Custom Words, Hidden Meaning ~ World-building Series #1
Custom words are crucial to fantasy or sci-fi settings, yet a poorly-chosen word can make it very difficult to follow a piece of text. This essay will delve into three examples and explain why they work.
World-building is a concept somewhat specific to speculative fiction in any format, but can also feature in many other subgenres that imply a divergence from history… and one could say, to some extent, that even something like historical fiction depends on world-building.
Overall, world-building is the process of constructing an secondary world or setting, sometimes associated with a fictional universe. The Merriam-Webster dictionary has an article on world-building where it explains that it:
“[…] is most often used to describe a component of a work of fiction, much like plot or character; unlike the word setting, world-building emphasizes that the world being created is entirely new”1.
According to this definition, world-building implies creating an entirely new world, with its geography and biomes, with its cultures and languages, its remnants of past times, its social constructs, and even its magic systems. Yet after that creative adventure is done, a writer must distill that information to the minimum needed for the reader at a point in the story, and present it in creative ways.
This is not a small feat; done wrong is what everyone knows as infodumping: “the practice of giving too much information at the same time”2 Infodumping refers to sharing a large amount of details—often related to world-building—in a way that breaks the immersion, interrupts the plot’s flow, and leaves the reader wondering whether it was truly necessary. More often than note, infodumping comes across as a plain description that is not woven with the plot.
One way to prevent this, is to consider the world-building a 100,000 pieces puzzle—one that we, as authors, do not give all at once to the reader. Instead, we should carefully pick which pieces are more relevant at a given moment (hints, foreshadows) and scatter them through the narrative. This can be a passing comment a character utters, an object someone sees, clothing and customs, or even specific words.
Yet this translation—from the totality known by the author, to the puzzle pieces presented to the reader—is not a minor task. And neither is reading to discover the world-building. I have a free podcast episode/essay on it.
Yet to scatter that puzzle, a writer is not only choosing what to say and how—all while testing the limits of how succinct and engaging the presentation can be. We are also deciding the cognitive load of a reader at a given moment within a book. Ultimately, scattering world-building bits throughout a narrative implicitly demands the reader infers what an in-book concept is, how, or why it is relevant for a scene.
This series of articles will delve into different elements surrounding the presentation of world-building elements.
Everything begins with a name…
—and it is not unknown that a writer’s biggest pain can be naming anything within the world. We are often prone to imagine non-existent or custom words, naming even the flora and fauna in an attempt to create a vast setting. There is a reason for that: names can reflect the in-book cultures, the source of inspiration (e.g., Roman names may hint at a Roman-esque or Roman-inspired setting), the language, the style, the book’s genre…
Yet custom names are a crucial part of the cognitive load authors demand from readers.
A poorly-chosen word can make it very difficult to follow a piece of text, while a perfectly-crafted selection can simplify the task of reading yet add that layer of otherworldliness we love so much of SFF.
Let us revisit some examples, each from different books and genres (science fiction and fantasy) to learn by example.