HOW TO BUILD WORLDS

I did a piece this week for an online writing magazine: writing.ie on authentic world-building.

As an author of standalone speculative thrillers, world-building is a critical skill in my armoury, and one of the aspects of writing I enjoy most. I invest a significant amount of time in conjuring up near-future worlds centred around my book’s premise. Each of my novels starts with a question that dictates the attributes and rules of its world.

My debut, The Waiting Rooms, questions what might happen if antibiotics no longer work, and a simple scratch can kill. Off-Target explores the consequences of allowing babies to be genetically ‘perfected’.
My third novel, ONE, set in a one-child-policy Britain, asks what might happen if birth was a crime in a world devastated by climate change.
And my latest thriller, The Cure, investigates the ramifications of a cure for ageing.

Once you understand your premise, you can get to work on fleshing out your world.
To make my novels feel authentic and plausible, I use five strategies.

Work out the rules of your world and apply them consistently.
I start with my central premise, my ‘what if…?’ and then think through all the possible ramifications: social, political, environmental, economic and technological.
What is different to our world now, and how has it changed? What is the same, and why? Once you know how your world operates, you can drip-feed this detail into the chapters in your book.

For example, in The Cure, a genetic cure for ageing has resulted in global population numbers rocketing as lifespan stretches way beyond a century. Here are just three of the ways that society is affected:

• Marriage is obsolete as people transition through multiple long-term relationships: cohabitation contracts become the new norm.

• Towns expand and merge into one continuous urban sprawl to fulfil housing and resource demands: the only green spaces left are virtual.

• Food is grown in labs and vertical farms as there is no land available for the conventional farming of animals or crops.

Once you have agreed your rules, you need to stick to them. I make a list so I can refer back to them as I write, to ensure consistency.
It’s no good having your protagonist swan through a leafy park if you’ve established that green spaces no longer exist.

Make the familiar surprising.
I include details about recognisable products, processes or places that have changed in ways that underpin what’s different about my world, and I love using alternative narrative devices. I often incorporate adverts and news articles because they are concise vehicles for distilling information and flagging cultural or societal change.

For example, I start The Cure with an advert for an anti-ageing therapy, written in the style of a pain-relief medicine or beauty product. I include customer testimonials about how much younger and healthier people feel, as well as conventional marketing straplines such as: ‘’Your trusted vaccine against old age’ and ‘Helping you and your loved ones grow young’.

News articles are another great tool to convey important differences or shifts, avoiding the need for long passages of explanatory exposition. They are particularly helpful when your novel spans different time frames, as mine often do, and you need to bring readers up to speed with key events.

Don’t just think of your world visually.
It’s often tempting to rely on visual descriptions to convey details about a particular setting, but it’s important to remember the other four senses, too. What are the sounds of this new world, how are they different?
How does the air/food/water taste? What about smells? Are these recognisable or completely new?
A lot can be communicated about your world by showing how your characters respond to simple changes in smell, taste or touch.

In The Cure, my young investigator, Mara, has only ever experienced the sterile confines of a city so when she arrives in Jamaica, she is overwhelmed by the lush vegetation and exotic flowers, not to mention the roaming chickens and goats. As soon as she steps out of the airport, she is assaulted by an array of unfamiliar smells: ‘The salt breeze is laced with earthy vegetation, tantalising spices and more pungent, animal scents.’

Do your research, but be subtle. No info-dumping.
Research is an important part of my process as my thrillers explore medical, political and technological dilemmas. I believe that good research can really make or break your novel when it comes to plausibility, but you need to know how to use it and when to stop. At the end of the day, I’m writing a novel, not a science journal. Only a fraction of my research ends up in my actual copy. Most serves as background stimulus for the development of character, plot and setting. Even if I unearth the most fascinating nugget of information, it has to earn its place. Pace and accessibility are vital. Long, jargon-crammed passages showing off how much I know about a subject will likely lose my readers. Research should enhance the central premise and plot, not usurp them.

World-building is rooted in characters, too.
World-building isn’t just about the setting for my novels, it’s an integral part of characterisation.
How have the characters been moulded by the world around them, and how does this drive who they are and what they do? How do the rules of this world affect their motivations and values? Or their relationships?
The world should be informed by and reflected in my protagonists’ behaviour.

Mara, my twenty-five-year-old investigator in The Cure, is a product of the world she grew up in, where the very old vastly outnumber the young. A world where jobs for the younger generation are hard to find, and housing even harder. A world with major intergenerational divisions where the youth blame the elderly for destroying their planet and their prospects. This is why Mara becomes an Omnicide investigator, tasked with hunting down those who made or took the super-premium ageing cure. A personal tragedy during her childhood provides further impetus, triggered by events directly stemming from that cure.

If you are a budding author, I hope you find those strategies helpful. Do get in touch and let me know.

The Cure is out now, and available from all good bookstores in paperback, and also available online as an e-book and audiobook.