My friend Louis was telling me about a fictional holiday on the TV show 30Rock called “Leap Day” — like February 29th was an actual holiday with a santa-like character associated with it and a traditional dish and observances… but what sold it to him was there were also traditional ways to mock the holiday. There was a joke about the day, some irreverent things tossed around. People hated that Leap Day movie. There were people who hated Leap Day and those who thought it was too kitschy.
(Wikipedia tells me this episode was directed by Steve Buscemi! It all makes sense now!)
When we’re creating a world for fiction, we often take a utilitarian approach. “I need a mode of transportation for my characters to get to the cloud castle. Hrm okay how about… like… sentient flying manta ray things that lend themselves out like cabs? Oo I need a Sky Flap Flap Union…”
Essentially you’re building stages and backdrops around your characters, and these can feel thin or artificial. We know it’s a stage and a backdrop. Need leads to solution; need leads to solution. Some writers try to counter this with massive world-building tomes, maps, chronologies — the “Silmarillion” approach. (And if you think that book is a hefty door stopper, you have not seen some of the binders my friends have in their closets!)
The thing is, these over-built worlds often don’t feel any more lived in. It’s just fancier stages and backdrops. Too many details can make a reader check out. “Wait, was ‘Frungi’ the name of the day of the week or the month or the season? Do I care?”
But just the right detail can make your backdrop feel three-dimensional, like a blob of paint mimics sunlight on a leaf. The mockery of Leap Day was just that sort of detail, because it wasn’t structural, it was off to the side. It showed us this painted object being reacted to, played with.
Most writers will start out developing their flying manta ray union and then extrapolate structures based on it. There’s this, therefore we need that. They’ll paint in a group opposed, a group wanting reform, a group struggling for more inclusion… But will they create the union softball team?
Life isn’t all about the big issues all the time. Living in a world means doing a lot of irrelevant stuff. Crossword puzzles. Articles about the best shorts to buy. This itch on the bottom of my foot that won’t go away… c’mon foot, I just scratched you!
If there’s a part of your world that’s been around for any length of time, there’s someone who has mocked it. There’s a “Dad joke” about it. (Hell, there’s probably a different class of person associated with one-liner jokes. “Ugh no your brother’s a necromancer? How do you put up with the Necro Jokes?” )
So yeah this is a long blog post to say one thing: look sideways at your world, look away from the structural and into the irrelevant and irreverent. Besides their struggles and their work, if your Sky Mantas pee on a mountain for luck, well, now they are a little more real to me.
