Ursula K Le Guin has written about “consciously imitating” Tolkien and creating a wider landscape and history for her fantasy world by naming events or places she actually knew nothing about at the time she wrote them (as opposed to Tolkien, who was referencing events already decided in his unpublished work). What do you think of this strategy for creating “plausibility?” Do you think readers can tell when authors are referencing things that have no “real” definition? Can it come across as just making stuff up, or can it work to convince the reader the world is real?
Isn’t that just normal worldbuilding? An author may imply that there was a war a hundred years ago without working out all the details. What I think is more interesting is when an author goes back to one of these random details later in a series and builds a whole story around it.
I remember the first time I reread Harry Potter. In the first chapter of the first book, Dumbledore tells Professor McGonigal that Hagrid borrowed Sirius Black’s motorcycle to bring Harry to the Dursleys’. You never hear the name Sirius Black again or hear any of his story until book three. That hit me hard when I reread it at the beginning of the book. Was that all planned out or was a name put in there and then the story built around the fact that there was a borrowed motorcycle?
Seanan McGuire’s InCrypted series does this too. There is a huge cast. Many of them were barely mentioned background characters in the early books. There was a grandma who was off in alternate dimensions looking for her lost husband. The family had a ghost babysitter. Recently both of these rarely mentioned people have been main characters in their own books.
The only way I think it wouldn’t work is if the author truly didn’t think it through or remember what they said about seemingly unimportant details in the past. For example, if the continuity of who was fighting who in the last war didn’t stay the same or the geography of the world didn’t stay constant. That could be annoying.
