On Writing and Worldbuilding, page 1
part #2 of On Writing and Worldbuilding Series
ON WRITING AND
WORLDBUILDING
Volume II
Timothy Hickson
Copyright © Timothy Hickson 2021
Copyright © Illustrations Timothy Hickson 2021
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Author and Publisher.
Cover illustration by Chris Drake
First ebook edition published in 2021
ISBN: 978-0-473-59175-5
PREFACE
ON WRITING
WRITING FIGHT SCENES
Long versus short sentences
Cause and effect
Where should you give detail in a fight scene?
Making it easy to follow
Word choice
Playing to the strengths of the novel medium
How do you balance internalisation and action?
Dialogue
Scene structure
Keeping it interesting
Does the fight scene really matter?
Magic systems
Realism
Summary
HANDLING PACING
Micro pacing
The Sidequest Problem
The Big Thing
Subtext
Summary
WRITING MENTOR CHARACTERS
Type of Insight
Mentors and negative arcs
The action-reaction scene
The emotional opposition scene
The action-lesson scene
Humanising mentor characters
Killing the mentor
Designing the mentor
Summary
POSITIVE ARCS AND REDEMPTION ARCS
How redemption arcs begin
Making a convincing change
Zuko’s redemption arc
Failure makes success meaningful
The meaning of redemption
Summary
POWER ESCALATION IN A MAGIC SYSTEM
Character arc-aligned power escalation
Escalation and tension
Power ceilings
Incomparables
Character challenges
Summary
FLASHBACKS AND BACKSTORY
Should the flashback be included at all?
An exception
The two kinds of flashback
Making flashbacks work
Scene structure
Recontextualisation
Summary
WRITING CIVIL WARS
Tension and national identity
Three realistic factors in civil war
Character arcs
The first act
The tragedy of the setting
Summary
WRITING IN FIRST PERSON
Psychic Distance
Developing a strong character voice
Delivering exposition in first person
Inference
Confiding in the reader
The first-person medium
Summary
WRITING DARK LORDS
Good versus evil
Character arcs
Dark lords are people too
Creating an active villain
Establishing the dark lord as a threat
Reader attachment to the secondary villain
Summary
ON WORLDBUILDING
FANTASY AND ALIEN RACES
Realism
Where to start
Biological pressures
Culture
The Planet of Hats
Universal pressures
The dangers of allegory
Summary
WORLD HISTORIES
Where to start
The problem with the Great Event
The Pillars of History
The reliability of history and its records
How historical records change
Historical narratives and personal identity
Summary
MONARCHIES
Types of Monarchy
Constitutionalism
De jure and de factor power
Communication, control, and commerce
The Royal Court
How monarchies collapse
A good king a good kingdom maketh not
Summary
PLACE NAMES
How they start
How names change
Power
A practical example
Summary
CLASS, WEALTH, AND POWER
Wealth, power, and status
Social mobility
Magic and technology
Caste systems
Class culture
Summary
HOW CLASS SYSTEMS ARE MAINTAINED
Maintaining a class structure
The rich and powerful
Class systems are not static things
The origins of class
Summary
HOW CLASS SYSTEMS COLLAPSE
Peaceful change
Violent changes
After class?
Plague
War
Summary
CITIES AND TOWNS
The Ancient Era
The pre-industrial era
City states
Political centralisation
The Industrial Era
Beyond the industrial era
Why cities change and adapt
Summary
HARD WORLDBUILDING VERSUS SOFT WORLDBUILDING
PREFACE
I remember the distinct feeling I had when I released ‘On Writing: Hard Magic Systems’ on the 8th of February 2018. That I had found something of value. Not merely financially, in the sense that you create something people willingly consume, but in that deeply personal way where you feel you contribute something to the world worth remembering. I don’t mean to overstate what that video was—after all, it was just a thirteen-minute-long video that I wrote in under a week—but it marked a sharp pivot in my career towards education. I remember telling my partner very explicitly that I did not expect the video to get more than 10,000 views online. It was a pretty niche topic, and it was certainly outside my usual wheelhouse. You can imagine my shock when it reached over 200,000 views in its first few days.
Making educational content freely available to people has been a truly fulfilling experience for me in a way that the videos I was making before were not. That I was helping people improve their craft and follow their passion while also discussing stories I loved. I have always approached writing from that perspective of a reader, wanting to study why these stories have stuck with me. An exercise in sharing my findings more than telling other people how to write. It was part of me learning to do that myself. I have always loved studying why stories work—structure, pace, character, and all—and it was just an extension of that. Put a chain of words in the right order and you can make someone cry. Stories are the closest thing we have to magic.
Unavoidably, the line between studying stories like this and teaching people how to write is a blurry one. Teachers have to do both. While I don’t see myself as writing from a position of authority, but as a dedicated reader and writer, I know some people have come to see me that way. It’s both deeply validating and terrifying that people would trust my thoughts and ramblings as much as they do. The highest compliments I’ve received have been from teachers telling me they use my videos in their classes, assigning them for homework or as extra materials. Validating because it makes me feel like I am doing something right, and terrifying because I’m not sure I’ve earned that.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is a well-known cognitive bias, and while it’s more truly applied to large groups of people, it’s hard not to apply it to yourself: that when you know little, you think you know a lot, when you know a fair bit, you will doubt yourself entirely, till eventually you do know a lot and you reach a plateau of moderate self-confidence. The paradox of the Dunning-Kruger Effect is that I cannot know where I fall on it. It’s a lot easier to spot in other people than myself. People who find what I make helpful impress on me that I must know a lot, that I must be a skilled writer and worldbuilder, but given only I know how much I struggle, part of me believes that must be a lie—that believing it would be the peak that comes with the ignorance. At the same time, does my awareness of that mean that I am in fact a slowly coming to terms with being at least a little knowledgeable—that plateau of self-confidence?
I don’t know. I certainly don’t feel confident all the time, but I’m not constantly in self-doubt either. The nature of being an online personality is the constant juxtaposition of praise and criticism, and it warps your ability to judge yourself. Even after the overwhelming and unexpected success of Volume I and having others enjoy my writing, I find myself questioning whether I have earned or deserve the right to put out this book.
All I know is that some people find my discussions helpful, that I enjoy sharing them, and that my work has made some measure of difference in the writing journeys of others. I’m thankful I have had the opportunity to do that, and I need to focus on that rather than trying to pin down exactly how good I am at what I do. That way lies madness.
My life has changed a lot over the last two years, largely thanks to Alex Cuenin—my video editor. Alex, you are not only a joy to work with but a great man and good friend. You helped bring this series to l
I want On Writing and Worldbuilding: Volume II to be a discussion you feel you can be party to. I have always steered away from the word ‘should’ because there are no writing rules; there are only things that are more satisfying to the average reader or things that might make a book more likely to be published. For every rule, there are ten exceptions, and for every ten exceptions, there is a masterstroke of genius writing. Volume II is a codified version of the online series with more detail, better and deeper examples, and thousands more words of analysis, and I hope it serves as a valuable educational resource that offers questions and points you may not have considered before in your own writing.
Here’s hoping Volume II helps you in some small way.
Stay nerdy,
Tim
ON WRITING
WRITING FIGHT SCENES
Without Fail by Lee Child
The Poppy War by RF Kuang
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by JK Rowling
Leviathan Wakes by James SA Corey
A Game of Thrones by GRR Martin
Skyward by Brandon Sanderson
The Hunger by Alma Katsu
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling
A Storm of Swords by GRR Martin
The Shining by Stephen King
The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan
Dune by Frank Herbert
Avatar: The Last Airbender by Mike DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko
Structuring Your Novel by KM Weiland
The Return of the King by JRR Tolkien
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest directed by Gore Verbinski
Star Wars: A New Hope directed by George Lucas
It is no secret that fight scenes are hard to write, but we can break them down into two dimensions:
Macro The broader structure and their place in the narrative.
Micro The word-by-word and sentence-by-sentence flow of a fight scene.
There is already a lot of advice out there about how to manage the macro of a fight scene because similar rules apply to television and film, while extraordinarily little is dedicated to the micro. This chapter will first address the micro in detail before moving onto the macro.
Long versus short sentences
The first piece of advice many writers find when looking into writing fight scenes is that you should write shorter sentences, and it is true that some authors do use shorter sentences to better reflect the quick back-and-forth of a fight. Author of the Jack Reacher series, Lee Child, commonly shortens his sentences to never let a moment linger. Consider the following excerpt from Without Fail:
Bismarck smiled. Tightened his finger. His knuckle shone white. He squeezed the trigger. There was a dull click. Reacher came out with his ceramic knife already open and brushed it sideways across the guy's forehead. Then he caught the Beretta's barrel in his left hand and jerked it up and jerked it down full force across his knee and shattered the guy's forearm. Pushed him away and spun round. Neagley had hardly moved. But the guy from the garage video was inert in the snow by her feet. He was bleeding from both ears.
These are not even complete sentences. ‘Tightened his finger’ lacks the grammatical subject ‘he’, as if complete thoughts are not possible in a tense moment like this. It creates the impression of urgency, more clearly mimicking our instinctual thought patterns in moments of tension. RF Kuang employs a similar technique in The Poppy War where shorter sentences reflect the brutal and sharp movements of the martial arts.
Unlike Venka, Nezha could absorb losses and continue. She bruised him once or twice. He adapted and hit her back. And his blows hurt. They were two minutes in.
... She was here to win. Exploding Dragon. Crouching Tiger. Extended Crane.
The next time she threw a punch he grabbed her arm and pulled her in close. Her breath hitched. He raked his nails across her face and down to her collarbone... Nezha had drawn blood.
... She dodged the first one. He swung his fist back in reverse and caught her with a backhand that left her gasping. The lower half of her face went numb.
He’d slapped her.
He’d slapped her.
... She couldn’t breathe. Black tinged the edges of her vision—black, and then scarlet. An awful rage filled her, consumed her thoughts entirely. She needed revenge like she needed to breathe. She wanted Nezha to hurt. She wanted Nezha punished.
... No—pain led to success.
He struck her face once, twice, thrice.
These shorter sentences usually focus on a strong verb without many adjectives or other framing—'He struck her face once, twice, thrice’. The prose itself is very restrained, even minimalistic. The place of short sentences is well-defined, and it is worth taking note.
However, not only do these fight scenes also have a lot of long sentences as well, but a large enough share of fight scenes do not shorten their sentences for you to not take this as universal advice. It can even be advantageous to have longer sentences.
This is because writing a successful fight scene is less about sentence length and more about how the individual beats of a fight scene tend to be short. Consider this sentence in Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter:
I slam into the hardwood floor, the back of my head hitting so hard I see bursts of light, and then he’s on top of me, blood dripping off his ruined face, one hand squeezing my throat.
Here, there are four distinct beats that happen in quick succession: slam, hitting, is on top of, squeezing—italicised for emphasis. There are far more verb beats than your average sentence, which usually only have one or two, and that each of these are short gives the feeling of fast-paced tension. Placing these actions in the same sentence can make it feel even faster because there is no full stop between them. No breath allowed.
Compare this with JK Rowling’s wording in the fight between Dumbledore and Voldemort in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix:
Dumbledore brandished his wand in one, long, fluid movement—the snake, which had been an instant from sinking its fangs into him, flew high into the air and vanished in a wisp of dark smoke; the water in the pool rose up and covered Voldemort like a cocoon of molten glass…
Once again, speed and tension is not about sentence length. It is about how long an action beat takes: brandishing, sinking, flew, vanished, rose, and covered all happen in the same sentence—italicised for emphasis. A hell of a lot happens in this sentence, but each beat is just a handful of words. It is worth noting that action beats in here do not have the same sharpness that they do in The Poppy War. Where in Harry Potter each beat flows into the next, in The Poppy War each one feels deeply consequential on its own. Both, however, feel fast-paced.
Let your sentences be short and long, whichever fits your style. A chain of strong verbs can allow the reader to follow the fight beats as fast as they would take to happen. The sentence from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix actually takes less time to say than the film does to show the same things happening.
Cause and effect
Having a series of verbs in quick succession does not an interesting fight make. Writing, ‘Marwyn kicked his opponent, then thrust his fist into a punch, dodged left and cut up with his elbow into his enemy’s jaw’ is a sentence of verbs in quick succession, but it is neither interesting nor easy to follow. What you will notice about good fight scenes is that whether using short or long sentences, there is a strong feeling of cause and effect moving from one verb to the other. Take this passage from James SA Corey’s Leviathan Wakes:
Holden shook violently in his restraints and then slapped back into his chair as Alex took the Roci through a series of sudden manoeuvres and then slammed down the throttle to evade the last of the PDC fire.
Shook, slapped, slammed, and evade—italicised for emphasis. Each of these four beats’ verbs arrive in quick succession, have a strong consequential relationship to the previous one, and then cause the one that follows. Holden shakes and slaps back into his chair because they are accelerating and evading, which are understandably rocky experiences.
