worldbuilding textures
May. 9th, 2019 12:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://bit.ly/2LHdnWO
in terms of fanfic, having participated in a fencing club in university is the gift that keeps on giving, you would not believe how much fictional mileage I’ve gotten out of having a basic grounding in the rules of right-of-way from foil/sabre fencing, and like, understanding what the difference is between a parry and a disengage, and an attack and a riposte. you don’t even have to like, know what the different lines are (your fourth, your sixth, your fifth, god i had a terrible fifth for a sabreuse) or follow all the ridiculous FIE rule changes (IDEK what they’re doing with flicks now), just the basic 101 stuff will get you really far down the path of being able to credibly throw swordplay into your fiction.
i guess it’s only certain fandoms, but for real. you don’t need to know any of it, but it’s such an easy, like, filler thing, to just have a fencing match in there somewhere that your characters can discuss knowledgeably. or if you’ve got an action sequence, you don’t have to think through how it would work, you can just kind of think of a basic fencing match action and just describe it. lord! so useful.
there’s probably other stuff like that. horses. i was a horse girl. that’s been incredibly handy; just your baseline knowledge for worldbuilding that a horse is not a car and so does not have an off switch and so will poop and not wait where you ask it to and you’re going to have to collect it or have someone in charge of it if you’re too busy being the Plot.
and guns. actually i haven’t used guns much in writing. no that’s not true, i based an entire SGA epic off knowing how a gun works. but i have not yet used my understanding of flint-locks for anything.
sewing, definitely; historical fashion; being aware that your character in any premodern setting would be dressed in layers and none of them zipper or have underwires, and some idea of how they behave differently than modern clothing– it all tends to add richness to worldbuilding.
you know what i wish was more popular for authors/screenwriters? understanding how pre-electric lights worked. everybody just uses candles one hundred percent of the time regardless of social caste or situation. nobody ever ever has rushlights or fat or oil lamps. nobody has ever had to trim a wick. they just– light a candle, somehow, as if by, hmm, flipping a switch. [there are exceptions. every one of martha wells’s universes has detailed worldbuilding around what kind of lights they use, for example. she first hooked me when in the opening scene of the first book of hers i read, a character had to deal with a malfunctioning wheel-lock pistol. who even KNOWS what a wheel-lock is! there’s slow match muskets in that same work, too. amazing.]
None of these things are deal-breakers or -makers, and maybe they don’t matter that much to most people’s worldbuilding. Maybe it’s just that I find it satisfying to think of them. I really like consuming fiction that has those kinds of toothy worldbuilding textures in them, and I find it so satisfying to use them as frameworks for my own worldbuilding– just an awareness that the world the characters are in is different than mine and so the things I assume, like a lightswitch being next to a door, like a car being waiting for me, with gas stations at convenient intervals, like the way modern clothing stretches to fit you and is easy to launder, like the way I have a thermostat in my house that I only occasionally have to adjust– none of those would be there, and there’d be other things instead.
but man. in 1999 when my roommates were super into fencing and i thought the road trips sounded like fun, i never really knew how much goddamn mileage i would get out of that. it would probably have consoled me, given that i was the absolute worst fencer at basically every event, and yet my muscle memory of fencing lunges has fucked me up irrevocably for every goddamn aerobics class ever. (”Why is your back leg straight? What are you doing!” “uhhh a full extension?” “Stop doing that!” “I CAN’T” protip: they mean different things when they say ‘lunge’ and in aerobics, you don’t get to stab anyone in the throat.)
in terms of fanfic, having participated in a fencing club in university is the gift that keeps on giving, you would not believe how much fictional mileage I’ve gotten out of having a basic grounding in the rules of right-of-way from foil/sabre fencing, and like, understanding what the difference is between a parry and a disengage, and an attack and a riposte. you don’t even have to like, know what the different lines are (your fourth, your sixth, your fifth, god i had a terrible fifth for a sabreuse) or follow all the ridiculous FIE rule changes (IDEK what they’re doing with flicks now), just the basic 101 stuff will get you really far down the path of being able to credibly throw swordplay into your fiction.
i guess it’s only certain fandoms, but for real. you don’t need to know any of it, but it’s such an easy, like, filler thing, to just have a fencing match in there somewhere that your characters can discuss knowledgeably. or if you’ve got an action sequence, you don’t have to think through how it would work, you can just kind of think of a basic fencing match action and just describe it. lord! so useful.
there’s probably other stuff like that. horses. i was a horse girl. that’s been incredibly handy; just your baseline knowledge for worldbuilding that a horse is not a car and so does not have an off switch and so will poop and not wait where you ask it to and you’re going to have to collect it or have someone in charge of it if you’re too busy being the Plot.
and guns. actually i haven’t used guns much in writing. no that’s not true, i based an entire SGA epic off knowing how a gun works. but i have not yet used my understanding of flint-locks for anything.
sewing, definitely; historical fashion; being aware that your character in any premodern setting would be dressed in layers and none of them zipper or have underwires, and some idea of how they behave differently than modern clothing– it all tends to add richness to worldbuilding.
you know what i wish was more popular for authors/screenwriters? understanding how pre-electric lights worked. everybody just uses candles one hundred percent of the time regardless of social caste or situation. nobody ever ever has rushlights or fat or oil lamps. nobody has ever had to trim a wick. they just– light a candle, somehow, as if by, hmm, flipping a switch. [there are exceptions. every one of martha wells’s universes has detailed worldbuilding around what kind of lights they use, for example. she first hooked me when in the opening scene of the first book of hers i read, a character had to deal with a malfunctioning wheel-lock pistol. who even KNOWS what a wheel-lock is! there’s slow match muskets in that same work, too. amazing.]
None of these things are deal-breakers or -makers, and maybe they don’t matter that much to most people’s worldbuilding. Maybe it’s just that I find it satisfying to think of them. I really like consuming fiction that has those kinds of toothy worldbuilding textures in them, and I find it so satisfying to use them as frameworks for my own worldbuilding– just an awareness that the world the characters are in is different than mine and so the things I assume, like a lightswitch being next to a door, like a car being waiting for me, with gas stations at convenient intervals, like the way modern clothing stretches to fit you and is easy to launder, like the way I have a thermostat in my house that I only occasionally have to adjust– none of those would be there, and there’d be other things instead.
but man. in 1999 when my roommates were super into fencing and i thought the road trips sounded like fun, i never really knew how much goddamn mileage i would get out of that. it would probably have consoled me, given that i was the absolute worst fencer at basically every event, and yet my muscle memory of fencing lunges has fucked me up irrevocably for every goddamn aerobics class ever. (”Why is your back leg straight? What are you doing!” “uhhh a full extension?” “Stop doing that!” “I CAN’T” protip: they mean different things when they say ‘lunge’ and in aerobics, you don’t get to stab anyone in the throat.)
