Patti O'Shea's Blog

I mentioned earlier that I sold another short story to Nocturne Bites. I’ve been immersed in this world ever since, writing and thinking about things. The basic world building is done and has been for a while because this is the third story I’ve set in this society, but areas that were only vaguely dealt with earlier are playing a bigger role in this story.

The two previous stories set in this world are Blood Feud in The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance 2 and Demon Kissed, my first Nocturne Bites (May 2010). Just as an FYI.

Each story has a different hero and heroine with a different view of their world. To stay true to Point Of View (POV), and a writer has to or they’re doing a disservice to their h/h, some things just don’t get mentioned. When people live with something their entire lives, they tend not to think about it or notice it much. And the difficulty with the world building is that if your character isn’t thinking about a piece of their society, the reader doesn’t get that information either. It’s a balancing act that gives me headaches of epic proportion.

That’s one advantage to writing multiple stories set in the same world–each character reveals something different because different pieces of the world impact them differently than other characters.

In Blood Feud, the key piece of world building for Isobel and Seere was that vampires and demons had waged a 300 year war that ended 800 years earlier. Because so many of the original combatants are still living, hatreds and prejudices seethe between the two groups. Isobel is a vampire who works as an enforcer for her clan. Seere is a demon prince. Neither of them lived while the war was in full swing, but it impacts them anyway when Isobel’s sire (who is also her clan lord) forbids her to see Seere again. And he’s got the power to back up that edict.

But when I wrote Demon Kissed, the war between the vampires and demons didn’t factor much in either Andras or Bree’s lives. Andras makes an offhand remark where he calls vampires bastards, but that’s really the only indication of a situation that was of critical importance to the h/h in the previous story. POV and perspective.

In Blood Feud, there’s an offhand mention at the end of vampires and demons needing to band together, but not really why. Demon Kissed has a demon-slayer heroine, so it’s a start to revealing what’s going on. The Bites In Progress (currently called Shadow’s Caress, but I don’t know if that will be the final title or not) introduces the vampire hunters. So if you go back to the first story, the reason why vampires and demons need to put aside their old hatreds is because they both have a new threat–humans who know how to kill them.

I’ve tried to write it in such a way that everything stands alone, but if someone reads all three stories, they should begin to see a bigger picture than what each story can reveal. Shadow’s Caress (as far as I can tell at this point) isn’t going to mention the demon-vampire war either because the heroine is unaware of it and the hero doesn’t really care about it. But they both are impacted by the vampire hunters.

And this is what I’ve been thinking about lately. I’ve always known there were vampire hunters, but they were a vague presence where I didn’t need to be intimate with how they work. Now I have to flesh them out, become familiar with them. They’re important.

I have more ideas for this world, more characters, and if/when I write them, more of this world will be revealed. The first idea, the one that’s clearest in my mind, will highlight more about vampire society and the clan lords because it becomes critical. Pieces that were only brushed over in Blood Feud will be the focus. And I love this kind of thing–revealing the world bit by bit according to what the characters care about because of who they are and the situation they find themselves in.

I hate reading books where the author gives me a primer on their world. Not only is it a boring info dump in most cases, but it also often has nothing to do with what the characters would notice and/or care about. It’s a trade off, I understand that, but I’d rather err my direction–on the side of how “real” people would really behave. Seriously, do you even notice the color of the carpeting in your home anymore? Who walks into their house and thinks the beige carpeting contrasted beautifully the taffy-colored walls? No one. It’s the same with characters. They live with the reality of their world every day, they’re not going to notice the carpeting. But a character who’s never been in that house before? She will remark on the carpeting and that’s why it’s awesome to do multiple stories in the same world.

I’d been focusing my world building efforts on the heroines and their people, but I realized this morning that I also needed to focus on the bad guys. They’re part of a different society and I knew nothing about them beyond some nebulous idea of evil. (In our opinion, of course. The bad guys have a completely different perspective on their actions.)

One of the things that surprised me a little bit was how learning about my villains helped me learn about the good guys. But maybe it shouldn’t have because my heroines’ jobs exist in large part because of a need to battle these beings.

The other thing that I’m finding interesting about the world building is that I feel like I’m missing something. I can’t figure out what it is and I can’t think of anything I’m at least not mulling over, but it just feels like there should be more parameters I look at. But then maybe I’m looking at it from a futuristic world building perspective and thinking that this is less intensive than that. I don’t know, but it’s bothering me because I hear about “elaborate” world building and I don’t feel as if I’ve done that, and yet, I cant see anything that’s missing.

I’m going to continue letting this play in the back of my mind, but my focus is shifting to my characters and the stories now. I usually get the handle on my h/h first and I don’t have that yet–which might be part of why I feel unanchored. I also need to continue doing research. When I first had this idea come to me, I picked up some books that I thought would help and now I need to read them.

Character names are important and luckily my heroes and heroines almost always tell me who they are and I just move forward. My heroines did that and the first hero shared his name. The other two weren’t nearly as forthcoming, but I did some looking and came up with a couple that felt as if they might work. Hero number 2 did, indeed, fit his name. Hero number 3, well, I have his name wrong. He made that clear over this past week. That means more time trying to pin him down and get it right.

I also need to find pictures of hero 2 and hero 3. Character pictures are big part of pre-book for me. And I guess that’s where I am. Pre-book. It seems weird since I haven’t worked on so many multiple proposals one after the other in a few years and I was just in pre-book.

I’ve learned a few things in the past couple of weeks about world building. I’ve done it for futuristic, including a proposal that I put aside and never pursued very hard, and I find this comfortable to do. Maybe because I can look around and extrapolate what I think the future will be. Or at least one possible version of it. The proposal that’s sitting on my hard drive had some pretty interesting world events, including a water shortage among other things. That, unfortunately, I can see happening far too easily–but I don’t want to talk about the real world or potential future problems.

I’ve also done world building for my Light Warrior series. But by and large, the Gineal live within human society and their council and magic is merely an extra layer. Their world is somewhat different, but not hugely so because their focus is to blend in and remain unnoticed. Yes, they have a council that rules them and their own particular societal hierarchy, but their world is much more a part of ours than separate from it. This is deliberate, BTW, so if anyone is expecting some hugely elaborate world building, it isn’t happening in this series.

Besides it was Ryne who did the world building here. When she first came in, she talked for weeks nonstop about her people and told me nothing about herself until later. I had the basics of the world down before I had just about anything else, including her name or who her hero was.

But now I’m world building a very different society, one that operates on completely different rules and paradigms. Unlike futuristic world building, I can’t look at now and project forward in time. In fact, I wasn’t even certain what questions I needed to ask, but I had a couple of friends come through with suggestions and I’ve been thinking about them. What I’m finding is that it’s complicated.

I’m still mulling, but yesterday the heroine from book 1 began to explain a few aspects that I hadn’t considered, things associated with the job her “people” do. The thing that’s interesting to me is that I didn’t realize I needed this kind of information until she started sharing it. Why did she have to go into detail, though, on the commute home? It’s not like I can write while I’m on the freeway and I don’t own a digital voice recorder. I kept talking about getting one, but never quite did it. I hear the iPod Touch has one of those, though. Doesn’t that make it a writing-related expense?

The other interesting thing about all this? I had this idea more than 2 years ago, but I was already committed to working on the proposal for Edge of Dawn. For all this time, the characters have largely been quiet. Mostly distant, even, but now they’re awake. Well, at least the first hero/heroine are. I also have a handle on the second and third heroines, but their heroes are still vague. Working on that along with the world.

Back to mulling.

Someone asked me a while back to blog about how I world build. I haven’t until now because my world building has a lot to do with what the characters for that story tell me. Almost everything I know comes from my hero and/or heroine. I’ve told this story before, but when Ryne came in from In the Midnight Hour she wouldn’t tell me anything about herself–not even her name–until she filled me in about her people and their society. That’s usually how I world build.

I actually really like doing it this way because then I don’t have to do anything. It’s just like when I used to complain that I never got to name my characters, they’d just come in and tell me who they were and that was it. I’d lament how some authors get to choose their characters names and why couldn’t I ever do that? And then I had a heroine who refused to tell me who she was. She was, in fact, letting me pick. I hated it! I literally spent weeks searching and searching and searching for the right name. I began pleading with her: could you just tell me the first letter? C’mon, don’t leave this up to meeee. I finally did come up with a name for her, although she never did bail me out, and I actually think it’s the right one because I can’t imagine her going by anything else, but the misery of the experience taught me one thing. I will never, ever complain again about my characters choosing their own names.

And I’m putting the same theory to work on the world building. If my characters are happy to tell me what the world they live in is like, I am happy to go with it. That doesn’t mean I don’t end up with some influence over the information I get. It happens like this–they’ll be telling me about their world and I’ll ask a question about something and then they’ll talk about that. Otherwise it might be something they don’t consider worth mentioning, but once I know it, I can use it to add depth even if I never say anything about that area in the book.

See, this is the key to world building as far as I’m concerned: Just because you know it, does not mean the reader needs to know it.

When I used to judge contests, that was one of the big things I saw–info dump world building. I’m not a big fan of description anyway, but when I’m getting non-stop world information, my eyes glaze over. Bor-ing! World building needs to be threaded in, dribbled in. If you’ve read In the Midnight Hour, the first chapter has an incredible amount of world building going on, but it’s woven in with all the action happening. There is no long stretch of nothing but world building paragraphs. I’m also doing a lot of character building in this first chapter. These two scenes show the essence of who Ryne is at her core.

That’s a lot going on for one chapter.

My guidelines (hate the word “rules”): Dribble in the information in small doses. Don’t give information that no one needs to know. Don’t tell the world building stuff, show it. There’s a big difference between saying that Ryne is a magical troubleshooter whose job is to fight the dark-force beings bent on hurting humans and showing Ryne fighting a dark-force creature to protect humans.

I think that’s it. Pretend your world building is an ice berg–only 10% is above the water line. The rest is hidden, but supporting the part that’s above the surface.