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knew nothing about at the time she wrote them (as opposed to Tolkien, who was referencing events already decided in his unpublished work).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.
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.
Exactly! The point Le Guin was making is that Tolkien’s invented world feels so rich because (to a large extent) he invented the history and language first, and then told a story set within it — whereas Le Guin wrote and would refer to places that she hadn’t planned out yet, or to history where she had no real idea what the term meant yet, and then if her later stories made that relevant, she fleshed it out then. That’s the kind of thing you’re referring to, and it can mimic the same effect that Tolkien’s work created without the extensive background, but it isn’t the same as what he did.
I do think from the writing side there’s an interesting question of whether the writer has pages and pages of notes about world building, so the author puts in a throwaway comment about a war 100 years ago but does the author A) actually have a backstory in their head about what the war is and how that affected the history of the country, regardless of whether this information ever makes it to readers or B) have no idea at all; they literally just wrote whatever popped into their head a at the moment and made up the name of war they know nothing about? And can the reader tell the difference in these scenarios?