petermorwood: a-r-a-k-r: sunderlorn: FINALLY  SOMEONE  SAID  IT.  ALL OF IT. &nb

petermorwood:a-r-a-k-r:sunderlorn:FINALLY  SOMEONE  SAID  IT.  ALL OF IT.  ALL AT ONCE. (Thank you @fallingawkwardly​ for bringing this to my attention.)Yup, I agree with a lot of these, it points out many cliches, I think there are good things to consider and more variety in fantasy worlds would be nice. However, something about it was bothering me. Is it that sometime epic fantasy just need focus on that : being epic and fun? Authors shouldn’t feel they have to fixate on world building to please all the Brandons of the world and make everything realistic because they are first most writing an engaging stories. Good worldbuilding can be a part of it but there are great stories with minimal amount of it. Do I really want to read 3 chapters on horse breeding ? NO. And more science ? Could be fun, but that’s not the appeal for me : the perrilous realm, the enchantment, the wonder, the misty lake from which a lady slowly emerges, the wounded hero losing his path in the forest at twillight, the radiance of a sunset on a city of silver and gold, the sword that speak to tell the sad warrior it agrees to drink his blood as he kill himself, the young girl flying among the clouds on a goose, the great dwarven cities carved in mountains and glittering with gemstones, etc.. That’s what I love about fantasy : the magic. And I like when the worldbuilding makes me feel that the magic is real, not when it tries to be realistic. Some of Brandon’s complains are linked to idea that a fantasy story isn’t realistic enough, because many authors are deep in the worldbuilding rabbit hole, and while trying to construct real-like secondary world can be fun, it’s very hard to do well because there is always one more thing thing to consider. Along the way they forget about what makes fantasy magical and fun.All of these are things a writer might need to know for worldbuilding purposes (I remember Terry Pratchett nattering to @dduane​ and me about “rain shadow effect” in Discworld) but have very little relevance to the actual craft of storytelling. Bringing a story to a screeching halt for exam-paper answers to a list of bullet points like the OP isn’t how such research is used. Answering that list is what goes into Supplementary Material, like cutaway diagrams of Star Destroyers or how to cook the cuisines of Westeros (yes, cuisines plural; not all the same soup.)James Bond boarding a plane isn’t a cue for the history of flight from the Wright Brothers onward. His vodka martini shaken not stirred isn’t an excuse for that long argument about bruising the gin and why vodka isn’t used for martini anyway. Drawing his Walther PPK shouldn’t - though some thrillers do - prompt a digression about muzzle velocity and grain-weight of ammunition.It’s good for the writer to know all these things; it means, even in fantasy where they’ve made it all up themselves, that they’ll be writing about something “solid”, and the assurance of such writing is what makes some fantasy worlds feel so real. But unless these things have some bearing on the story - usually by having an effect on plot direction or character development - they have no business being shoehorned into what is a finite amount of space between Beginning and End just to show how much research the writer has been doing.That said, there are a couple of very worthwhile points in the OP that go further than off-screen worldbuilding: for instance, weights, measures, distances, coins and especially language. These shouldn’t be the same everywhere, and are important enough to have an effect on the story. ”The Common Tongue” is a convenience, but isolated villagers speaking it with 100% fluency is unlikely. There can be interesting tangles (comedy to relieve tension, or something deeper) when a character who only knows the Proper Version of a language gets into a conversation with someone speaking dialect (Eton-and-Oxford English meets Geordie or Glaswegian.) How about the same word with a different meaning? Modern example: is the person saying “Nice buns” referring to baked goods or anatomical features? Context makes it clear, but maybe not fast enough to avoid trouble. There should indeed be small businesses - bookbinders, printers (or at least scriptorium-style copy shops), saddlers, blacksmiths, swordsmiths, cobblers, weavers, all providers of the impedimenta of adventure. There’ll be taverns and eating-houses, so is there smuggling? How much is a pound of pepper in the open market versus under the counter? Maybe there’s an embargo on the booze from a hostile country but it’s still popular; that’s why brandy - already smuggled in peacetime to avoid excise duty - continued to come illegally from Franceto England during the Napoleonic wars. Wine wasn’t smuggled to the same extent because it was lower-profit, so drinkers shifted from claret (French, enemy) to port and Madeira (Portuguese and Spanish, ally.)There should also be bankers and merchants, and if you think that sounds dull, check on what the Medici and Fugger banking houses got up to during the Renaissance, and how they got so powerful. There’s a phrase in Ireland: “Your money’s no good here.” That’s usually nice to hear, it means you won’t be able to pay for a drink since others are buying it for you. However, once currency goes beyond RPG-style “gold, silver and copper pieces” you start getting foreign money and that money may be “no good here” in a more awkward way. Is foreign money always acceptable? Is some acceptable and others not? Why not? “I don’t like the look of it” is a frequent reason. Though they don’t have the Queen’s head on them,notes issued by Scottish or Northern Irish banks are legitimate UK Sterling currency. But try shopping with them in England and see how far you get.Is coinage actually coinage, or just bits of gold or silver in convenient shapes? Has the metal content been debased so the weight value is less than the face value? (I did the “hero melts silver coins to shoot a werewolf” thing in “The Demon Lord”, then had the hero find out that devaluation hadn’t left enough silver in them to do the werewolf any real harm…)“Why aren’t your character’s teeth rotting?” - because in the medieval setting on which a lot of fantasy is based, they didn’t eat tons of refined sugar since it hadn’t been “invented” yet. (Wall-to-wall bad teeth is yet another Mucky Middle Ages cliché which probably originated with “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”.)Interesting detail: in the mid-late 1500s when sugar became more available, it was still hugely expensive. Rich people ate lots of it to prove they could, so sugar-related tooth decay was a disease of the rich (Elizabeth I’s teeth were a mess). Less-rich people sometimes stained their teeth to simulate decay and suggest they were wealthier than they were…The king being worried about his nobles increasing their power through marriage and alliance is sound enough, but also a Chekhov’s Gun - unless it’s going to have an effect on the later story, mentioning it in lengthy detail serves no purpose apart from Showing Your Work.Who domesticated the wheat used to make the bread your characters are eating? Who invented the ale-making process for the beer they’re drinking? Who breeds the horses they’re riding?Unless it has an effect on the plot, who cares?What matters in story terms is who offered their last piece of bread to the characters and why. Who’s getting drunk on the ale and about totalk too much so they give something away. Who’s riding a horse so different to the usual run of local ones (an Arab in a land of Icelandics, for instance) that they might as well carry a “Not From Here” flag.Fantasy isn’t unrealistic, and good fantasy rests on a solid bedrock of its own alternate reality. What it shouldn’t be is dull. -- source link

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