EP 6: How to Create World Figures

Hello and welcome to the Art of Will Building podcast Episode number six. Today's topic is how to create world figures like heroes and villains. This includes talking about what made them famous, their relationships and history, and what kind of cool gadgets they might have, and why. This material and more is discussed in Chapter 4 of Creating Life, Volume 1 in the Art of Will Building Book Series. Do you want practical advice on how to build better worlds faster and have more fun doing it? The Art of Will Building Book Series website, blog and podcast will make your worlds beat the competition. This is your host, Rhenia Lufsen, and I have 30 years of world building advice, tips and tricks to share. Follow along now at artofwillbuilding.com The advice in this episode applies equally well to heroes, villains, martyrs, celebrities, or any other public figures we might want to mention. Whether we invent them or not, every world is going to have its famous people. It can make our world seem more realistic if we have some of them for our characters to refer to. For example, a knight might look up to a famous knight who exemplified the values of the knighthood. A priest will do the same with their religion. There will always be famous pilots in science fiction. If our ship takes place on the water, there will be famous pirates and other captains. And of course, without villains, what's the point of writing a story? Some of our villains will be local to the story that we're telling, but some of them will be a much larger figure, someone who dominated the world or even multiple planets in science fiction. Whether our characters are good or bad, they usually have someone that they look up to. That said, we don't usually need to go into a lot of detail about these characters, just a liner to hear or there can be used. And in those moments where we do mention them, we usually want to mention why they are looked up to. For example, maybe there's a famous knight who changed the tide of war, maybe by sacrificing himself. Inso doing, he might have restored the honor of the knighthood if there was something wrong with it. If you wonder where I'm getting this from, it's from the Dragonlant series of books. In fantasy, we might also have a wizard who is responsible for people fearing wizards in general. Of course, wizards are very powerful, so we don't necessarily need a reason for everyone to fear them, but sometimes we might want to have an especially bad person who had a big effect where that magic is now restricted in some way, for example. We could also have an inspiring political figure or religious figure who is responsible for changing the way people think about various issues or even human rights. And the person I'm thinking of right now is Martin Luther King. Of course, if we base someone on him, we are doing an analog, which was discussed in an earlier episode. This is once again a very useful technique for inventing things for our planet. We could of course have a famous explorer who's ship vanished or could be their plane, such as Amelia Earhart. This example also gives us a lost plane or ship or spacecraft, which can of course eventually be found by other characters. We might have a dictator who is responsible for trying to exterminate a race, and this is especially useful in fantasy when we have more than just different varieties of humans, but we might have different versions of elves and dwarves and someone, somebody somewhere wants to exterminate some of them. Even good-hearted people might decide that ogres or goblins might need to be wiped out so that they are no longer a threat. But even with just humans, we can still do this as we have done here on Earth, where Adolf Hitler and, of course, Nazi Germany try to exterminate the Jews. Other versions of this that are a little bit less extreme have also happened more recently. We could also have a warrior who is known for incredible skill, but who ends up dying peacefully from something relatively innocuous like the flu. Who am I thinking of? Bruce Lee, the martial artist. If we want to create a martyr for a religion, we can just look up any number of them that have occurred over the course of human civilization here on Earth. And of course, there's the big one Jesus Christ. We might also want to include lowly figures like a bounty hunter or an assassin who occured in especially important persons, such as an emperor or a king. And of course, rulers are our other famous people, mostly because they are so well known, and they often do things that have a huge impact on a large number of people, and even long after they're gone, their impact is often felt. And if you're looking for inspiration for famous rulers, you just have to go back into our own history and people like Julius Caesar. Generally, if you look at these figures, they have done something that has had a lasting impact, and this is why we still know who they are thousands of years later. And that brings us to the very important subject of why these people are famous. There are a few questions we can ask ourselves to try to help us envision this person that we're going to create. One of those is what are we hoping to achieve? Do we want a character for people to admire or to fear? Let's use the example of a hero. Maybe we have a character called Kear, and he is a knight. He most likely has another knight that he looks up to, and we will call this knight Valon. And Valon is a famous knight, and we could decide that Valon is still alive today, and in fact maybe Kear knows Valon. In this scenario, Kear is likely to mention Valon in his thoughts or even to others more than once, and in fact Valon may appear in the book. In this case, Valon is a character who we need to flesh out a little bit more. On the other hand, if Valon is not going to be a character in the book either because he lives on another continent or just far away, or he's long dead, we don't really need to develop this character of Valon all that much. The reason is that we aren't going to have too many opportunities to mention Valon. In most scenarios, I would probably only have Kear mention Valon once or maybe twice in my entire story even if it's a novel. I would probably have Kear mention Valon early on in the characterization of Kear, and then if there's a critical point in the story where a Kear feels that he has not lived up to the virtues of Valon or that Valon stood for, then I might mention it again, but otherwise we're probably not going to have much use for this. And if our use for Valon is limited, then we only need a little bit of information about him, such as what he stands for. These virtues can be based on what we need for the character of Kear and for our story, or if we are creating a historical figure for the use in general on our world, then we can be a little bit more open-ended about this. We can decide that Valon has whatever character traits we think might be interesting, and maybe the most useful for the most number of stories that we write on that world. And if we can't decide between one set of character traits that Valon could have in another, well then why don't we just create two nights that were at different points in history? There's no reason we can't have this. What are the odds that there's only one famous night? In fact, we might actually want to create more than one night on purpose and have them represent different things, so that some people tend to favor one versus the other, or maybe they think of one of the other in different circumstances. This exercise can be done whether we're talking about nights or assassins or villains or whatever else. Regardless of who we're talking about, what we are talking about right now is of course the character traits that this person embodies. For a night character, the morale is something that comes to mind. morale is usually associated with a deed. For example, someone might have extraordinary morale, but unless they had the opportunity to demonstrate that, no one's ever going to know. So we would probably want to have a situation where that character was facing overwhelming odds, for example, and they overcame it anyway, and they did so partly by standing their ground despite the low odds of victory. And on that note, they don't even have to have been victorious. Maybe they died for this, but as a result of standing up like that, maybe they caused a delay in the opposing forces, or something positive happened as a result of their sacrifice. A sacrifice also makes it clear that they are humble in the sense that they are willing to lay down their life, but it also shows that they are willing to champion idea to the point of sacrificing their life for that. What we end up here is with a character who is very moral, and therefore is a moral compass for other characters to look up to. And this can be true whether that character is a knight or not. The result might be that Valon is not a knight, but Kier, who is a knight, looks up to Valon anyway because of what he stood for. This is a good way to create variety, because it can seem a little bit too planned to have a knight worshiping a knight, and to have an assassin worshiping a famous assassin, you know, and always having this one-to-one sort of relationship. Sometimes people might admire somebody for some of their traits, but not others. A famous person might also be famous for their characteristics, such as their morality, but then at the end of their life maybe something unusual happened that seemed to betray that, and so there's a bit of conflict for our other character who wants to look up to them. The point I'm making here is that we sometimes tend to idealize a hero, and at the same time vilify a villain to the point where we say they're exclusively one way or another way, and this touches back to something I spoke about in a previous episode about simplifying things to good versus evil. There is a tendency for most of us to do this. If that sort of simplicity works for your story, then go right ahead and do it. But if you're looking for something that's a little bit more varied, then try to give your hero some warts and try to give your villain some positive things that they may have done. For example, a villain might have sacrificed themselves at the end of their life for some noble cause, and this could have been a change of art or something else, and it's something that makes them a little bit more realistic. The only potential problem with doing such a thing is that we have to make up a reason for this, and you have to decide is it really worth it for that character. Again, if our story is only going to have a smithing that person once or twice, then maybe we don't want to do something more complex like that. On the other hand, if we're writing a longer story like a trilogy or more, or we're going to use the world longer, then we might want to go ahead and create these more complex characters. Now I do think that all characters actually are more complex. It's just a question of whether we want to portray them that way or not. Let's take a quick break here and talk about where you can get more useful road building resources. Part of worldbuilding.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 of us. 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. So our world figure could be famous for their character but they could also be famous for their deeds. When we do this we are also creating history which is the subject that we will touch upon repeatedly throughout this podcast. So this can work either way. You can be trying to create a world figure which results in some history or you could be trying to create history which results in a world figure. What I would recommend is that you have a dedicated history file on your computer and that you also have a dedicated file for each one of your world figures or have all of them in one file. What you will end up doing here is working in both files. So let's say we're working on our world figure and we're trying to think of an event that made that person famous. What we want to write down for that world figure in their file is their role in that event. But when it comes to the larger event and what was going on like let's say it was a war and this person was involved in the end of it. Well that war should probably just be described a little bit more in the history file. So what we're trying to do is minimize the redundancy a little bit. By having both files open at the same time it's relatively easy to just keep going back and forth between them and writing information in one or the other based on what we're writing. And I frequently do this and find myself writing too much about let's say the war when I'm in the world figures file but then I just easily copy and paste that into the history file. In one reason we might want to do this is that when we're creating this history we might find ourselves creating more than one world figure. And let's take a moment to talk about how I would write an entry in that world history file. In the history file the only thing I would say about the character is something very brief such as Lord Valin did so and so at the final battle of this and the result was the end of the war because this that or the other thing happened. I wouldn't describe this character in the history file. I may or may not want to leave a note to myself to look into my world figures file but most likely I will know that I've already got one of these and there are various people who are flushed out a little bit more in that file. As for what goes into the world figures file let's talk about that. Of course we're going to talk about the reason they're famous and the facts surrounding that and one point to make there is that there could be facts and then there could be rumors. They might be famous for something that didn't even actually happen or which didn't happen in the way that people think it happened. Now if we're going to create that kind of detail it's something that we should only do if we are intending to reveal that to our characters in particular and have our characters let's say become disillusioned because they find out something is very different. This can shake someone's faith in a cherished world figure. We're also going to write down this character's traits and their status such as whether they are dead or alive, what kind of possessions they have, their family members and their relationships with other species. We're also going to want to talk about their history which includes their origins and their demise if they are dead and then of course some of what happened in between. We might also want to talk about their training and their skills because that might also have made them famous and then of course their deeds. Now you don't have to remember everything I just said because there is a handy appendix. It's number three from the Creating Life book you can just download this by joining the newsletter. It's a kind of handy filled in the blanks form that helps you think about all of these things and it provides not only the space for you to write down these things but it provides some commentary on the things you might want to think about including the what's being mentioned in this episode. And all of these things I just mentioned are the other topics we're going to talk about today. 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 the fun the effort. When the next token or George or our Martin shows up you can tell yourself I helped them do that. Your support can be just one dollar a month to the cause. Higher levels of support get you increasingly cool things such as PDF transcripts of this podcast free MP3s 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 to the public. Just go to artofwilbubbing.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 great world building today. We touched on this earlier but we should really decide whether our character is dead or alive. Let's say that they're dead. Are they really dead or just presumed so? How did they die and was that a satisfying conclusion for their life for either the audience or the characters involved in the stories? They might just be missing and incorrectly identified as being dead. They might have even faked their death. All of these options add some interesting depth to what we've done but that's exactly why a lot of people have already done this kind of thing especially in TV and film. My advice would be to do this sort of things bearingly. If the character really is dead decide how they died. Was it in battle or something else extraordinary or was it a peaceful end? They might have gone on to become a ruler and end up in a famous tomb somewhere. Actually that can be true whether they became a ruler or not. That brings up another question. Where are they buried? Are they buried somewhere out of the way where no one can get to that grave for some reason? Maybe because they're very dangerous still even in death or maybe because they have a valuable item that was buried with them. Or they might be buried somewhere in a public cemetery where people can come and pay their respects. This might even result in a kind of pilgrimage that a knight character might do for example to go pay homage to that knight. It might even be expected or required of them. This could result in a pilgrimage for our character Kira who went to visit the grave of Lord Valle and at some point in his mid-20s and maybe he even met one of the characters who is also in the current story that we're telling while he was on that pilgrimage. This doesn't necessarily mean that the other character was also on that pilgrimage because we meet all sorts of people when we travel regardless of the reason. This is one way to work this into narration or even dialogue. What about if the character is still alive? Are they at the height of their powers? That would be true if the thing that made them famous was recent as in the last five or ten years. Maybe they are still around and doing good or bad things to people. Or maybe this was 50 years ago and now they are retired somewhere in old age and comfortably living by the sea or something. This brings up another question and that is whether this character is okay with their fame or if they're hiding from it. Imagine today where we have these paparazzi who have never let anybody alone and the tabloids where they keep following people long after they have ceased to be a public figure. You know we get these where are they now kind of stories. This is the sort of thing that's probably going to happen in a more futuristic society like ours or even sci-fi but in a fantasy setting it's more likely that a character is going to be able to retire to a quiet life without people pestering all them all the time. But there might be some people who still seek them out. Are they okay with this or do they just want to be left alone? What if it's only been 20 years since they did their famous deeds? If there are warrior then some people would probably say that they're past their prime. Does this person like hearing that or do they get offended? Yet another option for us is for this character to be imprisoned. Obviously this is more likely if they are a villain but there's no reason that a hero can't also be imprisoned in a place that is not kind to the values for which he stood. One question for all of our characters is whether they are imprisonment is known or not. Even if we decide that the average person has no idea it's always best if there are a few people who do know the truth and those people want to do something about it such as rescuing that character. There's a lot of fun to be had in saying that most people don't know a certain thing or most people know something but they're basically wrong and only a small select group of characters. Obviously the ones we're writing with are the ones who know the truth and are going to do something about it. What this allows us to do in a world where we're going to use repeatedly and for a long time is to state things our one way many times and then in a subsequent story we talk about the truth. We just have to be careful about this and not contradict ourselves too much. There is a trick for this and it's one that I use myself. I always have a character be the one who says something when that thing is not really true. They believe it's true and they say it but that means that me as an author I am not lying. I did not say it in narration. If I say "Valent is dead" in narration and then I later decide he's not, well then I'm the one who lied. If a character says "Valent is dead" and then they turn out to be wrong later, well that happens to us all the time anyway. You could say that this is a cheat on my part but it's perfectly valid. If we don't want to do that we can say in narration "Well everyone thinks Lord Valent is dead" but the problem there is that if we say everyone thinks we are basically dropping a hint that maybe everyone's wrong and therefore I won't become as a surprise if Lord Valent turns out to be. to not be dead. Now we may want to do that on purpose to create an ambiguity but we might not want to. 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. Everybody likes cool stuff. So let's talk about the possessions that our world figure might have. This is a subject not to go overboard with and what I mean is that we should only give our character one or maybe two items that are especially cool. Otherwise the law of diminishing return kicks in and what I mean by that is that the coolness of each of the items goes down and the more items we give them. Besides, we arguably want them to have one especially cool item. This is the one that might be associated with them, like Thor's Hammer. I would say the name of that hammer but it's impossible to pronounce and some of you are probably going to laugh when I say that but that does bring up another point that sometimes we might win a name these items. There's a long tradition of doing this kind of thing such as the name Stormbringer being the blade that Elric of Milnabone uses. And as a side note, for those of you who are following my fiction or got my free book, The Everfiend, by joining my fiction newsletter, yes I did steal the name Stormbringer for my character Talon Stormbringer. When we are trying to decide on what item to give our character, the obvious way to get going with this is to think of something that has something to do with what they are famous for. For example, knights are famous for their armor and for their swords, so we might want to give them a famous sword or famous armor. They might also have a horse that was particularly large or fearsome or followed their commands or was particularly loyal to them or which simply survived through a great number of adventures that they went on. A famous deed like a horse is certainly one of the options we can do with we are looking to give them more than one famous thing. In this case you can have the famous horse and the famous sword. In science fiction it might be a spaceship that is famous like the Millennium Falcon and Star Wars or it might be a gun or a laser gun, it depends on what kind of gun you're going to use in your world. The trick to these weapons is to make them distinctive in some way. And the best bet there is to make a capable of doing something that most similar weapons are not capable of doing. For example, let's say you've got a laser gun that eventually runs out of charge or does so relatively quickly while your character could have one that never does so. However, as cool features go, this one is not that exciting. Well, what if this one shoots around corners? Okay, that's a little bit ridiculous, but you get the idea you want to do something unique with this item that nothing else can do. The example of Thor's hammer is a weapon that can be thrown and come back to its owner. It is also so heavy that no one else can lift it up. That brings to my next caliber the sword that no one could pull out of the rock. This brings up another point that the the item could be famous because of how it was acquired. Or I should say that could be one of the reasons it's famous. Some of you may remember that in the Star Wars universe the Millennium Falcon was given to Han Solo. I believe it was during a bet that he won. However, that is just an interesting tidbit about the Millennium Falcon. It's not the reason it's famous. It's mostly that it is simply associated with Harrison Ford's character. But this also brings up another point that this particular ship is one that's known for its riggediness. You know, it has its issues. They have to kick it. They've got to do things to it to make it work the way it's supposed to. You know, it's a beloved ship, but it's got its problems. And this is a one way to make it famous for our characters at least because it requires personality through these faults that it has. This does bring up an important distinction, however. The Millennium Falcon is not really famous in the Star Wars universe so much as it is as famous here on earth as observers of that story. This is a subtle difference. The Millennium Falcon also brings up the idea of a broken item. One thing I'm thinking of here is a sword that has been broken. In the load of the rings, there's a famous sword that was broken and eventually becomes whole again. And this is a momentous event. In science fiction, we could have a weapon that is no longer powered for whatever reason. And the power source is something that's rare or is assumed gone. And we might have a storyline where someone tries to recover this weapon and make it work again. Earlier, we talked about characters still being alive or possibly being imprisoned and even being dead. In all cases, the question remains, what happened to their famous items? If they were buried with it, that could explain why they are buried in and out of the way place. Do people seek them out in an effort to take that item and use it for their own purposes? Does the famous character know that this is a possibility and have they taken steps to safeguard this item? Did they give it to a younger person who is now the one going out and doing things? Did they spread a rumor that it has broken or lost? We have lots of options for creating an interesting item for our character. If you're enjoying the podcast, please rate and review the show at artofwilbuilding.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 artofwilbuilding.com/review. Our final subject for today will be about the world figure's relationships. This is another way to make them much more interesting. However, it is once again something to do only if we think we will use this setting more often and have the opportunity to mention these details. The kinds of relationships that we can create are the typical ones for everyone. That's parents, siblings, lovers, and children. There's also the entire extended family, but we really don't want to go into that kind of detail in most cases. Something to consider is whether the world figure in the family are basically of the same disposition about things. Using the over simplification of good versus evil, if we're creating a villain, well, is the whole family evil or is this person the black sheep? By contrast, if the character is a hero, is the rest of the family okay with that? Or do they have problems with the status this person has acquired and have more traditional resentments that family might have? Had of jealousy? Is the entire family prone to heroism? In most cases, we're not going to want to go with yes. In other words, we're not going to want to have a hero character have her own family and a villain character come from evil family. It's just too simple. And it doesn't really matter what kind of family we're talking about, whether those are the parents or the children. The question so is going to come up, what do the family members think of this character? What we're really after here is whether they are proud of them or ashamed of them. If they're ashamed, then they're all sharing the last name and that last name is distinctive like Skywalker, for example, then do they change their name? Do they try to live anonymously? Do they try to disavow this person and just not be associated with them? Are they mad that this person brings shame on their name or that they are experiencing guilt by association? By contrast, if the character was a hero and went around destroying all sorts of bad guys, well then are those bad guys or their relatives or their henchmen trying to get back at that hero? Hero? And if they can't find that hero, do they decide to go after family members instead? This is especially attractive if that hero is no longer around, but revenge is still desired. If you can't take it out on the hero because they're dead and you don't, you know, a desigrating their corpse isn't enough, for example, then maybe you go after the family members. This might result in that family going into hiding, for example. The family might also have powerful friends if that hero had powerful friends who are now taking care of the family as a result of this. This could cause another hero or a character who was friends with that dead hero to feel an obligation to protect his, uh, his fallen friends family. We were talking earlier about having a main character like our knight Kier referencing a long dead character like Lorde Valin. Well, what if Lorde Valin was actually a relative who was now long gone could have been several generations earlier? He might be expected to live up to that, uh, that example and not appreciate this. He might feel pressure. He might not even want to be a knight but was forced into this. Another thing we should keep in mind is what this character's relationship was like with different species. He might have been a hero to the elves but, uh, villain to the dwarves. This will go back to the events that made this person famous or at least that's one way to go about creating this kind of dynamic. Did this character save the elves but in doing so doom to the dwarves? Traditionally, we see elves and dwarves as mostly being on the same side of conflicts, so it might be that the elves and the dwarves think he's a hero and many humans do, but that the goblins and ogres of the world do not. This is a little bit more obvious and is probably even expected, which is why we might want to do something a little bit more interesting than that. We've already talked about their demise, so let's talk a little bit about their origins. It can sometimes help to have decided that our character is from another continent or another planet in science fiction. This might give them a set of characteristics or behaviors that is markedly different from the place where they became famous. This might even be part of why they're famous. This can also apply to their appearance. For example, if everyone is Ravenherd and has brown eyes, but this character was from a place where people were blonde and blue eyed, then this appearance might be one of the reasons they're famous. If we have decided that they are from somewhere far away, we should try to figure out why they came to the place where they became famous. We don't need at a elaborate reason because in science fiction and fantasy, we often have characters who are traveling for adventure or something a little more intelligent than just saying it's some nameless adventure that they wanted. They may have been driven out or they may be seeking a better life for themselves, for example. This is a little better than just saying they wanted adventure. And something that I talk about in the book, but that I'm not going to cover in this podcast is the training that this person might have received and the skills that they could have picked up either in that training or along the way. This is one way to justify the abilities that they have and which are on display in our work. In the book, I also give guidance on where to start. Creating world figures can add a nice dimension to our world and it's something that you can do at any time. Join the newsletter and grab the template and get started. All of the show's music is actually courtesy of yours truly as I'm also a musician. The theme song is the title track for my Some Things A Better Left Unset album, but now we're closing out with writing with the top down from serenade of strings. You can hear more at rindielofson.com. Check out artofwoolbuilding.com for free templates to help with your world building. And please rate and review the show in iTunes. Thanks for listening. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]