Worldbuilding
In stories it's important to distinguish between worldview and storyview:
| View | Description |
|---|---|
| Worldview | What the writer knows about the world of the story. The worldview has more context and may contain many more stories than the one you focus on. |
| Storyview | What the characters know and believe about the world. |
Note
Vantage Points for Characters:
- Native: The character knows everything about the world. This is the most difficult to write, because there's a different cultural default between reader and character.
- Tourist / Visitor: shares cultural values with the reader, thus it's easy to introduce the peculiarities of the world to the reader.
- Conqueror: Great potential for conflict, difficult to create sympathy for the main characters.
Characterics of a Good Setting
- Coherent and consistent logic
- Build-in cause and effect
- Strategic use of specific details
- Impact on the character's life
- Depths and width (that is consistently expressed across chapters or stories)
- Both mirrors the real world and deviated from it
- Personal to the writer (to avoid settings to become too symbolic or stylized for a living and breathing story)
- Sufficient mystery and unexplored vistas
- Consistent inconsistencies (example: in London modern building exist next to those from the 1600s, because places and cultures change over time)
- Diversities in ethnicity, religion, culture, class and language
- Objects that support the reality of the setting (physical, real things that have context to the setting's history, but also resonance with the real world)
- Offers different realities for characters (that may clash with one another)
- Collective and individual memory
Caution
Beware that:
- the setting does not devour the characters (characters should be sufficiently separated from the setting)
- a single element does not dominate other details
- detail does not overwhelm other elements