EP 2: Using Earth Analogues

Hello and welcome to the Art of World Building Podcast, episode number two. Today's topic is why and when we need to build a world and how to effectively use analogues. This material and more is discussed in chapter one of Creating Life, volume one in the Art of World Building Book Series. Do you want practical advice on how to build better worlds faster and have more fun doing it? The Art of World Building Book Series website, blog and podcast will make your worlds beat the competition. This is your host, Randy Ellipson, and I have 30 years of world building advice, tips and tricks to share. Follow along now at artofwilbilding.com Now we're going to move on to chapter one, Why Build a World. Depending on your genre, you may feel that you have no choice, that this is a kind of obligation that has been thrust upon you by circumstances or even the expectations of an audience. Now there are ways around that, for example, if you are writing a sci-fi story where there are characters from Earth, well in this case you can get away with not inventing gods or species or plants and animals or any of that stuff. If the characters are always leaving from Earth or if they originated from Earth and they're only encountering other humans in the context of the story. In that case, you don't have to actually build life forms. Now since they're traveling through space, there's probably going to be places where they need to visit like other planets. In that case, you will probably have to be inventing these other locations. But again, there's a question of how much detail. So you may not have to create every last city on a planet, and anymore than I have done in the last 30 years of working on lorian. But you're going to be doing at least a little bit of world building. Now if you're doing fantasy that occurs on a fictitious planet and there is no connection at all to Earth, then yes, you do have to do some world building. That said, you can create a world that is basically Earth by another name. So you don't have to include species other than humans. This has happened in Game of Thrones, you know, pretty much everyone there is a human. So you can keep your world building of that to a minimum. Now you're still going to have to create places, but at least you can keep some of the world building to a minimum. If this is something that you don't really want to spend a lot of time on. The other solution is to use public domain species or races. So for example, L, Stwarves and Dragons, those are all public domain. You do not have to invent these. You can just put your own stamp on any of these creations. And for the most part, when you do this, you want to satisfy expectations. You want to be presenting something that is wildly off from what people are going to expect. An obvious example is not to call something a dwarf and then have it be taller than humans. In that case, it's partly because the word dwarf means smaller. So that doesn't make any sense. That's not even really the point. The point is that that is not what people are going to expect. So when using public species and races, we can put our own stamp on them, but we should be at least a little bit reasonable. So if we're going to make serious changes to its appearance, its demeanor and how it acts, well then we might want to consider giving it a new name and just making it our own. Let's take a quick break here and talk about where you can get more useful world building resources. Heartofworldbuilding.com has most of what you need. This includes links to more podcasts like this one. You can also find more information on all three volumes of the Art of World Building series. Much of the content of those books is available on the website for free. And the thing that you might find the most useful is that by signing up for the newsletter, you can download the free templates that are included with each volume of the Art of World Building series, whether you have bought the books or not. All you need to do is join the newsletter. You can do this by going to artofworldbuilding.com/newsletter. Sign up today and you will get your free templates and you will never miss an update about what is happening in the Great World of World Building. Let's talk a little more about using analogs. I have something I call the Rule of Three. It's more of a guideline than a rule, but the basic idea is to make at least three significant changes to an analog. The reason we want to do this is that so people don't recognize it's an analog. A good example for me is the movie Avatar. I thought this was really cool, but the thing that kept leaping out at me all the time was that this was basically Native Americans that were taller and they were made blue. I don't know how much of the culture is really from Native Americans or the imagination of James Cameron, but it didn't seem like there was much difference between the two of them. Now why is it a problem if people recognize our analog? Well, personally I find it distracting. We never want something to pull the audience out of the story. And most of us don't want to run the risk of causing some disrespect if the audience is just thinking, "Oh, you just stole that from someone." So it doesn't make a good impression and they kind of don't respect the work we've done as much anymore. There's an inherent problem of lack of originality when using a analog. We need to balance having used something that already exists here on Earth with putting our own spin on it. And it's not really enough to just make minor tweaks to it. You really want to make a significant tweak. So this is what I mean when I say the rule of three. This isn't something as trivial as removing the pointed ears from elves. If I were to use elves somewhere, I would probably not only remove the ears, but instead of having them living in forests and being obsessed with all of the life forms they're in, I would probably change their habitat to something else. I would also probably no longer make them live forever or over a thousand years. This is one of the basic ideas on what an elf is. The goal of using an analog is to create something new that is inspired by something that has already been created by somebody else or which already exists. It's much easier to use an analog as a springboard than to just start from scratch. A related issue is the name that we give our invention. For example, let's say I create a horse that has an extra pair of legs and I still call it a horse. The first time I point out this extra pair of legs, the reader is obviously going to be aware of this, but as time goes on, I'm just going to keep referring to this as a horse. You know, the guy got on a horse. He wrote his horse there. You know, this is that other thing. Sooner or later, the reader is just going to forget that this horse has an extra pair of legs because I'm not reminding them all the time. Now you could say, "Okay, well, you can just keep reminding them." But is it really better to keep reminding them? Wouldn't it be better to just call the horse something other than a horse and make more significant changes to that horse? The reason for this is that if we use another name and we've described this thing, now people are no longer picturing something familiar and trying to imagine, "Oh, it's got this trivial change." Well, they're just picturing something that's completely different. Okay, maybe completely isn't the word we want there, but it's significant enough that they see it as a different creature and therefore they've got this mental picture. And every time we use a new word to describe that thing, that new mental picture is what comes to mind. On the other hand, if we keep using the word horse, well, we know what a horse is. Here's a kind of mental inertia to a known term. It suggests a familiarity. And that familiarity will basically take over our memory of the details that are different. In other words, we're just going to forget that extra pair of legs. Now, if we're working in a visual medium like film or TV, this issue is less of an issue because the name of it doesn't come up as much, because we're not writing sentences about this. And on top of that, we keep seeing it all the time. So obviously, you're looking at a horse with two extra legs. Your eyes are not going to somehow fail to notice the extra pair of legs all the time. During a high intensity scene, you might not care, but that's okay because you're focused on whatever's happening in that scene anyway. Another problem we can run into is using a known term to refer to something new. For example, a few years ago, I saw a movie where the characters mentioned that there were goblins that they would have to face. Now, I've heard of goblins before. I've read about them. I immediately had a picture in my mind of what they were going to face. And it was something small. It was nasty. It was probably a little bit malformed, poorly dressed, and possibly even green. Well, this was mentioned, and then maybe 20 minutes later in this film, the goblins finally appeared. And what came on screen? Well, it was a gorilla. I mean, these guys pretty much did a computer-animated animation of a gorilla. It even moved like one. It certainly looked like one. I was a little bit surprised that it didn't pull out a stereotypical banana and take a bite. Now, this was so distracting for me that it pulled me right out of the scene. And I thought, "That's not a goblin. It's a gorilla. What are you doing? This is ridiculous." Now, in fairness, they did make two changes to that gorilla. They put two horns on it, and they said, "Oh, it loves gold." So, when you saw the gorilla, it looked like it had taken its front paws and dipped them into a vat of gold. And now, there was gold all over the front two paws. Well, this is not my idea of a significant change. These were both superficial changes to a gorilla, and then calling it a goblin. This is a good example of exactly what you don't want to do when using an analog. So let's talk about how to subscribe to this podcast. A podcast is a free downloadable audio show that enables you to learn while you're on the go. To subscribe to my podcast for free, you'll need an app to listen to the show from. For iPhone, iPad and iPad listeners, grab your phone or device and go to the iTunes store and search for the Art of Worldbuilding. This will help you to download the free podcast app which is produced by Apple and then subscribe to the show from within that app. Every time I produce a new episode, you'll get it downloaded right onto your iDevice. For Android listeners, you can download the Stitcher Radio app which is free and search for the Art of Worldbuilding. This only needs to be done once and at that point you will never miss an episode. What I'm going to do now is just make up some analogues on the fly and discuss a starting point and then how we can modify that and what sorts of things we might want to modify. First we're going to take a look at modifying a sovereign power and by that I mean a kingdom, empire, a federation or a dictatorship and we're just going to choose one from Earth and then discuss what we can do to modify this. Since I live in the United States, I'm going to go ahead and start with this government because I'm familiar with it. Now obviously we're not going to want to use the same name but my point is that we can call a collection of states, a federation or a confederation. In fact if you remember from the Civil War, the South was calling itself the Confederacy and I go into more details about what is the difference between a federation and a Confederacy but we basically have options for what we call the resulting country and we don't have to use those words at all. For example in the United States we don't use either of those words to describe what we are. This is actually quite common. For example no dictatorship actually calls itself that, they always have another name for themselves. What I'm really getting at here is that the form of government does not necessarily have to be part of the country's name. This reality is reflected on most countries that you've heard of on Earth. You know Canada is a federation but they don't call themselves the Federation of Canada. Similarly the United Kingdom in England is technically a constitutional monarchy but they don't call themselves the constitutional monarchy of England. But there are places that do use the name or excuse me the type of government in their name. So this is an option you have. So let's talk a little bit about government. Most of us find that to be a fairly boring subject, no offense to those who find it fascinating. But this will be covered in great detail in volume 2, creating places. There's an entire chapter on this. So I'm not going to go into the details now. But my point is that if you live in a given country with whatever government there is, you understand how that government functions. Our understanding might be a little bit limited but that's okay because as a general rule readers of our stories are I going to want to know how the country functions in detail. However. Most countries that are similar to the United States have multiple political parties. Here we have two major ones, the Republicans and Democrats. So this is an obvious subject to change. You might still have two major parties but obviously you're going to call them something else. In a world with magic, one of those parties might be magical and the other one not magical or you might find some other point of delineation between them. Once you know this you can begin giving them typical hatreds of each other for example. This particular subject is only going to be useful to you if you are planning to write something that has political intrigue to it, similar to Game of Thrones. So what else can you change about a country like the United States? You can decide to represent the United States not as its current state but as either a future state which gives you a lot of flexibility or as a past state. For example, you could basic country of your invention on the United States from the 1800s. Now you may not want to do a ton of research about this but one of the major things that was still going on then of course was slavery. We can also decide that the country is newly formed and that there is something like our American Civil War still going on or about to brew over possibly a different issue. Another area for change is our geography. What if we were an island nation like Australia? What if we were much farther north or much farther south and the kind of vegetation that we have was greatly altered? This would also change the basic skin color of most of the people here. Now a lot of people think that the United States is mostly white and white people are the majority but that's because of colonization from Europe. The Native Americans are not white skinned. The point here is that you can reverse the typical demographics that are found in the United States and have darker skinned people be the ones who are in power. So these are some basic ways that you can change a known sovereign power so that it's not as easily recognized. For those of you who support crowdfunding, I am on the patron site and would appreciate any support you can lend. Think about whether you're benefiting from this podcast or the art of will building blog and website and consider supporting the effort to spread the word far and wide. Your support could help a budding world builder create an awesome world that you become a huge fan of. This podcast and related items are my way of giving back to the fantasy, sci-fi, movie and gaming industries that I love so much. You can give back to by helping to fund the effort. When the next token or George or our Martin shows up, you can tell yourself, I help them do that. Your support can be just $1 a month to the cause. Higher levels of support get you increasingly cool things such as PDF transcripts of this podcast, free and pre-threase, including unreleased music, free ebooks and short stories, bookmarks, and even sign copies of books and CDs of my music. Many of these are unavailable through the public. Just go to artofwillbubbing.com/patreon. You can also just go to the homepage and click the big icon for this. Please note that patron is filled a little bit weird. It's P-A-T-R-E-O-N. Support create world building today. So let's talk about using a typical species such as a dwarf and creating an analog. Dwarves are known for certain things such as being grumpy, of course being short, and living underground in many cases and also having beards. Just look at each of these and decide whether they really are worth it and if we can get away with removing these and possibly having something new that is inspired by our dwarf. Let's start with the beard. Is there any reason dwarves must have beards? Biologically, I can't think of any scenario where this would always be happening. We could try to say that since they are living underground that this is going to make them cold and therefore they want more hair on their faces, but of course that only applies to the guys, not to the girls, unless of course we decide that we want all the women to have beards as well. But you know something, even that explanation doesn't work because if you've ever spent any time underground, you know that the temperature is actually as steady constant. I'm not sure what it is, but it's way above freezing. And obviously if we can go outside when it's 50 degrees outside and not feel like we need something on our face, then dwarves are not going to need to grow a beard to keep the face warm. So I can't think of a habitat reason or a biological reason why dwarves so often have beards. So guess what? Get rid of the beard. This is the kind of thinking you want to do when thinking about analogs or even creating something from scratch. It helps to question your assumptions. This can be difficult because the hardest influence to eliminate is one that you don't even realize that you have. What about dwarves living underground? Now in some cases they're depicted as being heeled dwarves that actually do live out in the sun, but let's focus on these mountain dwarves as they're called. There doesn't appear to be a biological reason why they live underground. It is usually depicted as being something like a love of gold and other natural minerals that are found there. And in some cases it's a distrust of the outside world. But this latter issue is a bit problematic because have you ever wondered where those dwarves are getting all of their food? Either it's going to be shipped to them by people who are willing to trade with them or we're going to have to invent plants that grow underground or we're going to have to decide that they are carnivores who never eat plant life. But even then what about the animals? There's only going to be so many animals that live underground. Where are they getting anything that they can eat? This idea that they can only live underground doesn't seem plausible to me. It also exposes them to great risk if they are getting any of their food from outside the mountain. All you have to do to starve them out is stop feeding them. So one of the first things we might want to do is not have our dwarves live exclusively underground. And those that do are probably going to have a more pleasant attitude about trading with others. Now there are ways around this we could decide that they have magic doorways and from those they can teleport from one location to another to like a farm somewhere and take what they want or even have an installation. Their own farm set up somewhere where they can grow food and it's protected. But this kind of creative thinking can get us into more ways of doing things that haven't been done before and get us out of a problem like this. And of course it has one of the biggest benefits and that is that we have used a known race or species and we have altered something significant about it and turned it into something else with a new name. And then there is the grumpiness. It seems to me that if these guys are living underground and they are dependent on others for so much of their food that they would probably be more interested in positive relationships with other species not being obnoxious and hiding in their mountains, starving to death. There is no biological reason for the grumpiness unless they've all been suffering from a chemical imbalance which could have been caused by lack of exposure to the sun. Now I'm not a biologist or a chemist so I don't really know how that kind of thing works but I've heard about that kind of thing. But you know if they are living underground I can understand being a little bit grumpy. It's not exactly the most attractive thing looking at all these walls of stone regardless of how well they have been carved. There is a lot of natural beauty that you're going to miss out on if you're stuck underground. The air is also not going to be as fresh. It might even be quite stale. And generally it's not the most pleasant place to be. So that could account for the grumpiness. So to some extent that does make sense. Another thing that makes sense is their height. If you had to tunnel through the rock to create a home or a passageway well the taller you are the more digging you're going to have to do in order to fit right? Either that or everyone's going to be stooped over. So it does make sense that their height is reduced. However this raises another point. This is an environmental reason for short height, not a biological one. This means that if they are living outside in the wilderness like hill dwarves and theoretically those hill dwarves would not be so short. Wouldn't they be taller than the mountain dwarves? I'll leave it up to you to decide but the point is now we have taken our species and we have made more significant changes to who they are. So we might have a new species or race and we're going to need a new name for them. But we have something new. If you're enjoying the podcast please rate and review the show at artofwilbulding.com/review. Reviews really are critical to encouraging more people to listen to a show they haven't heard of before. And it can also help the show rank better allowing more people to discover it. Again that URL is artofwilbulding.com/review So let's take a look at doing an analog of an animal. The first thing is to just choose something that you like. For example I like cats so I'm going to go with a tiger. Now what's good about a tiger? Well there's all sorts of things about how it's ferocious, it's big, it chases down all sorts of animals and pretty much scares the crap out of everybody right? If you had one of these in your house people would think twice about coming in. Now the problem with a tiger is that it is a wild animal. So what if we decided that we have a kind of cat that looks pretty similar and it's tameable? We can train this thing like a dog. Wouldn't it be cool if you can make it do all sorts of things? What if we decide that it's also more of a pack animal like wolves and they will cooperate with each other? So what we're getting at here is the behavior of an animal. Take an animal that you like and just start changing its behavior. And it can be anything that you would find interesting or that might be useful for your story. And just have fun with it. Another thing you might want to do is change the size and the coloring. Tigers usually have stripes so obviously you don't do that. Maybe you make it all black for example. Maybe you make it have more of a polka dot look. Just do something different from how it normally looks. In fact the idea of a black tiger is basically reminiscent of a panther because those are often black. So you can combine features of different kinds of felines. One thing that is tempting to many people is to create these animals. I think these have a name where you take something like a dog's head and you put it on a cat and then you give wings from a bat to it or something. That kind of thing has been done a lot and it can be cool for something freaky. But there is the risk of it being a bit of a cliche there. And there might already be one that suits your purposes. I would just recommend trying to find something that's a little bit less crazy unless you are looking to create a monster for example. This brings up the idea that you're going to want to think more about behavior and how people view this animal. Are they terrified of it? Do they think it's friendly? You know we are around horses and we think nothing of them. But on the other hand if we walked into a barn that was full of giant tigers, most of us would probably get very nervous. Unless these were steel cages. On the other hand if these were tame, I'll we might not think of anything of it any more than we worry about horses. Finally let's take a look at plants. You may want to choose a flower that you like to look of and change its coloring. But more importantly you might want to just decide that it is poisonous. Once you do that you can have fun and venting ways for that poison to be created or administered and then also figure out treatments for it, which might inspire you to create another plant that can be used to cure this. You can also use parts of that animal you just invented and say well the only known cure for the poison from this plant is something from that animal. This is one way to start tying together the things that you create. We can also decide that our plant only grows in certain parts of the world and we can literally just make this up. In volume 2 of the art of world building, creating places, we have a chapter on this kind of thing and the details of each kind of plant and where it typically grows. But I'm not going to cover that right now. The point is that we have some leeway and we can not only decide which latitude something grows in but we can also decide that it doesn't grow in a specific country or that it does grow in one. And this can be a point of contention. For example a poison might grow in one country but the antidote might grow in another one that is not on friendly terms. And next thing you know you've got a problem because someone important has been poisoned in one country and their enemy is the country that has the cure. So what do you do? This is one way to add some additional details to your analog so that it doesn't resemble something from earth. So now that we've looked at some specific examples of how you can create analogs, this should give you an idea of how you can question anything from earth while using it as a source of inspiration and change the details to make something new. This will prevent people from immediately recognizing your analog. Now I do want to caution you that some things you could change might strike you as a change when the reality is that it's already like that on earth. For example most of us are used to seeing orange carrots but as it turns out carrots come in a bunch of different colors. Now you could create one that yellow thinking you're doing something new and no one's going to think oh it's a carrot and that might actually be true that they didn't realize that because how many people know that carrots come in different colors but the point is that it helps to do a little bit of research and we could be able to do this even though that's not exactly authoritative. But you can gain some high level ideas on how your source really is on earth and frankly when you find out that something comes in another color it can in bolden you to just go ahead and do that on your world and not worry about it so much. And my point there is that some things are just different from how you expect and now you have something that's a little bit different. Analogs are a great way to jumpstart your creativity so I hope that this podcast has given you some ideas for more inspiration check out art of worldbuilding.com. All of the shows music is actually courtesy of yours truly as a muscle a musician we're going to close out today's show with a song for my some things are better left unsaid album called the key. You can hear more songs at Randy Olipson dot com check out art of worldbuilding dot com for free templates to help with your worldbuilding and please rate and review the show in iTunes. Thanks for listening. [Music] [Music] [Music] (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)