Guest Post: Michael R. Underwood on Five Tips for Cultural Worldbuilding Without Building a World Bible

A pop quiz for speculative fiction writers. Think about your current work-in-progress. Maybe it’s a short story, a novel, or a play. Now, thinking about your protagonist or main character, answer the following questions:

• What are your character’s greatest fears from one day to the next?
• What does he or she want in life, most of all?
• What does your character want for those around her, the important people in her life?

If you can answer these questions without hesitation, you’re ahead of the class. You’ve done your homework. Kudos for that!

But if you’re like many writers, and you’re struggling to find the full depth and complexity of your characters, it might be time for a little journaling.

You’ve probably heard of this concept before. It’s simple enough. All you do is write some diary entries in the POV and voice of your main character. You slide into your character’s skin, into their world, and let the thoughts and ideas flow.

This technique has several names. Character journaling. Fictional diary. Et cetera. Call it what you will, just know that it’s a powerful method for breathing life into your characters. It can also be a lot of fun, yielding surprises and insights you never saw coming.

A New Twist on an Old Classic

The general concept is straightforward. You journal in your character’s POV, getting inside their head to reveal their innermost fears, hopes and desires. That’s the gist of it.

But let’s go beyond the basics. After all, stories have a beginning, middle and end. And your character’s headspace can, and probably should, be different at each of those points. So what I’m suggesting is that you write three diary entries for your main character (and maybe for your important secondary characters as well).

Write a diary / journal entry for each of the following:

1. The beginning of the story, before the conflict has come to a head.
2. The climax of the story, when the conflict and drama have reached a peak.
3. The end of the story, post climax, when everything has changed.

For a short story, you might only need to write one or two diary entries. Short stories often “start in the middle,” from a dramatic standpoint. But for a novel, you’ll definitely benefit from doing all three. It forces you to think about how the events in the story affect your character, and how your character shapes those events through his or her actions.

This isn’t a writing class and there aren’t any hard-and-fast rules. You could approach this project however you want. But, having done it many times myself, I would offer the following tips:

• Don’t show the diary to anyone. Keep it private, just like a regular diary. Give your character the confidence to “open up” without fear of judgment.
• Turn off your internal editor and let the words flow, grammar be damned. It’s a diary after all.
• Embrace the turbulent stream of consciousness. Let your character’s thoughts, fears and hopes stream forth, unrestrained. Bust the dam wide open.

What it comes down to is this: If you give your characters the space and opportunity to surprise you, they probably will. And your story will be richer for it.

Notes from the Field: A Real-World Example

I’ve used this exercise many times, but it never ceases to surprise me. Just when I think I’ve got my characters figured out, I write a few journal entries and BAM… revelations.

Here’s one example. My current WIP is a sci-fi horror novel set in the future, in which a woman travels to a huge shopping mall to retrieve her errant teenage daughter (who is supposed to be at the library studying). Long story short, the mall’s service androids go bananas and turn murderous, and what began as an ordinary trip to the mall turns into a survival scenario.

I did some journaling on behalf of the mother, the main character in the story, and discovered she harbors a lot of guilt. She got into some trouble in the past, got kicked off the police force, and ended up with her face all over the news. I knew those things, because I wrote them. What I didn’t know””even halfway through the novel””was how much guilt she carried for putting her daughter through all of that turmoil. She had failed her daughter, at least in her mind. That particular insight emerged as the mother was “speaking” through me in the relative safety of her private journal.

(Thankfully, she gave me permission to carry some of this over into the novel.)

Think of it as an exercise in trust. Your character uses you as a kind of medium. They share, and you write. That’s the arrangement. And while much of the journaling won’t ever see the light of day, it will breathe new life into your characters. It will make them more real in your mind, and in the reader’s mind.

And who knows, you might even produce some usable material you can add into the story. With your character’s permission, of course.

BIO: Brandon Cornett is a longtime writer whose stories have appeared in the Mississippi Review and other journals. His first novel, Purgatory, is a horror-based thriller with a reality TV tie-in, available now on Amazon. His next novel will be out in 2020. Brandon also blogs about speculative fiction with a nerdy level of enthusiasm over at https://www.cornettfiction.com/blog/.

If you’re an author or other fantasy and science fiction creative, and want to do a guest blog post, please check out the guest blog post guidelines. Or if you’re looking for community from other F&SF writers, sign up for the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers Critclub!

Everyone always wants to know the writer’s writing origins, when for many of us we can’t recall the first time we scratched out a story. Was it a moment of inspiration, they want to know, a story we’d run across that needed our personal improvement? Or maybe we had somehow leaped over childhood development itself and landed in the middle of our search for identity only to discover that damn it, we were writers.

I don’t remember when I thought of myself as a writer, even if I know I bundled up in the front room of my parents house because it was cold enough to see my breath, and I banged away on a towering Royal typewriter, feeling every carriage return as small progress. But my writing genesis is far less interesting to me than its trajectory. I had no idea, making up tales about natural disasters and families and sea monsters, that I’d come to have certain inalienable opinions about my work thirty-plus years later. I write with purpose beyond that of simply selling my work””which don’t get me wrong, is a great goal, fellow authors””I write because there were books I needed in my youth and early adulthood that didn’t exist. I write to fill in at least a few of the gaps. I write for myself, of course, and sometimes I’m writing for one other person who will read the thing and send me a Facebook message saying they’d never seen themselves in a story before mine. I am so lucky to get the opportunity to write for even a few others who will find it resonant.

A professor friend of mine who is rather brilliant in many regards was almost boastful with me last week by declaring that she simply doesn’t read novels. The novel is a product of The Enlightenment, she said, all about a kind of egotism between a luxuriating individual (presumably because they have the time to read) and a narrative that centers their being through the protagonist or movement of the plot. It’s the very act of finding oneself in the text that she found so distasteful. But I ask, when do Americans not seek themselves in their lives? We are told to “find” careers that we love, we buy our sofas with our own comfort in mind, we make friends based on common interests and with the expectation that they will understand us. While it is useful to inquire into our relationship to literature, why only do this to literature and not everything in culture? And why is the best move to act like literature isn’t there?

I would rather engage the process of reading and writing, of authorship and ideology. My ponderous process of writing has led me through many questions about narrative itself and the late-capitalist products that support narrative, like novels, blogs, Internet free-for-alls of visual productions like House of Cards. I return again and again to the production gaps””whose stories aren’t being told, which communities aren’t heralded in the publishing industry, in Hollywood, in New York City””and I revisit the questions of our newest generation of readers. Yes, stories should destabilize the oversimplified identification with the protagonist. Good writing should push those boundaries, as well as resisting the expectations we have for form, genre, literary merit, and popularity. Great writing should speak to readers who have never before felt spoken to, who have before that latest moment always had to wrap themselves around the writing in order to engage the text.

I thought nothing about any of this when I first sat down in my childhood, even if the kinetic energy of these questions was always at my fingertips. Who I was in my earliest stages of writing was not very interesting. What I try to achieve with my writing today however, fascinates me. I take that as a good sign I am headed in the right direction.

BIO: Everett Maroon is a memoirist, humorist, pop culture commentator, and fiction writer. He has a B.A. in English from Syracuse University and is a member of the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Association and was a finalist in their 2010 literary contest for memoir. Everett is the author of a memoir, Bumbling into Body Hair, and a young adult novel, The Unintentional Time Traveler, both published by Booktrope Editions. Everett blogs at transplantportation.com.

Want to write your own guest post? Here’s the guidelines.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.