… Or World-Building and How I’m Definitely Not Sebastian Faulks

But you grow up with that. It’s accepted there is nothing beyond the ship, so you make space smaller to fit in with your world. As far as you’re concerned, space may only be a metre deep, the only thing that suggests it’s not is by spending hundreds of years travelling from one point of it to another.

It’s the Daniel’s Nemesis Podcast, reading Chapter 8 - Watching Videos with William. 

These days, Internet celebrities and influencers are always selling you merchandise. They build the audience, then flog you stuff. The book they inevitably write comes years into their career. Here I am, giving away my book before I have any audience at all. 

Yes, this is the book that I wrote when the Internet was barely a thing. We had chat forums back then, not apps on a phone. This book has seen the rise of Friends Reunited, MySpace, Facebook, and now that governments are trying to break up the monopolies of such huge sites, this book is finally seeing the light of day. 

See, before the Internet, we had imagination. And if that is an arrogant thing to say, you have not heard this podcast before. For success today, one needs polish. One needs to look like they have a massive budget and a whole crew behind the scenes. I have a novel that never went anywhere and a microphone. And now your ears. 

XBook, the classic story of aliens invading the Earth right after the First World War as one character has a mental breakdown, and the other character is stuck centuries in the past. It’s got maximum surrealism, it’s got maximum ponderousness, it’s got minimal actual story. 

What have you missed so far? Ginger took leave a month after the Great War ended, and has taken his girlfriend Dee to the countryside. 

William, a Trascon, having reached Earth after centuries of travel, sees the only way to get onto Earth is to instigate an attack. A warning of which has been issued. 

Ginger is called back to base. 

Feels weird doing these catch-ups with some actual plot points to catch you up on. 

Anyway, 

Just Remember:

This is fiction, 

Always fiction. 

Logic is, 

As Logic Does.

General Notes

Ok, ok, so I accidentally gave a spoiler in the previous episode. I’ve fallen into the trap that I knew I was inevitably going to fall into; I talked about something that seemed like it was a mere expository detail when in fact it was a revelatory detail in a chapter that hadn’t been released yet. This was going to happen. Analysing chapter by chapter a book that I know very well, I am occasionally going to take some things for granted as known when in fact they are not known. I just need to be more careful. That detail? That supplies are running low on the Trascon ships. This adds stakes and a consequence to William if he doesn’t continue with getting the Trascons to Earth by whatever means. It’s a new dimension and an interesting one. 

Besides, with the extreme length of the last episode, and the accidental spoiler, and the repeated awareness that I am stepping into “Death of the Author” territory, I think for all those reasons that I need to follow the “Less is More” philosophy. Less because it makes for a shorter, more enjoyable episode. Less because I don’t risk giving away so many spoilers. And less so that I can give you some food for thought without telling you what to think. 

OG DANIEL’S NEMESIS:

Don’t you want readers to focus more on the book rather than your analysis? What’s your goal here? 

HOST:

Oh, that’s just the me from the past. He pops up every now and then to have his little say thinking that I’ve changed too much in the last decade and a half since this book was last looked at. Well, listener, if you want, you can tune out now if all you want is the novel. I mean, he’s right, the rest of this podcast is just analysis. So, I was talking about giving away key details. 

Well, that was at the end of the chapter. What about the rest of the chapter? What do you say about a chapter where someone has only been watching vids? 

Well, I guess I can talk about World-building. 

We’ve learned about the insides of Ginger’s head. We’ve learned about the history of the Trascons and how they’ve got to this point. What we haven’t had much of is an actual description of the physical worlds that both inhabit. Well, it seems that in this chapter I may have been kind of addressing that point. William is looking at Ginger’s world and talking about it. We may know little about what the Trascon ship looks like, whereas we now know what Earth weather is like. If you’re from Wales, as I am, you are probably over-familiar with weather as Wales is the land of the horizontal rain. But, with a character looking outwards, and at their present, at least I was making steps in building the world that the story takes place in. 

So, let’s examine this in a bit more detail. 

What is World-building?

I’ve enjoyed a fair few Sebastian Faulks books in my time, but I guess that level of descriptive detail was not for me. Sebastian Faulks goes into a level of world-building that I feel is a bit extreme. But I do get at something that adds some texture if not substance. 

At a basic level, world-building is describing not just the physical appearance of the world the characters inhabit, but describing the rules of how the world works, the geography as well as the socio-economic factors. I’ll get into all that later, but let’s look at another aspect of world-building. 

The way that you describe a world should say a lot about where the characters are at that stage in a story. Worlds that seem strange to the audience are often strange to the character as well, and focus will go on certain details that emphasise that strangeness. If the strange world is known to a character, then what is strange to us will be normal to a character, and be treated as such in the narration of the story. 

Film is particularly good at world-building. The way that a character is framed, for example behind bars, shows imprisonment of some kind, even if those bars are not part of a prison, but maybe a feature of a window. If a character’s in an expansive area, that shows some kind of freedom. Where the camera is positioned and how it looks at a character tells us a lot. Likewise, how the camera looks at the world tells us something of the character’s perspective. Let’s look at Film Noir, and the movies that inspired that genre, German Expressionism (also known as Weimar cinema). Film Noir is usually set in a contemporary world to the production with the world mirroring one that the audiences were familiar with. However, Film Noir also used heavy lighting to set the mood and transform that recognisable world into something new. This was due to the often low budgets and bare walls, so lighting and shadows played a dominant part in the visual aesthetic, but also helped build this grimy, murky, dark underworld where danger appears at every turn. Basically, Film Noir used a budgetary constraint to its artistic advantage. German Expressionism had previously developed this with its worlds of horror and fantasy - Caligari having very stylised sets depicting a dream world. Fritz Lang used gigantic sets in Metropolis to create claustrophobic and terrifying workhouses depicting humans becoming, in effect, part of the machinery contrasted with expansive areas that the bourgeoisie had a lot of freedom in. Then there’s the infamous scene in Nosferatu where you only see the shadow of the monster approaching the victim. I could go on forever about German Expressionism, but these worlds were built with light doing a lot of the heavy work to set the tone of the worlds portrayed. And they are wonderfully constructed worlds that have me practically orgasming to look at, despite these movies now being about a century old.

But, famously, an image tells a thousand words, and films have a lot of images. Books and novels have a lot more work to do. There is a reason why there can be a lot of detail to describe each new place a character walks into. Economy with adjectives is not often deployed. I mentioned Sebastian Faulks earlier, who really puts more importance on his world than his stories, at least in my view. Or he just likes showing how much research he has done. I dunno.

However, I never really studied the art of world-building. I was taught to look at the mise-en-scene. Mise-en-scene is the arrangement and composition within an image including the placement of a character, a prop, and what is in the background. The placement of any object in a screen can be seen as important in some way, for example, it can be metaphorical or symbolic. Or it can be there just to make the background look good. I treat world-building details in a similar way to how someone constructs a film image. I place the camera of my mind’s eye in a particular direction, and only what is seen in my mind at the moment is commented on. Very little of the external world penetrates into either characters’ consciousnesses, and when it does it gets scrutiny. Kind of like we don’t get to see what’s behind the camera in a movie. Every world is 360 degrees, but only a few of those degrees get looked at at any particular time.

Knowing this kind of informs my approach to what the characters look at, and what they scrutinise, and consequently what you, the reader, gets to know about my worlds. But there’s some other aspects as well. 

I never built up Ginger’s world, both because I didn’t have enough research, but also because it is a world that is documented, is known, is imaginable. William’s world is his normal to him, so he doesn’t describe it much. How often do you walk into a kitchen and pour adjectives onto the mug you are about to drink coffee from? Extend this to a room you are in every single day - do you really examine it in excruciating detail every single day?

This novel deploys first-person narration from both characters. This therefore determines how details are given. The details given are about them and where they are. The worlds I am building revolve around them, and how external both characters are to their individual worlds. The details are from their perspective with less regard to the reader. Were I to narrate this from a third-person perspective, details would emerge as the reader enters a new environment, not the character unless the character has never been there before as well. For example, William pours more scrutiny on Earth than Ginger would because Earth is the strange new world to William. The details he looks at are the details that interest him - humans just being human. Perhaps not dancing like nobody's watching, but just going about their day to day as if no one is watching. In terms of expositional world-building, William looks back partly because it is his job to know about his civilisation, but also because there is some kind of envy that Trascons of the past never had to do what he is doing. He looks back perhaps because he desires to be there, and not in his own present. And, yeah, it’s also convenient exposition. 

World-building says a lot about a story and its characters. Many authors really build up the worlds in almost excessive, if not self-indulgent detail. I refrain from the details. If my characters are separate from the worlds around them, so should the reader be. 

William describes his relationship to his metal home as “safe”. He describes others’ relationships to it as well, brief details about them travelling from home to work and families not spreading out much. He describes looking out at space and seeing it as a wall rather than endless possibility. There is a conflict of interest. Less food equals more habitable space, but a larger population means a more rapid decrease in food. 

I am attempting to take the camera, and use it from the character’s point of view. In essence, as a character becomes aware of something, I am positioning it within the camera frame. 

Have I not made it clear in previous podcasts that I had a filmmaker’s approach to writing a literary novel? It’s becoming a bit more clear now, isn’t it? 

William’s world is that of being confined, and the politics of a civilisation also confined. If you are disappointed that I never gave a lot of details to describe what William looks at then how about this? This is how I would describe it in a script: “Grey, a bit darker grey, lighter grey with grime.” His technology? “850 years old with random upgrades done at various times over the centuries. A hodge-podge of old, and newer technology that is not that much of an upgrade anyway. By 21st century human standards, the technology looks fairly primitive but functional.” But why should I be giving you details now when I didn’t back then? After all, if it’s not on the page, it’s not there at all. 

OG DN:

Then stop explaining everything. 

HOST:

Hahaha, oh, long time ago version of me. 

What Are the Rules?

I’m not sure I was ever sure of the world rules. I mean, I’m still not sure now, so there was no way that I could have done back then. Let’s face it, one of my characters is Ginger where almost anything can go, at least internally. Looking back, though, I can see lots of details that could be played on, developed as motivation for actions that some of the smaller characters later take. 

But I am still around act one. I am still in the establishing area here. I don’t need to change the world that the characters are in yet, or introduce a new set of rules. At least, a new set of rules on the vague rules already established. 

The rules at the moment are that of a fairly normal world that we all live in. Yes, that includes the Trascons onboard their spaceships. I was anthropomorphising this group of aliens. It’s easier, after all, to have aliens with a human-like civilisation than create an entire alien civilisation from scratch.

Bearing in mind I never fully developed the rules of the world, let’s go into some of the details of how it works. 

The Geography of the Mother Ship

William mentions that for most Trascons, their world is going from their living space to their workspace. What are those workspaces? I imagined their living quarters as being something from Red Dwarf or Star Trek, kind of sci-fi’d versions of apartments or flats. But what are their jobs? Do they have shops and restaurants like us? How does manufacturing work? Exports? William also says that they stay close to their families as there is nowhere to spread to. Does this mean that different types of jobs are fairly spread out across the entire mother ship, if not fleet of gigantic ships? 

For us, we travel to different cities because we can’t get the job we want in the place we grew up. Many industries are based in certain areas, dotted around a country. In the UK, manufacturing is pushed to towns like the one I grew up next to, farming is in the countryside, but the big-banking, economic, entertainment jobs tend to be centralised in big cities, particularly London. When writing this, I was still a naive little country boy. I didn’t understand how the job market works. I barely do now, to be honest. I didn’t understand the way towns and cities worked. The village I grew up in was a place where people lived. One shop, a couple of pubs, and that was it, employment-wise. Looking at larger, more urban areas, I couldn’t distinguish between the suburbs and the financial districts. I didn’t have enough knowledge of city or even town-life to break things down enough to be able to build them back up in a new alien world. 

I don’t think the idea of towns and cities existing on the ships even came to me back then. I did, however, have a concept of each ship representing a different country, and I think that was it. 

However, geography and, later, industry is an area that fascinates me in Discworld. Terry Pratchett was always bringing in new industries into the Discworld, giving us a clearer picture of how Ankh-Morpork worked as well as the regions around Ankh-Morpork if not other countries very distant from that city. Typically, through the Watch or Lord Vetinari, the despot Patrician, we got to see how these new industries impacted the world we have known and built up in our minds through many books. World-building was something Terry Pratchett was good at, as he literally built an entire world in his imagination. But, it also took Terry Pratchett many, many books to introduce all these new ideas, these new slices of life, and over many decades as well. 

Sometimes, you have to draw your limits. I think I was wise to draw my limits where they were. It’s a case of micro and meta-narratives again. 

Micro-Narratives of the Socio-Economic World

You can’t represent everyone, but with the introduction of new characters, Legalt and Yertjuk, this micro-narrative represents larger power struggles being played out across the Trascon civilisation. By screaming and shoving, Yertjuk is determining his authority, and Legalt is the naif foil to that. 

We finally get a small slice of life onboard the ship outside of William and Skernajj. We have a sense of a world of hierarchies with William at the top as the Supreme Leader, but also a world where aggression towards a perceived minor is accepted. 

It’s interesting to me that I happened to bring in new characters as William stops looking to the past, and starts looking to the present, even if it is the present of the Earth more than the present on his own ship. 

And, as we have only just been introduced to these two new characters, I should stop talking about them here. 

William World-Builds Ginger’s Terrain

Yes, William is looking more at Earth in this chapter, perhaps more than his own world. And isn’t it funny that it’s actually William who describes more of Ginger’s external world than Ginger does? 

For William, it’s important for him to analyse Earth, to study it. We get little details like why the UK is focused on. Apparently not because it’s the hub of an Empire where the sun is always shining, but because it’s a small country where the Smoovs can get in and out of easily. Not bad thinking, old me. 

OG DN:

Accepted. I do get things right occasionally, oh Master of my psyche.

HOST:

Go away. I’m on your side this time. You can tell by the more sincere tone. 

Understanding the weather systems would be important to a leader. One’s got to know how it’s going to affect a civilisation that has done without weather for centuries. Had I had more smarts, I could have maybe talked a bit about the crops. That’s surely something William would want to know about if they are rationing their own food. But William doesn’t look at that. Because I didn’t write it, but it’s not the only issue that is truly bothering him. He’s looking at the weather because it’s alien to him, and he attempts to contextualise it in a way he can understand. And William states that he is not looking at the things the scientists and anthropologists have been over countless times.  

William is watching videos as if he is psyching himself up to enter Earth. He is our audience surrogate as the observer. Well, he’s got a dual role, even in this chapter, as he begins as he has done in a few chapters by narrating his race’s history even if it is from a distance of centuries. But as a narrator, he knows more than the reader. In the second half of the chapter, he moves into ‘observer role’.  As the observer, he becomes a good audience surrogate. By that, I mean, William can look at the rules of the world and how the world operates. Also, William is in another good position to act as an audience surrogate. He seems separated from everything that is going on around him. He’s alienated from his current home, he’s alienated from his potential future home. He looks at Ginger’s world as if it is alien to everything he understands. In other words, he is learning as the reader is. 

World-Building and Narrative Structure

So, what is William seeing here? And is this… (WHISPERS) foreshadowing???? I don’t want to spoil things, so let's go through this with a bit of care. How does this world-building contrast with the previous world-building that he’s done previously? 

So far, we have just had: World-building through exposition dump. In previous chapters, this is seemingly all it has been. However, I feel I managed to finally have the exposition impact William’s story. As William goes into exposition, a new plot point is revealed, that being the lack of rations. 

Blake Snyder in his book ‘Save the Cat’ talks about the Pope in The Pool. The Pope in the Pool is a way to get over lengthy exposition by putting a character in a surprising situation. For example, we think of the Pope giving sermons. We picture him waving from inside his Pope-Mobile. Who thinks of the Pope in a pool? In one such script that Snyder refers to, this happens as a load of exposition is dumped on the audience. It doesn’t impact anything story-wise, but by having the Pope relate exposition in a strange place, it combats the boredom many suffer from hearing too much exposition. Ultimately, whether or not you dress the exposition up in a fancy way as Blake Snyder suggests, there has to be a reason why, as a writer, you go on at length about events prior to or circulating the story. 

I have accepted I am exposition-heavy. So, what is my reasoning for having so much exposition in the chapters concerning William to date? I am getting from events that started centuries, if not millennia ago to where William is right now. Not only does it help explain the general psychology of the Trascons and the cabin-fever and why they are keen to get off the ship and onto Earth, but it helps explain why William, who clearly would prefer to be an observer, is having to go against his natural inclinations to have to step foot on Earth. In other words, things that have happened a long time in the past are impacting William now. 

Through all this exposition, we get more of a sense of William’s internal conflict. That conflict being: 

1. Wanting to go past Earth and continue the life he has always known. 

2. Wanting to kill to get onto Earth, therefore being trapped into events as they are happening. 

3. His admiration for humans and the world they live on. 

Why does William have this conflict? 

• It took a massive series of events beginning with a sun dying to get to where William is now. 

• Imagine if there were a common goal that all humans had that would take a thousand years to complete. 

• Imagine all those people who developed technologies that had to last for centuries. 

• Imagine all those people who created plans for 850 years after their own lives. 

• Imagine all those people whose hopes were for their descendants nearly a millennium later?

• Imagine all those lives of people trapped on a ship, spread over 850 years, forced into a life they cannot escape? 

• No home to return to, and no hope of getting off at the next stop.

• Imagine you were the person who had to honour the shared goal of an entire race for an entire millennium. 

It might prey on your mind a bit as well, wouldn’t it? 

However, is all this exposition too talking-heady? Should I strip it down and focus only on details that will be relevant later on? 

No. 

I always wanted to create a history book for an alternate world. This was my self-indulgence. 

Besides that, I feel there is more structure in this world-building than in the main story. There is a sense of a beginning/middle/end. There is a sense of conflict in the Trascon history, and even how the weather systems on Earth interact (with) and affect human life as we see in the video that William watched.

It’s all subtle. 

But, I feel it works. 

William jumps around in (Trascon) history, as well as the world of the ship and the world of Earth, but it’s all deliberate and is designed to create contrasts as well as a sense of story.  This helps us understand William and his place in everything more. 

I do show, I just narrate over the showing, but I feel it’s justified. 

Also, a sense of jeopardy is introduced right at the end; that of supplies. The Trascons are running out of food. The implied jeopardy is that with the humans and Trascons sharing Earth, would Earth supply enough food for its suddenly increased population? Another over-arching question for the reader, and another problem for William to tackle. 

Furthermore, there is a contrast in the weather seen. (PRETENTIOUS VOICE): “It’s like the weather also becomes a metaphor.” We have snow from a previous winter, then rain from much more recent footage. The snow represents lifelessness but in a romanticised form. The snow completely alters the world in damaging ways. Yet, the world is still and peaceful, and has children playing. The danger is present, but is often glamourised by us humans. The rain footage is different. Rain is a life-giver to William, yet this time we see people running, trying to hide away from it, making the world more frantic. What is the contrast a metaphor for? Well, I’ll leave you to think about that. Perhaps the word (WHISPERING) ‘foreshadowing’ might give you a clue. 

Closing

It may not be the best chapter in terms of story progression. It may be a heavy talking-head exposition dump. But I like this chapter. I like reflective William. I like knowing that I wrote stuff like this, whether or not it’s right for a story. It’s right for MY story. It’s my voice, my observations, my headspace. 

William is me. 

I thought I was Ginger. 

I identify more with William. 

Besides, I had way much more fun taking scant detail from books I was reading and creating the worlds in my head than being told what to picture all the time back when I was an obsessive reader. 

To summarise this whole chapter briefly, though, I guess that I’m beginning to get across the idea that William will soon be entering the second act, where the world will change for him. I guess this is a bit of a reconnaissance mission into the second act, arming him with facts before he really needs to jump across the first act turning point. 

So, before I say farewell, what do we have to look forward to in the next chapter? 

Well, Ginger packs his bags in order to return to base. 

Scintillating! 

Until next time, TTFN!

And just in case you were wondering, all text was written by me, Daniel’s Nemesis, and XBook is purely a work of fiction and is not meant to be based on anyone or any events at all. 

The music was also by me, Daniel’s Nemesis, as was the image that accompanies this podcast. 

It sucks, doesn’t it? 

But there we go.