InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "MOOSH"

fb_worldbuilder (fb_worldbuilder) wrote,
@ 2008-06-10 22:07:00

Entry tags:

30 days method, fantasy, worldbuilding

Worldbuilding Project : Day Ten - Mood and Culture
Once again the quoted text comes from 30 Days of World-Building by Stephanie Bryant.

Day Ten - Mood and Culture

Settle on the overall mood for your story if you haven't already. Look through your timeline, political groups, and language notes and mark for revision anything that doesn't fit your mood. If you have time, revise those things. Otherwise, leave them for later.

This is another of those troublesome exercises. I suspect all of the mood exercises are going to be troublesome, because I'm not designing this world to be home to one story but multiple stories. That makes pinning down any one mood and noting things that don't fit difficult - because bits that don't fit one story might fit another. On the whole I suspect none of the stories are going to be comedy so I went through looking for things that might be comedic but I don't see anything excessively silly in what I've come up with so far and some of the stories will be darker and some will be lighter so there's not really a mood problem that I can see with anything.

This is probably a good thing since my throat's still sore and I still feel like crap so i coul;d do with a night off.

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mortaine.blogspot.com
2008-06-26 08:06 am UTC (link)

Hi, hope you're feeling better!

If you broaden your mood into "genre," you might have an easier go at those parts of the exercise. For instance, if you're building a world where you want vampires, werewolves, and fairies, but you don't want "silly," then books written in this world would probably be shelved with "dark fantasy." That gives you a mood to work with.

It's really just a way to focus your world and say "yes, this belongs here," or "I want this, but I don't want it to mess something up-- how to I present it so it's not jarring?"

If you're saying "yes, but my world has spaces in it that are for horror, spaces for science fiction, and spaces for Western shootouts," then you're building a combined world. Each genre/mood pocket is its own world, needing its own set of worldbuilding and rules.

The focus in the exercises on mood exists primarily because, to my experience, all worldbuilding should serve the story in some way. Worlds give your story a setting. And while the setting can serve many functions, the function that it's best at is giving the story an emotional backdrop for the characters (and the reader) to interact *over* (not necessarily with).

Erm.... I don't know if you ever watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Angel, but those are two great examples of what I mean by the interaction of setting and mood. Buffy: set almost entirely in Sunnydale, which is a conflicted town (both a sweet, "normal" place to raise your kids, and the opening of a gate to Hell), and Buffy's emotional story carries a lot of that mood, as Buffy is a nice kid growing up, but is also in constant combat with the forces of evil. Angel: set almost entirely in Los Angeles, a place where nothing is as it seems, you never know your neighbors, and nearly everybody is out to meet their own needs. Again, Angel plays out that emotional tension, by not being what he seems, and putting his own needs first is destructive to everyone around him.

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