A way with worlds: 40 - Communicating Your World

A Narrative Character is a character whose experiences can help the reader better understand the world. It may be someone new to a setting or someone knowledgeable who explains things to others. In their dialogue (or internal dialogue if it's first-person), the reader can learn about the world as that learning is part of the story.

It can get very tempting to insert Narrative Characters or overdo them. Don't. It then becomes another tool, and then an obvious tool, and then your reader realizes they're reading a story.

If you find you must use Narrative Characters (and at times as a writer, we have to make compromises), ask what situations occur in real life that would be some kind of exposition/explanation. One or two of those may do a world of good.

MY SOLUTION #3: Visceral Elements
One of the best ways to communicate how things work in your world is to ensure that you write elements that are very visceral in the proper levels of details and address them properly.

Your reader may better understand a world if you are careful, in your writings, to address issues anyone can understand and relate to, such as:

• Birth
• Death
• Eating
• Love and Marriage
• Sleep
• Travel
• Work/Leisure

Now these elements are likely to pop up in your stories. These elements are also likely to be illustrative of how your world works and how your characters and your culture work. Showing a complicated marital ritual (or even a memory of how one went) can show a culture is highly organized. Characters having little to eat communicates a harsh environment.

If you're careful, tiny sentences, little moments, and many things that just happen to be in your stories can communicate the world to your readers. This is probably the most invisible way of doing things - and the way least likely to make the reader feel lectured too.

SUMMARY:
In helping people understand your world, you may have to be writer and worldbuilder at the same time - but there are ways to communicate your world effectively.

A Way with Worlds is hosted at:

• fanfiction.net

• lit.org

• sffworld.com

• Woman-to-Woman

The complete works are archived at the Way With Worlds archive.
A German translation is in the works at Christian Spliess's Page