Worldbuilding: Intro to Political Science for Non-Political Writers
You need to understand the basics.
I have to be careful because I still have a day job, but I'm taking the risk because I'm tired of reading your half-baked worldbuilding.
I majored in Political Science because I wanted to become President of the United States. But I also knew that learning how our society is structured would make me a better writer.
The Basics
You may not care about who wins the next election. However, you probably care how long you spend waiting to renew your drivers license. So if you care about long wait times… you do care about politics.
Politics is the study of how resources are distributed. For example, if you have three pieces of pizza and five people in line waiting for pizza, you have to decide how you allocate your pizza. Do you cut the remaining slices in half so that everyone gets a piece? Do you only award pizza to the first three people in line? How you decide who gets the remaining slices is a political decision.
But who decided that you should be the person to distribute the pizza? Did you write a dissertation on the dimensions of pizza? Did your neighbors endorse you because you listen to both sides of their disputes before deciding who to unfriend on Facebook? I'm not saying that you aren't a fair judge of all things pizza, but that is not my decision.
The question of resources and who gets to distribute those resources is the heart of all political disputes. Maybe, one person doesn't want to take a smaller slice because they made an effort to get to your food truck earlier than everyone else. Maybe, you have more pizza in the oven, but the fourth person in line has a five-minute meeting, and they cannot wait until the next pie is ready.
How to Write Political Disputes into your Worldbuilding
Unfortunately, some of your readers are like me, and they care who makes your story's decisions. But those conflicts are easy to find because they exist in real life. For example, if your protagonist is a student, they have teachers, and if they have teachers, then their teachers have an administrator, their administrator has a school board, and their school board has a voter.
Your fifteen-year-old protagonist may not care who is on their school board. The school board may have no impact on the story, but your teacher may be hesitant to teach critical race theory in Topeka, Kansas. That said, critical race theory will probably never come up in your story.
The level of specificity added to your character's external world gives it credibility. For example, would anyone believe that Wizards and Muggles could live among each other if there were no agency to regulate the use of magic? How does that agency handle a Muggle seeing a flying Ford Anglia 105E?
Answer the Question
If you (as the writer) ask yourself a question, your reader is asking the same question. So we need to understand how your story moves from one action to the next. It needs to follow the rules of logic, but it also needs to be interesting.
That said, if you want to turn logic upside down, you need to establish your rules of logic at the beginning of your story. For example, if I find out 30 pages into your story that your fifteen-year-old protagonist has a tail and lives in a mermaid colony, then I'm throwing your book at the wall. You deserved it.
The Three Rules of Worldbuilding
- Find the natural conflict and exploit it. This conflict is a natural result of what your characters wants and the natural limitation of their surroundings.
- Be specific about their everyday life.
- Establish the rules in the first two chapters.
As a reader, I want to lose myself in your world. I want to drink your mermaid-tailed protagonist's pumpkin spice latte and change the station every time I hear the song that played in the background when they got dumped.
Worldbuilding is the ultimate responsibility of any writer. It's like playing God.
Be ruthless and omniscient in your worldbuilding. Make your readers worship your keyboard. If you earn my trust, then I will happily surrender to your will.
If you would like to not talk about politics, please connect with me on LinkedIn at Madison Sasser, where my feed is all kittens and rainbows.
