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Storyworld Tip: Feature the Creatures

You know Dune, right? Sci-fi epic, desert planet, and… what else comes to mind? That’s right: giant freaking sandworms. Are they characters or character archetypes in the Dune stories? No, not really. They don’t make decisions or drive the plot. They aren’t overcoming obstacles in a way that’s entertaining to the audience. No one sits down to play the long-out-of-print Dune RPG and says “I want to play a sandworm!” So if they’re not characters, what are they?

Sandworms are creatures.

Like landmarks and rituals, creatures are elements of a storyworld’s setting. Like all good elements, creatures help define the setting’s unique look and story potential. And like all good elements, they’re at their most useful when they help seed stories by enhancing conflict and characters.

Enhancing Conflict

Here are a few ways that creatures can enhance a storyworld’s conflict:

They can be at the center of the conflict, and the things the characters are fighting over. (Sandworms, for example.)
They can be a conduit for conflict. The Orcs from Lord of the Rings definitely fall into this category, as do the stormtroopers from Star Wars. While they might individually have intelligence and ambitions, as a group they’re just a weapon to be wielded in a conflict much larger than themselves.
They add uncertainty to the conflict. Unlike other elements, creatures have a certain amount of self-direction. They are a force of nature, and aren’t necessarily under any character’s complete control. For example, just because the Ministry of Magic stations Dementors at Hogwarts to keep it safe doesn’t mean those creatures won’t turn on the students at any moment.

Enhancing Character

Creatures associated with a certain character (or archetype) help define that character’s strengths, goals, and place in the world. For example, creatures may be:

Assets such as faithful steeds, valuable livestock, or hordes of minions for characters to use as needed.
Mcguffins such as prized butterflies or giant worms that secrete magic space-spice, for characters to chase after.
Predators such as zombies or killer robots, for characters to run away from and fight against.

As you can see, the value of a creature is defined by its relationship to the conflict and the characters. Like all setting elements, creatures have a job to do. If they do it well, the story-seeds will practically plant themselves.

Storyworld Tip: The Magic of Rituals

Could you help me out for a second? Stand right here, in the middle of the circle. Great. Now, hold this goat skull and close your eyes while I fondle this weird-looking dagger and talk about the magic of rituals.

Ha! Just kidding. The dagger is actually rubber. The skull’s real, but it’s a rental, so please be careful with it. I’m such a kidder! But I do want to talk about rituals and how they can add depth to your storyworld.

When I speak of “rituals” I mean any recurring scenario or sequence that’s a part of your storyworld. This could be…

a literal ritual (such as the swearing in of a new member of the Nights Watch in Game of Thrones),
a more metaphorical ritual (such as James Bond checking out this movie’s gadgets in Q’s lab),
a running gag (such as pulling the mask off the monster at the end of every episode of Scooby Doo), or
any other sequence of events that keeps showing up (such as the arrival of the first-year students at Hogwarts — complete with the Sorting Hat, or the TV show forensics team sweeping the crime scene for DNA).

Rituals help establish order and set up audience expectations. They tell us about the setting (hey, there are cool gadgets here!) and, once we’ve seen it performed once, it creates expectations for the next time (I wonder what gadget he’ll get this time?).

Unique rituals are important elements of a storyworld’s setting. As such, they might be cool, but if they aren’t helping you create stories, they’re not pulling their weight. A good ritual should be able to do one or more of the following:

Add Tension: Rituals set expectations for both the audience and characters. When we as the audience have a different expectation than the characters, that leads to tension. During the Reaping at the beginning of Hunger Games, for example, the characters have certain expectations about who’s going to be thrown into the arena. But the readers, who’ve read the back of the book, have a different idea, which leads to suspense. Likewise, there’s bound to be tension if we have no idea how the ritual is going to turn out — even if the characters do.
Reveal Character: Different people react differently to the same ritual, and how they react tells us a lot about them. Think of Harry Potter under the sorting hat, choosing his house. Or Katniss at the Reaping (sorry, no spoilers). These rituals forced them to make decisions, and those decisions drove the story forward.
Reveal Conflict: Sometimes rituals are a good time and place for a conflict to be revealed and resolved (think of any wedding scene in any movie or TV series). The ritual itself may highlight an established conflict (as the Nights Watch swears to oppose those on the other side of the Wall) or foreshadow a conflict to come (“I’ll bet James Bond will have to burn something with a laser before the movie’s over”).

Does every ritual have to check all these boxes? Not necessarily. Sometimes a cigar-lighting procedure is just a recurring cigar-lighting procedure. But if there’s a chance to turn it into something richer, consider doing so. Your future self will thank you.

Storyworld Tip: The Power of Landmarks

Landmarks have power. I don’t mean just those landmarks lying atop ancient burial grounds at the intersection of three different ley lines. Sure, those suckers are crackling with arcane energy, but when it comes to crafting a storyworld, they’re no more powerful than the Empire State Building, Castle Grayskull, or the Great Sept of Baelor in King’s Landing.

When designing a storyworld, if you include a number of unique landmarks, you can harness their power to help define the world around them. Here are just a few ways:

Establish a Mood: Geographically, a landmark can set the mood the region around it. Likewise, a landmark casts a long shadow over any scene in which it appears. It can even shape the mood of a whole story if you let it. (A story revolving around the inhabitants of the Tower of Blood will probably have a different feel than a similar story focused on the people of the Sun-sugar Valley.)
Establish Conflict: Yes, yes, here I go on the importance of conflict yet again. Landmarks may be cool, but they don’t drive stories — conflict does. Landmarks might be explicitly the center of the conflict (the ruined keep at Moat Cailn that keeps changing hands), imply a past conflict (the space station is decorated in the skulls of its inhabitants’ fallen enemies), or hint of a conflict yet to come (the cultist compound where two factions have each taken over one of the two dormitories and stopped talking to each other).
Establish Character: A landmark can tell the audience much about the people who live there. Behold: wise, kind King Randor. So noble, so brave. And sitting atop a throne of skulls in the Hall of Bones, where the skeletons of his fallen foes suggest there might be more his character than wisdom and kindness.
Establish Location: Okay, I’m sort of cheating with this last one. But the point is that once you’ve set up a given landmark in the minds of your audience, you can use it as shorthand to create an “establishing shot.” If we start a Star Wars scene with a shot of the Deathstar, you have a pretty good idea of what sort of scene is coming up. This can be especially handy when working in transmedia, where the different platforms dictate how much detail you can include.

What if your storyworld is based on the normal world around us? You’ve still go landmarks, and they’ve still got power: The police station? The mayor’s mansion? The boarded-up gas station at the edge of town? Once could argue that these “mundane” landmarks might have even more power, since they automatically resonate with your modern audience… But that’s a blog post for another day.

Storyworld Tip: Three Reasons to Embrace a Genre

Some creators shun genre labels. “Just because there’s elves in the story doesn’t mean it’s a fantasy world. They’re cyborg vampire elves! It’s totally different!” This, in my humble opinion, is dumb.

When creating a new storyworld, it’s in your best interest to choose what genre you want to be in, and claim it. Embrace it. Wrap your sweaty arms around it and drag it home to live with you. It’s your new best friend.

Here are three reasons why:

Reason One: Accessibility

Genres exist for a reason. Labels are handles; they let us take hold of things. I might have the coolest storyworld this side of Westeros, but if it doesn’t belong to a specific genre (“It’s kind of fantasy, but with some horror elements — oh, and lizard politicians”) it’s hard for people to describe. And the harder it is to describe, the harder it is to talk about it or tell their friends about it.

Genre also establishes certain expectations. If the audience goes in expecting fantasy, they won’t balk when the elves solve a problem with magic; a space opera audience isn’t going to worry if the Flux Terminocity FTL drive is scientifically accurate; a mystery audience won’t think twice if there’s a murder in town every week.

Reason Two: Discoverability

Audiences who like a certain genre actively seek out more stories in that genre. If you storyworld doesn’t have a genre, those audiences are more unlikely to stumble across your stories. Yes, this means that people who don’t like that genre may actually avoid it, but it’s better to grab one segment of the audience while alienating another than to ignore them all and hope they show up anyway.

Reason Three: Owning It.

If you don’t pick a genre, someone will pick a genre for you. Guess what? Your storyworld of cyborg-vampire elves is now “urban fantasy” because an influential blogger said so. Maybe that’s okay. Or maybe the “urban fantasy” purists will be up in arms because your world is full of cyborgs, flying cars, and 60 foot-tall robots.

Perhaps your storyworld really does defy genre labels. That’s fine. Make up your own genre! Create a unique niche within a larger genre. (“Dystopian techno-fantasy” is the perfect world for undead elves with robotic limbs.) Just make sure whatever sub-genre you come up with is distinct enough that the audience knows what it’s getting into, and can easily share it with others.

Planting Story Seeds part 3: Consistency

Today I’ll be wrapping up this series of posts on creating stories for storyworlds with a few notes on consistency. (And I’ll not even mention hobgoblins, except to point out that “Consistency Hobgoblin” would make a great band name.)

It almost goes without saying that any stories developed from a storyworld should be consistent with what’s been established for that storyworld. If we’ve established that the lizard-headed politicians eat babies, they should be baby-eaters in your story. If the special crimes unit is known to be feuding with the mayor’s office, it should be awkward when they’re all forced to join the same intramural basketball team. If you’ve told us the the Force is a “energy field created by all living things,” you should think twice about making it the byproduct of microbes in your next story.

Most of this is continuity. Once you’ve established the mechanics of a storyworld element — what it is, how it works, how it smells, its relationship to other elements — those things should remain consistent across all stories from that storyworld. You might think it doesn’t matter, but in this age of wikis, messages boards, and the tightly woven network of people who love your stuff enough to meticulously pick every nit, it matters a lot.

Beyond continuity (which I’ll admit is pretty obvious), stories from the same storyworld should have a consistent genre, tone, and theme.

Consistent genre means that if you’ve established your storyworld as one of science fiction, your story shouldn’t feature unicorns and elves. And if it’s based on the real world (but with more serial killers and grizzled FBI profilers), you’d best avoid vampires, witchcraft, or elves. Know the genre of the storyworld, and don’t include elements from other genres — especially elves.

Consistent tone is a bit trickier, as tone is harder to pin down than genre. (“It’s horror, yes, but it’s slapstick horror: bloody, but funny-bloody, not dark-bloody.”) Once you can define your storyworld’s tone, make sure your stories match it or you audience will be confused and possibly irate.

Consistent theme requires you to identify your storyworld’s themes — which can be tough, since themes sometimes stay hidden until they’re drawn out through the creation of the stories themselves. (And forcing a theme from the beginning can come off heavy-handed and, well, forced.) It’s okay to let the themes develop organically, but as they do, roll them back into the storyworld so the stories that come after remain consistent.

Consistency can be a challenge. But it’s a lot easier if it’s something you plan for from the creation of the storyworld itself.

Planting Story Seeds Part 2: Windows

In part 1 of this series on creating stories for storyworlds, I wrote about choosing the right combination of story and platform. Today I’d like to look closer at the story itself, and how the storyworld can shine through it.

When is a story more than just a story? When it provides the audience with a glimpse at the rest of the storyworld.

Metaphor time!

In the kingdom of the storyworld, each story is a building. It’s self-contained, with the standard requisite floor, ceiling, and walls. But if you look out the window, you can see other buildings and other parts of the kingdom. You don’t need to understand the things you see (“Why does that building have a mustache?”), but if you do (perhaps because you’ve already visited there), it gives you a greater understanding of the house you’re in.

In this metaphor, a “window” is any reference to things outside the immediate story.

Star Wars did this this with its casual mentions of the “clone wars” and the “Kessel run.” The TV show Lost built an obsessive fanbase by packing each episode with windows. Comic books, with their tightly interwoven continuities, do this all the time. (I remember reading a Spider-man comic in which it was snowing in August. It was irrelevant to the plot, but interesting, and an editor’s note told me it was all explained in the latest issue of The Avengers.)

Storyworld windows serve four major functions:

Immersion: Glimpses of the world beyond the story help suspend disbelief. Characters have lives outside the story — places they’re from, people they know, things they’re planning to do when the story is over. These little details make the elements of the story feel more solid and real.
Intrigue: The audience should be curious about what they see out the window. What’s a “clone war” or a Kessel? What was the Dharma Initiative trying to achieve? Why is it snowing in August? The answers to these questions don’t matter to the story, but asking them can keep the audience engaged long after the story is done.
Story Hooks: Everything you see out the window is another potential story. Thirty years later, we can tell the story of the Clone Wars in a TV series. We can detail the objectives of the Dharma Initiative in an alternate reality game. We tell the story of the snow-blowing super-villain in next month’s issue of The Avengers.
Reward the Inquisitive: Of course, it’s possible that the questions posed by windows have already been answered, and your true fans — the ones who read the wiki, post on message boards, and follow you on Twitter — know those answers. This knowledge doesn’t weaken the story (knowing the “clone wars” doesn’t take away from the scene in Obi-Wan’s sand hut), but ideally adds depth and meaning to what’s already there. For that person, a throw-away detail (“I hate snakes!”) has deeper resonance because she’s aware of the greater context (“His mom was mugged by a snake in that short-story I read!”).

Okay, one last bit of window metaphor before I find some other dead horse to beat: Windows are cool, but you can’t build a house out of them. The story comes first. Tell a good story, then worry about the view into the neighbor’s backyard afterward.

Planting Story Seeds Part 1: Platforms

I won’t tell you how to tell a story. Oh, I could, but there are thousands of books, websites, and street-corner literary professors who can drop those pearls of wisdom with greater skill and authority than I can. What I will do is give you some pointers on telling stories that fit into a greater storyworld.

When planning one of these stories, you need to ask yourself two questions:

What aspects of the storyworld does the story explore?
What’s the best platform for telling the story?

Or, in other words:

What story do you want to tell, and what’s the best way to tell it?

By “platform” I’m referring to the means by which the audience receives the story. Is it a novel? A short story? A serial novella delivered one page per day via carrier pigeon? Is it a movie, a web-short, or a TV miniseries starring Tom Selleck? Is it interactive — a video game, a tabletop game, or an alternate reality game?

Each platform has its own strengths and weaknesses. A story that works great on one platform might fail miserably on another.

For example, if you want to tell the story of the brave jet fighter pilots who protect us from alien flying saucers, focusing on different types of jets, saucers, and aerial tactics… serial fiction might not be the best platform. But a video game would rock. Likewise, a story detailing the dirty politics of how the United States and Russia combine their militaries in 1954 to defend the Earth could make a riveting novel or Tom Selleck mini-series, but a terrible video game. (“Press X to bluster!”)

In a perfect world, you’d decide what story you want to tell, then find the platform to match. But in the real world, stories are products, and products are defined by their platforms, so it’s more often the other way around: you’re assigned a platform, and have to decide what story — and what aspect of the storyworld — fits it best.

It doesn’t have to be a tough decision. Just remember that the storyworld is big enough to hold all the stories… and not all of them have to star Tom Selleck.

The World to Come

As I continue to hack my way through the storyworld jungle, dual-wielding the Machete of Words and the Weedwhacker of Theory, it occurs to me that a more detailed example of what I’m talking about might be in order. It’s one thing to say you should have archetypical characters and unique imagery and… all that other stuff I mentioned. But it’s another to put those principles into practice.

I’m still mulling over what form that practice will take. It’s definitely going to be a storyworld of some sort, developed here in public, to serve as an example of the sorts of things I’m mentioning elsewhere on the blog. But will it be a pulp world of hi-tech spies and lizard-headed politicians? A realm of both swords AND sorcery? A storyworld focused on a small town in Idaho with a secret people have killed to keep?

Oh, that Idaho one actually sounds kind of intriguing…

I don’t know. I’m still mulling.

In the meantime, hand me that word-machete. I’ve still got some hacking to do.

Three Parts of Conflict

Storyworlds without conflict are beyond boring. They’re empty and pointless, like decaffeinated coffee or alcohol-free beer. I’ve mentioned this before, but I’d like to take some time today to break down the most important elements of any good conflict.

Accessibility

God knows I’ve pontificated on accessibility before, but I’m not going going to stop now. It’s kind of my thing. I’ve had t-shirts printed and everything.

You can pull people into your storyworld with an awesome setting and cast of characters, but if the audience doesn’t understand the world’s conflict — that is, what the stories are about — they’re not going to stick around.

This is a communication issue. You need to make it clear (a) what the different sides of the conflict are, (b) how they are different from each other, and (c) what’s at stake. If I can’t tell one side from another without reading the FAQ, we’ve got a problem.

Engagement

Once the audience understands the conflict, do they find it intriguing, suspenseful, or fun enough to stick around and explore it? This is essential if your storyworld has an interactive component such as an RPG, an ARG, an MMO, or something that doesn’t have a three-letter abbreviation. Here’s a tip: if your core conflict revolves around trade agreements, minor family feuds, or civil debate over the finer points of theology, most folks won’t stick around long enough to see if gets interesting.

Scope

Your conflict has to be big. Specifically, it needs to be big enough to encompass a large number and variety of sub-conflicts, each of which can support its own series of stories.

For example, the main conflict of the Star Wars trilogy is the war between the Empire and the Rebellion. That one conflict — the war — is big enough to support 20+ years’ worth of space battles, secret missions, smuggling runs, and dozens of other sub-conflicts in various comics, novels, and games.

Conflict is a huge subject. It is, in essence, what every story — and by extension, every storyworld — is about. So no, I haven’t covered everything there is to say on the topic. But I’ve covered the basics, and if I’ve left you confused, you can always ask me a question in the comments.

Four Key Elements of a Great Storyworld

Great storyworlds don’t just happen. Okay, you can take an exciting story (like, say, the movie “Star Wars”) and then cobble together a cohesive universe around it after the fact. But if you’re not George Lucas and/or oozing money from your very pores, it’s far more efficient to create the storyworld first.

When doing so, I suggest focusing on the four most important elements:

setting,
characters,
conflicts, and
story seeds.

Element One: Setting

I’ll probably be harping on this quite a bit, but I’ll say it first here:

A storyworld is not a setting, and a setting is not a storyworld.
That said, a good setting is an essential part of a storyworld. A good setting establishes the storyworld’s location in time, space, and genre. Without it, the audience will be lost (“Is this set in the present? If so, why are there no cell phones? And why is the President a giant talking lizard?”)

Element Two: Characters

You can’t have a story without characters. Ditto for storyworlds. When making a storyworld, decide what types of characters are scampering through it. When I say “type” I mean just that — archetypes, rather than specific characters. What types of characters will be the heroes, the villains, the well-meaning but bumbling comedic sidekicks?

Are there rich nobles? Mystic warrior monks with energy swords? Scheming doctors? Brave colonists? Schoolgirl mech pilots competing for lucrative military contracts?

Focus on the types of characters that are unique to your storyworld. Yes, it may have greedy politicians who give off lies like plants give off oxygen, but that’s hardly unique. Now, if those politicians are giant talking lizards… that’s worth mentioning.

Element Three: Conflicts

Conflict drives stories. Without it, your storyworld is stagnant and dull, like a bowl of pudding with a skin on top. Therefore, you don’t want conflicts in your storyworld that can be easily resolved — once they’re gone, your world turns to conflict-free pudding. (Individual stories may have simple conflicts, but conflicts that define the world should never be simple.)

Like characters, conflicts should be broad and archetypical: Oppressive governments oppose freedom-loving folks. Rival corporations fight for market share. Feuding families compete for power.

Also like characters, the specifics of the conflict should be unique to your storyworld: The oppressive government is in space, oppressing space cowboys. The corporations are rival robotics firms. The feuding families are giant lizards.

Element Four: Story Seeds

At this point your storyworld has a setting, a cast of character types, and an array of interesting conflicts (which, not coincidentally, are the three elements you need for any story). Together, they combine to form story seeds.

Mixing the elements should inspire any number of exciting new tales, each unique to the world you’ve developed. These tales (not yet written, but merely inspired) exist as potential stories. They’re seeds. And your world should be riddled with them.

After all, creating stories is the whole point of making a storyworld in the first place. In the end, the world is only as good as the stories it supports.