Building an Iceberg

This week was about knuckling down and getting my world building sorted.  You'd think this would be something that should have been worked out long ago, and you would be right.

I recently read some advice on world building by N.K. Jemisin.  (It's a powerpoint and well worth the read.)  She mentioned that world building is like an iceberg, and you only see the tip of it in the text of the story.   That feels like solid, resonating advice to me, and it nailed home that my shoddy world building here needs to pull itself together.

More specifically, I was having problems with how non-magic people view magic in the world I've created.  It was inconsistent throughout the story, ranging from unimpressed to confused, to anger and fear, to flat out disbelief and rejection.  This problem stems from how this is a million story ideas mooshed together, each with their own take on the situation, and I'd yet to commit to one over another.  Even though I've known this was a problem for a while and I've put off thinking about it because I couldn't come up with a quick answer.

But this edit is about cohesiveness.

So this week, I sat down and wrote "A brief history of magic in the United States" as written by the main character. 

It worked surprisingly well.  It fit together like a history should, with swings in opinion and rises and falls in popularity.  I thought I would have to go in and change the behavior of some characters, but I surprised myself and found justification for everyone's reactions.  Now I just need to change the framing around their reactions. I also got everything I needed under a shared history, tying things together.

Themes started to appear.  I solidified that there are several different groups of magicians, who are influenced by different events and influence each other.  These different groups are split along class lines, education levels, and North/South and East/West lines.  Second, I clarified that there's a history of both people lying about being magicians and of magicians lying about their capabilities.  They can fool people because no one really understands how magic works and people expect magicians to look and act a certain way.  But people have figured out that magicians lie, so now that's part of what they expect to see.  Finally, I saw that it's messy.  There's a lot of groups with a lot of agendas and values and opinions about each other.  The public doesn't understand that they're as different as they see themselves, so the public's opinion of one group affects their view of all magicians.  I kind of like that it's messy because it feels real.  I just need to embrace the mess in the text.

The other cool part was that now I have dozens of little side stories that amuse me and might go into the novel, but might not.