World Building – Part One – Consistency

World building is a subject near and dear to authors. We can create worlds not bound by the conventions of the world we live in. Or we can take this world and tweak it here and there to make it just a bit different and thereby ours and ours alone.

Some authors create continents, new races, languages, and entire histories for their worlds. Tolkien, for example. Others take a world like ours and change just a few things, like the systems of government in power. Fahrenheit 451 comes to mind. Still others create worlds that are ours with the exception that an underworld of magic exists. Harry Potter or The Dresden Files anyone? Readers find all these different worlds fascinating. Be it the lure of something completely new or the comfort of the familiar, readers will embrace any well told story.

This leads us to the one thing the world building author must never forget – consistency. It may be your world and you may have built it, but you need to follow the rules you’ve set up in your stories. Vampires who die when exposed to sunlight at the beginning of your story can’t be getting a tan on some beach halfway through the book without some serious explaining beforehand. It’s not that things can’t change, but there better be a good explanation when they do.

Here’s an example: I recently started watching a TV series about space travelers who needed to wear magnetized boots to move around in their ship, otherwise the lack of gravity had them bouncing all over the place due to weightlessness. This made for some excellent scenes where characters could use either gravity or weightlessness to accomplish a goal. Then came the inevitable bedroom scene where the heroine starts wandering around her bedroom one the ship in her bare feet which somehow remain on the floor. How could that be? What happened? Why is there now gravity where there was none before? It pulled me completely out of the story and I blame that on the writers not following the rules of the world they set up.

So, set up any rules you want for your world, but remember those rules are a story promise. You have promised your reader that this is how your world works. If you don’t want to jerk your reader out of your story, don’t break a rule without an explanation.  And make it a good reason, not “just because” or the reader will have no faith in you.

Now go out and create something awesome. And consistent.