Arianne "Tex" Thompson's worldbuilding workshop at ArmadilloCon 2016

Subtitled "Escape From Clichea", Arianne "Tex" Thompson's worldbuilding workshop was the most remarkable event at the ArmadilloCon 2016, and was alone worth the price of admission. She gave a heap of good, practical, doable recommendations on how to improve your worldbuilding, storytelling, and characters. At a typical writing workshop you'll get vague advice like "show, don't tell", and "kill your darlings", but rarely will you hear specific recommendations what to do. But Tex Thompson's workshop was an avalanche of such implementable nuggets of goodness. She showed us how to look at your story material differently and tease the interrestingness out of it.

To be sure, this wasn't the kind of workshop where professional writers and editors critique your manuscript. This was 1.5 hours of Tex Thompson speaking. But I came out of it full of ideas of how to make my stories better.

I wrote them down to the extent I remembered them.

The workshop wasn't strictly just about worldbuilding, but also covered deeper aspects of writing, like how to find your identity as a writer, how to find what makes you unique, and use it to build your online presence.

On how to build your identity as a writer

Write down 3 things you have been paid to do. Then 3 things you could write an article about. If the things on those lists have nothing to do with writing, that's completely fine. Those are things that make you unique. They help you stand out between other writers. If nothing else, they could give you ideas for your blog posts, and a blog is a big part of how a writer attracts and keeps an audience.

Here is another way to mine ideas for blog posts.

Write a list of 3 stories that you want your work to be compared to. Then write down common elements between them. For example, Tex Thompson said that for her, those elements are: (1) ensemble cast / team effort; (2) people with different abilities or powers; (3) big, wild, slightly-ruined world. Such elements are great for mining ideas for your blog or convention panel topics. For example, combining (1) and (2) could lead to Top 10 teams in comics.

Other lists to tease out your identity

Things you would you do with your life if you won a million dollars

What you tend to get into arguments about

Worldbuilding exercises

Association exercise. What do the words "four kingdoms" remind you of, asks Tex Thompson.

Audience says: 4 elements, 4 directions, 4 seasons.

Tex Thompson. Take your first idea and place it carefully in the garbage. Because it is also many people's first idea.

What could be a fresher take on the "four kingdoms" idea? The audience replied:

• Aliens come and the kingdoms have to unite to defeat them;
• Economics arms race;
• Each of the 4 lands has a princess and they are all supposed to be in a beauty pageant, but one of them has a prince and he wants to compete too.

Best practices for writers

"Arianne 'Tex' Thompson leads the Escape from Clichea worldbuilding workshop at ArmadilloCon 2016. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2016 (39) are in my photo gallery.

• Use the Triforce!

Triforce consists of: Education - something you know about; Passion - something you care about; Inspiration - something you are excited about. At the intersection of those things is a story that only you can write, says "Tex" Thompson.

• Ask yourself: "what is the easiest, laziest thing I could do here?" Then do something else.
• Start with Episode IV, and leave space for more stories as you go.

What happened in Harry Potter world before the HP started? All the Voldemort stuff, the Marauders. Your idea for the front story might make an awesome back story.

• Question your assumptions.

Have you read a story about space travel that's set in the 25th century, but all the gender norms are from the 20th century? Or they have all the same notions of nuclear family and property?

Everything that surprises you about another country / culture says something about your own. There is a book series CultureShock! that explains how to live in another country. In US it says, don't drop off at someone's house uninvited. It's OK to ask what people do, but not how old they are. You can call uninvited, but not after 9 pm. Never cut in line, that will not be good to you.

• Give us something we expect and something we don't.

Many enormously successful TV and book series do that. Star Trek: a Western but in space. Game of Thrones: medieval fantasy, but gritty / realistic. Harry Potter: witches / wizards, but in high school. Another example. Chuck Wendig once asked: what would a vampire do in a zombie apocalypse? In "Double Dead", the vampire tries to make sure that the human race does not go extinct, because then he'll be out of food. So he herds human survivors through the apocalypse.

In any scenario, ask:

• Who benefits from the current state of affairs? Who tends to benefit in most zombie apocalypse stories? Zombies, warlords, gritty surrivors. Even in the worst of times somebody turns a profit. Doomsday preparers, escaping prisoners, drug companies? Gun manufacturer Colt?
• Who loses out? Who is the first to go? The slow and the sick. The people on the front lines where the apocalypse started -- hospital workers who got blood sprayed on them. They are gone.
• Who's trying to maintain the status quo? Usually people who are winning, or people who think they are getting a better deal than they would otherwise. How many of you stayed in a crappy job because its certainty was better than the uncertainty of the alternative?
• Who is trying to change things? Someone who is losing, who has nothing left to lose.

Explore the timeline

While my memory of the workshop is already vague, I think this was a segue of the "vampires protect people from zombies" exercise. I assume this all means not that we, writers, need to explore all these time periods in our prose, it's just that perhaps the story could be built around not the event itself, but what happened n number of years later.

• 3 months later: chaos, social collapse, ragtag survivors
• 10 years later: status quo; the world is relatively stable. But what are we doing now that we weren't doing 3 months after the event? Maybe we are enslaving zombies. We have started to adapt to this new world.
• 50 years later: the idea that there was something before this seems strange. You still have people who remember the old world, Kennedy's assasination, the days when presidents used to drive down the street in open convertibles. But also the current generation may not know or appreciate reasons for the current state of affairs. This leads to a possibility of a new conflict. They have no respoect for their vampires-elders. They don't understand why people submit to the vampire lords.
• 100 years later: nobody remembers the way it was. Nobody alive today remembers the flu pandemic of 1918. From the 50s to the 90s our big preoccupation was the cold war and the Bomb. Now everybody has a bomb. We don't worry about Russians launching nukes so much. We are worried about people sitting next to us in a movie theatter. The Great War doesn't come up so much as it does in the fantasy novel prologues.

How much info to dump?

When Tex Thompson teaches at the DFW writers workshop, she tells writers: don't pack me a lunch, leave me breadcrumbs. If your mom packs you a lunch, you'll throw away the apple, trade the cookies, etc. You are more like T-Rex: you don't want to be fed, you want to hunt.

Give readers just enough information about your world to build something of their own

Consider how many bigger-than-big franchises -- Harry Potter, Star Wars, Marvel Universe, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Pokemon -- give you enough information so that you can create your own Jedi, superhero, wizard school, etc. And they make the world vast and intriguing enough that you would WANT to! Ask yourself: what am I giving my readers to do while they wait for my next book? Fan theories about what is Jon Snow's real heritage, Rey's from Star Wars real heritage, etc. Can they make a costume of a character? In how many ways can they participate in this world? In what ways can you make it exciting to participate?

Tex Thompson enjoyed Harry Potter, but like many fantasy novels, the main character was a dude. She wanted to make her own hero. For example, in the world of Sugar Rush racers, who are all named after candy, Tex's friend made his own Sugar Rush racer, Molten Milk Toast. Does your world accommodate other heroes? Do you establish your world well enough for your fans to actively participate in it? And is it interesting enough that they would want to? If your wizard school is in UK, would the readers wonder what it would be like in the Caribbean?

A guy in the audience. Leave the rules a little open, that the people would wonder how much is possible.

Tex. Right. We need some rules at the outset, but we don't need them all right away. And a lot of the secret sauce is what is the right order of revelations so that they would let people build upon one another, etc.

"Use the Triforce, Luke! Triforce consists of Passion, Education, or Inspiration -- in other words, something you care about, something you know about, and something you are excited about. At the intersection of these three lies a story only you can write. More pictures from ArmadilloCon 2016 (39) are in my photo gallery.

Problem: infodumps are boring

Solution: do not let your story answer any questions the reader hasn't had time to ask!

Give out world details and exposition like treats. Instead of infodumping an explanation of how the star drive work, ask yourself, what question is that an answer to? The question probably comes up when the star drive is broken and needs to be fixed. "We need a new flux capacitor, or else the discombobulator won't work."

What excuse do they make for explaining magic in Avatar the Last Airbender? "Why is so-and-so special? Why can he control all 4 elements?"

Anything you are tempted to go on and one for 100 pages about, make it the focal point of your story. Make your story about how to survive on Mars, and hundreds of pages on growing potatoes will become relevant.

Problem: making a fictional world as detailed as the real wone would take forever, and also be super boring. What should you do?

Answer from the audience. Use the same cliches as in the real world?

Tex. Yes. Use the words "magic wand". Readers already know how it works. Or "hyperdrive". Everybody knows what it is.

You don't want to include things that are not relevant, things that have no emotion attached to it. But if I tell you what magic the blue crystal does, what will you automatically wonder about? What other crystals are there, and what magic they do.

Solution: imply that your world contains more detail than is explicitly given in the book.

Conservation of detail: if something is explained in depth, it's because it's somehow important to the story. (The Malazan series by Steven Erikson stomp on this idea. He explains everything about everything.) Respect your readers' brain cells. If I ask the reader to spend a brain cell, there should be a reward for it.

Using the real world responsibly

How to avoid stereotypes

In real life we have stereotypes about entire nations, about some states or even some cities. In fantasy it is easy to fall into the same pattern. Elves have stereotypes about orcs and vice versa. Their races do not get along. But in reality, within any nation, people are quite different from one another. There is enough internal variation between elves and between orcs. In real world, your biggest beef is usually not with the person across the ocean, but with a person across the street. Your fantasy world will be more detailed if you tell us what elves fight among themselves about. Is it what type of wood is best for bow crafting? Is it something as silly as what end of an egg to open from breakfast?

What kinds of people tend to get left out this kind of story? Can you find a way to include them?

Going back to the vampires-in-a-zombie-apocalypse example, what kind of people don't make it through a zombie apocalypse? The elderly and the sick. One of Tex's friend had said: "Why would I want to read stories about apocalypse? If power goes out, my fridge goes out, I won't get my insulin and I'll die. So why would I want to read it?"

One of the plot threads in your book could be about how a guy with diabetes makes it through the apocalypse. Will the vampire take care of him personally? Will he the vampire hunt pigs to make insulin?

Make a story that includes a category of people who are not commonly included, and you might have a whole new big group of fandom for yourself.

Smash the Monoliths!

Question. What is the easiest, laziest, most obvious, least-realistic thing I could do with my fictional people?

Answer. Create a monoculture.

You are probably wondering: but what if I mess up? What if I write a character outside of my own experience and get it wrong? Don't worry, says Tex: you WILL mess up. No matter what you write, someone will hate it. There is a famous quote: "If you're not pissing someone off, you probably aren't doing anything important." Use your fear of hurting people (from other cultures or marginalized groups) to motivate you to do your research. Listen to people, and solicit feedback -- even painful feedback.

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The following year I had the fortune to attend another of Tex Thompson's workshops, "Plate Tectonics Theory of Dialogue". It took place in Austin in July 2017, and focused on dialogue. Your characters are constantly in motion: they clash, collide, fold, buckle, shift. Good dialogue expresses all that. Here are some of the slides from the dialogue workshop

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ArmadilloCon 2010: religion in worldbuilding

Official synopsis: "Religion plays a part in worldbuilding, but if you just lift aspects of current religions, they may not fit well into the world you are creating. How can religion be added without making it a caricature?"

I thought this synopsis contained a nugget of unintended irony. Why would it be difficult to include it in your SF or fantasy world without making it a caricature? Could it have to do with absurdity of most religious beliefs? Unless your religion is so vague that it limits itself to a largely indifferent, hands-off Creator, it can be characterized by Heinlein's famous quote: "one man's theology is another man's belly laugh". Ironically, your readers might think that a supernatural being you created is ridiculous, but the one they believe in is not, though they differ only in details.

Mikal Trimm, Matt Cardin, and Matthew Bey on Religion in Worldbuilding panel.

Somebody in the audience held Frank Herbert's "Dune" as an example of a SF novel in which religion is done very well. Fair enough -- I don't remember it being ridiculous. Somebody else mentioned an Arthur C. Clarke's story that incorporates religion very well. In that story, missionaries go to a distant corner of the galaxy to preach their religion, and reach a star system where all life went extinct thousands of years ago when the star went supernova. Turns out, that was the Star of Bethlehem. I think the story makes a good point, but it avoids making a religion look like a caricature at the cost of making it look ironic, arbitrary and cruel -- just like in real life. So that was probably not the point the panelists were trying to make.

I was disappointed how one or two people in the audience perpetuated the myth that the "New Atheists" are just as fundamentalist as religious fundamentalists. But it wasn't the right place to get into that debate. However, I had a chance to pitch my Science and Religion in Fiction book club to the audience (well, it's not mine, it's part of Center For Inquiry, but I'm the organizer), and I got a few people interested. Whether any of them will ever make an appearance at our meetings, is anybody's guess. (Mine is "no". :-))

More on the similar topic: my blog post on Creating a Believable Religious Society: an ArmadilloCon 2004 panel .

Pictures from Armadillocon 2010 are in my photo gallery.

ArmadilloCon: why a fantasy writer should develop an interest in solid waste management

What would a city built by pirates look like? The decorations would be haphazard, because it's all from loot. Your loot might not have enough angels' statues to decorate the entire building, so you'll have angels next to gargoyles. That's the opinion of Rob Rogers, who explored the concept of a pirate town in his novel "Devil's Cape". Stuff like that is discussed on perennial panels on world building -- a crucial part of every science fiction or fantasy novelist's job. Maybe because it wouldn't be right to just reuse panel titles from last year, this year's panel was focused on City Building ("Creating a city that both works for your story, and makes sense for the world it is in.") There was the usual advice on the importance of consistency in city building, like in all world building if you want to have 10000 monkeys in the story, start with that city that could support 10000 monkeys. Don't just put it in as an afterthought in the middle of an agrarian country, or you may discover that it will support at most 8000 monkeys! (Scott Lynch).

Scott Lynch, Jayme Lynn Blaschke, Rob Rogers, and Vincent Docherty in the City Building panel.

Scott Lynch also suggests that if you want to get a handle on realistic city-building, try to develop an interest in solid waste management. Combing through other people's waste used to be a major part of people's pastime in medieval and even early industrial times. Masses of poor people would wade in the sewers, capturing lumps of waste, and picking out anything that was remotely valuable, discarded by upper classes. In Victorian England cities, that had long outgrown their medieval infrastructure, there were thousands of people involved in the business of transporting other people's "nightsoil". All this was a subject of Steven Johnson's book "The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World", that Scott Lynch got his wife for Christmas. That's the kind of guy he is! :-) (In his defense, he said his wife is a biology major, and fascinated by pathogens.) Even if you are not into pathogens, stuff like this surely helps a fantasy writer to create a realistic medieval world.

Pictures from ArmadilloCon 2009 are in my photo gallery.

Create a World: an ArmadilloCon 2007 panel

Every ArmadilloCon has a world-building panel, where the panelists and the audience "create" a science-fictional or fantasy world by collective brainstorming. Artist R. Cat Conrad often participates by drawing scenes from this world on a whiteboard.

For starters, the panelists and the audience decide by voting: are they building a science fiction or a fantasy world? The audience is almost equally split between the two, but, but science fiction prevails by a small margin.

To keep the scope of the task manageable, we'll focus on one city in this world we are building. The city is half-submerged in water. Or it maybe be fully submerged and exist under a dome of a force field. What kind of inhabitants will it have? What kind of conflicts will arise in this society? They may arise from the different species' fight for dominance, or natural cataclysms. What kind of religion will they have, and what part will it play in the conflict? What myths will this society tell itself? And finally, some silly touches.

The whole article can be found on my web site.

Here are more of my pictures and blog posts from ArmadilloCon 2007.

Linucon 2005: World building panel

(Linucon was a joint Linux and science fiction convention that took place September 30 - October 2, 2005 in Austin, TX.)

I was about 20 minutes late to this discussion panel. In my pre-baby days an early panel was at 10 or 11 am (mostly because room parties at conventions go on late into the night), but now that I had to feed the baby and get her ready in order to take her along, even 12 pm seemed early. So I missed the beginning of the conversation.

"Building" a world means coming up with a description of a hypothetical planet's geography and how it would have conditioned or determined the biology and sociology of the alien civilization that lives here. And, of course, the ultimate goal would be to describe the civilization itself. Well, actually, the ultimate goal of such exercise is to write a story or a book. Writing a book or to a lesser extent a short story, that takes place on an alien world, requires giving a lot of thought to what this world would be like, and how to make it interestingly alien while remaining consistent with the principles of science. Because of that world building exercises are perennially popular at science fiction conventions. At least the ones I go to.

The brainstorming in this case was lead by an Austin-based science fiction writer Rie Sheridan, and the audience actively participated.

From what I gathered after missing the first 20 minutes is that Rie Sheridan and her audience had decided to "build" an sea world. This planet will be mostly covered with oceans and will have little dry land.

The intelligent life forms live in the sea

The intelligent life forms live in the sea. Unfortunately, the discussion on what those intelligent life forms would be like must have taken place before I arrived, since there wasn't much talk about it afterwards. Even so, they probably didn't devote much time to it because at the end of the panel a woman in the audience asked: "I came in late. Did you talk about how they communicate underwater? Do they have speech?" Rie replied: "that's a good point". It turned out they haven't covered that part.

But later Rie Sheridan brought up an interesting example of how the geology, etc., the nature, the surroundings these creatures live in would affect their language and mentality. If they live in the sea, the idioms in their language should be water-based. So, for example, they should not say "I have the weight of the world on my shoulders and it feels lika a rock is pressing on my heart" since those are earth-based metaphors. It reminds me of Ursula LeGuin's story "The Word for World is Forest" of which, unfortunately, I remember only the title. The story didn't seem memorable except for the forest-based figures of speech that the alien civilization in it used.

I guess if Rie and the audience did not even get around to discussing how the inhabitants of this world communicate, I might not have missed much. Because to me that's more interesting than geography and geology.

What would colonists have to deal with if they come to this world?

They approached this world mostly from a colonists' perspective. What would they have to deal with when they come to this world? What natural resources would they use, and how would they use them, to make stuff they need? What, you mean they won't have nanoassemblers that would convert any available molecules of matter into anything the colonists need? The latter was my thought, actually, not voiced in the discussion. Well, having process natural resources the old-fashioned way can be hard, I suppose. There was a suggestion to make things out of kelp which is reported to be very waterproof (maybe only in this fantasy world?) Or make boats out of glass, because this planet has volcanoes and they are somehow supposed to provide colonists with glass, though I'm not sure by what exact process. The volcanoes would also provide them with geo-thermal energy. Or they could harness wave and tidal action to generate electricity.

Writer Rie Sheridan. More posts from Linucon 2005 can be found in my blog

But their ability to do so would depend on their level of preparedness to deal with a hostile environment and that in itself is determined by the tools, materials and knowledge they have. Which can drastically vary depending on their circumstances. If they had set out to explore and put roots on a new planet, they would probably be well prepared. But what if it's just three guys from a freight ship that crash-landed on the planet? They don't have much supplies. How would they survive? And if there's no hope that a rescue mission would come and find them, would it even make sense to try to survive? Knowing that here on this planet you are the last representative of your kind and your race will die out with you might be too demotivating.

Somebody in the audience suggests that in the latter case the accidental colonists could try to assimilate themselves into the local population, even try to breed with them. The idea that two species so vastly different as terrestrial and aquatic could interbreed is so unlikely as to be largely unscientific. And as such, it doesn't appeal to me.

Even if it's a fantasy story, magic must have rules

Unless, of course, this is a fantasy story and this world has magic. That would change the rules of the game immensely. So one of the things Rie Sheridan advices the writers to decide on early in the exercise is whether this world is technology- or magic-based. Building a magic-based world was done at the last year's ArmadilloCon and is described in this article. It was very amusing! Rie Sheridan was there too, though she wasn't the driving force for that panel.

Magic, too, is not a ticket for you to do whatever you want with your world. If the inhabitants are able to do all the magic they want, it doesn't take any energy, it doesn't take any materials, and any situation you get into you can get out of with magic, that may be quite boring. So it's better if you have only a limited pool of energy to do magic. Maybe, as in Dungeons and Dragons, there are only so many spells you can cast in one day.

Common sense stuff, really. So... I don't know if it's even worth writing about.