What About Worldbuilding? #19 - Degrees of Disbelief

Huh?

Yeah, I had no idea what this was going to be about either, the title just popped into my head.

This year seems to be spinning off into individual years of its own every month, and that sort of inward propagation is driving me up a damn wall.

What we’re going to be talking about today is something I’ve coined “Degrees of Disbelief” and it’s really just about what a writer can expect to get away with when crafting a world and story.

It Varies

I suppose that’s where I’d like to start things off.

What you can get away with varies. Some writers struggle to establish credibility with their audience in regards to worldbuilding choices. You can be weird if you want, it’s fine if that makes you happy, but there’s really no guarantee that you will be able to sell your readers on what you’ve concocted.

There are a few factors that come into play here. One of which is how much trust you’ve established with the reader before you’ve taken side-steps toward evolving insanities. Whether the trust was built through past works, or through establishing a connection between the reader and the current work, if you’ve got their trust then you can pretty much build whatever you want and they’ll probably be along for the ride.

On the other end of the spectrum, we encounter issues where there is no trust and no reasonable foundation upon which assertions are made. It’s a bit like saying you didn’t eat the cookies when the crumbs are all over your shirt.

Not convincing in the slightest.

I have no idea where I was going with that… huh. Weird.

Okay, but yeah, the thing. You can’t just drop the story into a volcano made of chocolate with peppermint dragons dancing around the rim and expect anyone to be on board with that. Not unless you’ve got a rabid fanbase that will go with whatever you think is best.

I mean… even then don’t do it.

Can you imagine what the Nougat Incursions would have been like? Brutal stuff.

We don’t want to see that kind of story. Too dark.

Be Reasonable

Begin in a place you can defend if questioned. Don’t put yourself in a position where you’re forced to defend indefensible decisions. That’s a waste of words and basically buries the beginnings of what could be a great story in needless exposition.

Start small, end big… build up to the insanity. Earn it.

Start in some quiet place, or with some simple happenstance.

I’m not saying you can’t do what you want, but what you want will need to be tempered until you’ve proven to your reader that you can create something magnificent using the basics and build up to having three-winged demigods in the shape of continents marching across a sea of grass.

Cool?

Cool.

See you next month...