Fantasy with Friends – hosted by Pages Unbound – poses questions each Monday about fantasy, either as a genre as a whole or individual works.
This is a really interesting question, and not something I’ve deeply considered before – I admit, before diving into this, I haven’t (yet) read Ursula K Le Guin’s work, but I still think this an intriguing aspect of fantasy writing to consider.
Fantasy with Friends:
Le Guin, Tolkien and Worldbuilding
Ursula K Le Guin has written about “consciously imitating” Tolkien and creating a wider landscape and history for her fantasy world by naming events or places she actually knew nothing about at the time she wrote them (as opposed to Tolkien, who was referencing events already decided in his unpublished work). What do you think of this strategy for creating “plausibility?” Do you think readers can tell when authors are referencing things that have no “real” definition? Can it come across as just making stuff up, or can it work to convince the reader the world is real?
I don’t think worldbuilding works unless you have a sense of history behind it, whether it’s one the author knows about and details prior to writing, or if they do it on the fly and give themselves an opportunity to expand through the series, without trapping themselves. I think there’s pros and cons to both approaches, but I think where it falls flat is when a writer doesn’t actually consider the timing of an event or the impact of such.
Worldbuilding stops working when it becomes convoluted. If a writer has come up with a unique, special way of denoting years, they might want to show this off in the way the characters reference events – “Ah, yes, the great battle in the Year of Xe’ofsn” is completely and utterly meaningless to the reader. Is this a solar year like we experience on Earth? Was the year the previous year the characters are in, or was it 100, a thousand years ago? Are there living survivors, did the characters know people who fought in those wars? Or has it long drifted into myth and history?
Some writers get too caught up in the weeds, and end up infodumping. I think this is less of a risk with Le Guin’s approach than Tolkien’s – if you have it all planned out, surely your reader needs to know about it? When, actually, worldbuilding and the history of the fantastical world should be more like an iceberg, where you get a glimpse and idea of it, but the majority remains under the surface. If it needs to be expanded on later, then great, expand on it! But if it has no real relevance beyond being a reference point for the characters, they need to really give consideration to how much the reader needs to know and when.
Some authors don’t make the connection between the way we treat and talk about history and how this can be reflected in their characters. We reference historical events, use them as metaphors, evoke phrases that come from history – we don’t mention these then go into a deep dive about the cause, unless there’s a deliberate reason! Maybe a character is a scholar invested in history, so when someone does talk about a battle or war or new monarch or a destructive event, it does make them think of the connections on a deeper level, or consider how the great warrior tackled the challenge. But for the most part, we don’t talk about ‘Blitz Spirit’ then go onto to explain or even think deeply about what the Blitz was or meant or how destructive it was.
There is a balance, but I can see how Tolkien’s method might result in info-dumping, where Le Guin’s doesn’t lend itself to that as much. On the other hand, it can help writers make their work more plausible if they know as much as possible about what they’re writing about. And some writers get enjoyment from the worldbuilding side – if a writer wants to keep a history textbook style track of their world’s events, it can work really well to make it feel more real.
In the hands of a good writer, the reader won’t know if there’s more to the event referenced or not. And that’s fine, they won’t mind, as long as it comes across naturally and doesn’t feel shoehorned in just to show off the unique way of naming years the author has come up with.
Unwrapping Words 