idea of making any of those decisions is intimidating to you, you can fall back on this simple series of questions: what do I have? What do I like?

What do I have? means taking a look at what’s already out there. If you want to write a revenge story, look up revenge stories. If you want to write a high fantasy involving elves, look up high fantasy involving elves. Read widely. Do research. It’s as if there’s already a conversation going on surrounding whatever type of work you’d like to contribute to culture— you want to know what’s already been said in that conversation. That doesn’t mean you have to come up with something completely new to contribute, it just means it’s good to be aware of what you’re repeating, if anything. And how. And how intentionally you go about it.

Seeing what other people have done with a particular thing can also introduce you to the challenges of it, the questions of it, in advance. Revenge stories, for example, carry their own questions— about violence, about grief, about justice, about whether you can really ever “get even,” about how far a character will go to try. If you aren’t interested in those questions, you probably shouldn’t write that kind of story. If you’re excited by them, that’s a good sign.

What do I like? is a bit of an obvious question, but this is more about confidence than anything. Just making a choice because you like it is a perfectly valid way to make worldbuilding decisions. I’m tired of writing about dictatorships so I want to tackle an oligarchy— great. I’m not interested in rewriting Allegiant, so I want our genetic enhancements to be weirder than that— also great. What you like is important, not just for your well being as you write a story, but because other people out there are like you, too. They like the things you like. You can trust yourself to steer your fictional world toward something interesting just by filling it with the things you want.

WHEN YOU’RE STUCK

Go back to these two little loops:

THE SOUP

Plot, character, and world— which one would I like to add to? How does that affect the other two?

HAVING/LIKING

What do I have? What do I like? (What’s already out there? What do I enjoy in stories?)

UPCOMING

My job, now, is to write a short story set in our world— a character on a government-sanctioned revenge quest in a world ruled by people genetically enhanced to resemble gods. Keep your eyes peeled— I’ve got some interesting ideas.

If you watched these seminars and enjoyed them and have ideas for the future, feel free to put them in the comments. I’m already considering a revision one— thoughts?

V