Guest posts for Ways into Worldbuilding will appear most Wednesdays through early November. Today’s post is from one of our industry’s most versatile writers and editors, Kristine Kathryn Rusch.
International bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes under several names and in every genre she can think of. She’s won more awards for her fiction than she can count, and she also edits. Her latest editing projects are The Best Mystery and Crime Stories 2016, which she coedited with John Helfers, and The Women of Futures Past. Her next novel, The Falls, will appear in October. For more information on her work, go to www.kristinekathrynrusch.com or sign up for her newsletter.
Aside from reader expectations, why do you build worlds? Is it more of an obligation than a pleasure? If the latter, what is enjoyable or rewarding about this aspect?
I’m constantly thinking about other worlds, other times, and other cultures. A big part of my what-ifs (the source of my fiction) is: What if I was born in that country? Or in that time period? Or on the Moon in the future? What would it be like?
As a kid, I used to imagine myself into photographs—what does the air smell like? What does the ground feel like? I still have a coffee table book of photos that my parents owned. I used to stare at it all the time, imagining myself watching those people or being them.
It was great practice. I studied history to learn more about other times, and then I became a journalist to force myself out of my comfort zone. All of that informs my world-building. I can’t write a short story set in a made-up world without thinking about things that will never make it into the story.
Worldbuilding is kinda who I am.
How important is worldbuilding in your novels? Is it a goal for you to create an innovative world, or do you favor having the milieu sit more comfortably in the background?
Well, huh. The answer to the first part of the question seems very elementary to me. You can’t write about a place without knowing what it is, where it is, what it smells, tastes, feels, sounds, and looks like. That’s worldbuilding.
The second part of the question could have been in Greek, for all I understood it. Innovative? Background? The world is the world, just like our world is our world. I don’t try to make something different from other writers—that’s working out of critical brain, and that destroys fiction, in my opinion. I don’t try to make something unusual: that will just happen. Down the road from where I live, people live differently than I do. Their lives—with children, dogs, day jobs—are very different from mine. So that will seem unusual to me.
As for “comfortably in the background”? If the world is in the background, I’m not doing my job. Anyone who has been stuck in a snowstorm knows that the world is rarely background. So, I try to be very detailed, very hands-on, and very deep in the story.
Do you apply any sort of process to worldbuilding? How does a coherent world emerge in your work?
I wish I was one of those people who outlined everything ahead of time. I need to make copious notes as I go along, because I discover the world as my characters do. Often, I’ll write a novella or short story to explain to myself a part of the world I haven’t seen yet.
It’s complicated and disorganized, and somehow it works for me.
In a series, do you lay in mysteries, trusting that readers will be intrigued and look forward to learning the answer in later books? How do you feel about making the reader wait to learn important world features?
Kris’s secret of writing: I write for me.
I love mysteries and the unexplained. I’m willing to wait to find out information, so the readers are going to have to wait sometimes as well. I’ve got an entire science fiction series, set in the far-future Diving universe, that is just now beginning to answer the central mystery of the entire series, six books and several novellas in.
Those things keep me interested, and if I’m interested, I have to hope the readers will be too.
Any peeks you’re willing to disclose about your next world or what we might learn about your latest world in your next book?
Right now, I’m focusing on science fiction in the novel form, under the Rusch name. (I have several pen names.) So as I mentioned above, I’m working on a huge far-future universe that has ships and time travel and intergalactic mysteries. I’ve just finished two books in that universe, The Falls, which started out as a novella to explain something to myself, and turned into a full-blown novel in a sector base planet (something I hadn’t written about before), and The Runabout, which explores, literally, a gigantic spaceship graveyard. The Falls comes out in October, and The Runabout next spring.
But I also write historical mysteries as Kris Nelscott, and I just finished a huge project there, called A Gym of Her Own. Set in Berkeley in 1969, the book follows three women as they work to establish a gym for women. All the skills I use to build sf/f worlds, I use in the Nelscott books, because the past is gone, and I have to recreate it in full. That’s fun, and hard, and exciting to me.
As for my fantasy fiction, right now, I’m doing mostly short fantasy fiction, primarily for a series of anthologies called The Uncollected Anthology. Several other writers and I pick a topic, then write a fantasy short story based on that topic. My most recent, The Latest Madame Fortuna, just appeared in Fortune Tales. You can find it here: http://www.uncollectedanthology.com/
Speaking of worldbuilding, that’s what’s slowing me down on returning to my Fey fantasy universe. I’ve written seven books in the Fey world, and need to return for a new trilogy, but I have to put that world back in my head completely before doing so. That’s a problem with 300,000 of worldbuilding materials (set aside from those books) and big fat fantasy novels to review.
But I’m doing it, albeit slowly. I’m really proud of those books, and they’re still available. If you’re interested, start with The Sacrifice and work from there.
Or if you want to get one of my other fantasy novels relatively inexpensively, I’m in a storybundle with several other authors. The Epic Fantasy Bundle (https://storybundle.com) contains my novel, Heart Readers.
As you can see, I’m really busy with all kinds of projects. I haven’t even mentioned the worldbuilding in my Kristine Grayson paranormal romance and YA novels (which are going to branch toward mysteries soon), and the three witchy sisters who are magical dramaturges, whom I plan to write more about, and, and, and…
Oh, but one more thing! If you want to see just how eclectic I am, come to http://kriswrites.com/ every Monday to read a free short story. Sometimes the story is fantasy, sometimes it’s sf, sometimes it’s mystery…it varies from week to week, like my work does.
Thanks for reading! And Kay, thanks for asking me onto the blog.
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About this post. Ways into Worldbuilding is a series of interviews I conducted in the summer of 2016 with SFF writers, asking about their opinion on, and approach to, creating fictional worlds. Watch this space for upcoming interviews with Sharon Shinn, Django Wexler, Louise Marley, Tananarive Due and more amazing writers!
Previous interviews: Martha Wells, L. E. Modesitt, Jr
Next interview: Claire Cooney, September 28