One of my favorite aspects of storytelling is when the world feels alive without being told that it is. I know how that sounds a bit confusing, but it’s a really amazing concept when pulled off correctly. I was thinking about it was I finished a run of Hollow Knight and started playing Silksong. The story isn’t directly told to the player, but it’s inferred through the background and the art in the surrounding areas of the game. Overly Sarcastic Productions touches on it very well in their Detail Diatribe regarding Space Marine 2. They had a really fun name for it, “worldbuilding through vibes”, which I thought was quite clever. It got me thinking about how much of a satisfying way this is to learn about a world as part of the audience that I thought about how this would work in a book.
The obvious way to approach this is to go into details as scenes play out within a book to give the reader a full picture of what’s happening. But it’s a delicate balance as one can easily fall into the trap of over exposition and ruin the flow of a story. The key aspect and most difficult challenge, just like in visual mediums, is the use of subtlety. But how does one achieve that? How does a writer make use of subtlety in their work?
The idea of subtlety in writing is actually not terribly difficult to do, but it is counterintuitive to what one might think. The idea of being subtle is usually being understated to the point of being quite easy to miss for the inattentive but in writing the process is almost the opposite. It’s the inherent difference between a visual medium and the written medium. For example, when entering a room, the process is very different between visual and written. In a visual medium, the viewer is shown everything all at once and can miss something but in a written medium, you only know what the writer directly tells you. In the former, the viewer is bombarded with information all at once and, as a writer, you can do that as well. More information provided to the reader can create the same effect.
The idea of “less is more” is important in writing, but when it comes to implicit worldbuilding the opposite is true. In a sense, one can view this as an element of showing rather than telling how things are. Going into detail about a scene allows for certain hints to be given about the state of the setting rather than simply telling the reader. For example, take the description of a room in a home under a tyrannical dictatorship (a classic for young adult novels). How a writer describes this room can add quite a bit:
“I opened the broken room to see a dilapidated room with ruined furniture, scattered messy clothing everywhere, and a rancid smell in the air.”
Vs
“The door was barely held together with tape as I took hold of the doorknob. It shook as I pulled it open, barely holding together and revealing a sight much worse. It was the smell that hit me first, the familiar tinge of blood mixed with things I’d rather not think about. There was a torn mattress was on the ground, the bedframe it had was broken and kept by the fireplace as was the chair and what appeared to be remnants of an old dresser. At least I think it was an old dresser, it would explain why there were pieces of stained clothing strewn about everywhere.”
It’s a bit of a crude and extreme example, but it illustrates the point rather directly. Both examples give a direct and clear message that this is a room in extreme disrepair, but the latter adds far more description to it. But what’s most important is that there are parts of that description that can allow for a lot of implications that hint at what kind of tyrannical empire this is. The barely held together door can imply that it’s been broken, possibly more than once, when the police force breaks in. The broken furniture being used as firewood implies that there’s a desperation to stay warm but resources are so scarce they have to resort to this. There’s a lot of things that can be implied with additional descriptions but there’s still a necessity to have a reason for it to be written. As a writer, if you want to imply something you will also have to build upon it later on by putting in these small breadcrumbs for readers to follow and get an idea of what this world is like. It allows for a far more interesting and satisfying world for the story to take place in.
– Raphael
Raph's Cozy Musings 