if you get a very solid grasp of your world. If you have a feel for it, if it's sort of firm under your feet, as it were, everything you will then write should come from that work.
Now, like I say, this is purely the way I work, but I think it benefits me a great deal to do that because... I can write with a certain amount of confidence and without having to stop and think how things work all the time and also without having to stop and go back and make things line up because if I've done my work properly, things line up from the start because they're all coming from that side.
And when you introduce a character, you know, right, this character, they come from this people, they have those attitudes, they've been exposed to this, they think about that.
and you, or alternatively, they come from this place, but they are unusual, and so this is how they deviate from the traditional stereotypes of their... their culture but you have all of that framework that you can build on instantly you know how that character is going to be perceived by your other character in that scene and that kind of thing you know the starting attitudes that they have that will be confirmed or overthrown as these characters interact. So you get this sort of
texture to everything. It's not just like flat colours and sort of like the old western sets where it's just the front of the shop and it's just plywood behind it. You get this whole idea of everything around these characters just extends off beyond the page and that they are real people in a real world.
What is up, everybody? You're listening to episode 134 of SFF Addicts. I'm your host, Adrian M. Gibson, and welcome to your weekly dive into the world of science fiction, fantasy, and writing craft. Joining me as always, my co-host, the Chewy to my honsel. The Joker to my Commander Shepard. My dear MJ Kuhn. I am doing great, except it's snowing in Detroit today. How are you? Boo hoo. It's not that.
No, it's not, but I'm a big baby. I'm a summer girl, all right? Yeah, whatever. Yeah, just like throw a sweater on. You'll be okay. Right. I have no, I have no sympathy for you.
but i do have sympathy for mj's writing career so go get a copy of among thieves her debut novel and its sequel thick-ass thieves if you want a wonderful duology full of heists and you know fast paced action and lots of killing and death but also some some light romance with hand grazing you got it all here in this beautiful duology
Death and hand grazing. What more could you want? Yeah. You could want mushrooms. Look at that transition. And that's when you should check out my dear Adrian's debut novel. No hand grazing. No hand grazing, but lots of body horror and psychedelic. things. So check it out. Celium grazing. There's a lot of that. If that sells everybody off.
As well, a quick note for everyone out there, our Patreon and merch store are live, so check the links in the description to support what we do here. Also, don't forget to write and read the podcast on your favorite podcast app. and subscribe to the Fanflatic YouTube channel where this and every other episode of the show is available in full.
And now joining us once again is the wonderful Adrian Tchaikovsky, award-winning author of the Children of Time series, Shadows of the App series, the Tyrant Philosopher series, and much more. This prolific, prolific man. Welcome back, Adrian. How are you? Hello, I'm very well.
You're very welcome. Welcome back to the show. And a heads up, this is part two of our two-part chat with Adrian, so I recommend checking out part one to get to know him better. Today, though, we're dealing with the consequences of all of our... Just kidding. We're actually dealing with consequences as they relate to world creation. So to get this started, Adrian, can you tell us a little bit about your personal approach when it comes to creating?
You touched on it a little bit last episode, but you can dig a bit. So I'm going to preface this. Because there's a lot of needlessly prescriptive writing advice out there I'm going to preface this with to say this is purely how it works for me. And it's not going to work for everyone. So I'm absolutely not saying this is how you write a book or anything like this. So I'm only talking about my own personal approaches.
So I work with the world first. World building is one of those concepts which has a bit of a bad rep in some quarters. It is thought of as maybe overly nerdy and people had the idea of people getting obsessed with the details of... what coinage people use and all that sort of thing at the expense of character and plot, which I strongly disagree with as a take.
but I was not with the world and There are two good reasons to take that particular approach, one of which is the world is what sci-fi and fantasy has to offer in particular. above any other genre. As I mentioned in the previous one, we are able in sci-fi and fantasy to do the things that every other genre does.
but we can also have these world elements that no other genre can have. And so if you're not really using that side of it, it's going to, why are you writing sci-fi and fantasy if you're not doing fun things with your setting? And this is where I'm trying to think. I had a second point. I'm trying to think what it was. It's the reason to start with the world is also... If you get a very solid grasp of your work.
If you have a feel for it, if it's sort of firm under your feet, as it were, everything you will then write should come from that word.
Now, like I say, this is purely the way I work, but I think it benefits me a great deal to do that because... I can write with a certain amount of confidence and without having to stop and think how things work all the time and also without having to stop and go back and make things line up because if I've done my work properly, things line up from the start because they're all coming from that same place.
And when you introduce a character, you know, right, this character, they come from this people, they have those attitudes, they've been exposed to this, they think about that.
and you, or alternatively, they come from this place, but they are unusual, and so this is how they deviate from the traditional stereotypes of their... their culture but you have all of that framework that you can build on instantly you know how that character is going to be perceived by your other character in that scene and that kind of thing you know the starting attitudes that they have that will be confirmed or overthrown as these characters interact. So you get this sort of...
texture to everything. It's not just like flat colours and sort of like the old western sets where it's just the front of the shop and it's just plywood behind. you get this whole idea of everything around these characters just extends off beyond the page and that they are real people in a real world. And to me as a reader, I find that enormously important. I need to be able to believe in these things for the duration of my reading of a book.
Yeah, let's talk a little bit more about that immersion piece of the puzzle, right? Because I think that's something that...
very important with the world building and it brings consequence into it. You know, once you've established a reality, it helps you see into it. But there's also consequences to that, right? How do you kind of... uh you know what what is the role of establishing that reality and how does that kind of come to fruition um so i mean i think For me as a reader and for me as a writer it's kind of an essential part.
of the experience if you have a world that the book is set in whether that is a secondary world or whether it is just a particularly inaccurate depiction of the real world it's going to knock you out of your reading enjoyment the moment you get to something you know well that doesn't work
And, you know, obviously there is always a limit to how well you can do as a writer because there will always be people who know more about any given topic than you. And you can just, you know, you have to do your best and in that way.
alienate the smallest possible number of readers and yeah there are quite especially things in fantasy and in sci-fi there are particular areas which are quite well known as areas that writers probably need to bone up on a little more like how do horses work or certain elements of how physics works in space. yeah i mean space no one can hear you scream literally because there is no medium to carry the sound
a thing that a vast number of science fiction films decide they don't want to go with because having sounds and space is kind of cool in a film. Not having explosions would just be completely unsatisfying. Right. I mean... But building on that, how might world creation and consequences in science fiction compare to fantasy?
So with, I mean, it's worth noting it's not, they're not polls. It's a continuum. So for example, when I'm writing, sorry, I have cat. I know I love it. I know I was going to say, cat buddies. when I'm writing hard science fiction, then... there is what I think of as a left wall. The left wall idea is so when you are creating, there is a barrier that you can't venture past because this is how physics works.
for the sort of story you're telling. And there are other potential apples. So if you are writing a historical story, then what we know of the historical time and place you're writing in is your left wall. and you can expand in every other direction, but beyond that is where you are constrained creatively. I'm aware that's my right hand, I've just realised, so I've got that completely back. It's on the left side for anyone watching. Good, there we go. That was obviously my intent.
with as you move more towards the fantasy end of things that left wall tends to fall away so that for example in the final architecture which is much more of a space It's still got the trappings of a science fiction book and tries to have the logic of a science fiction book, but the science it is dealing with is kind of made up because it's dealing with a hyperspace sort of realm.
enormous world destroying aliens and things like that which kind of go beyond any current understanding of science but that's fine because that's the territory the book exists in and then when you go towards say a more full-on fantasy then the only left wall you've got is the left wall that you yourself build while making the world. Because what becomes important then is that you are... logical and consistent within what you have decided can happen in this
Yeah. So when we're thinking about making sure we're adhering to that, I love that idea of that's your stopping point, your left wall. For you personally, like if we're just getting into some examples, what are some of your favorite stories that you can think of that have particularly well thought out worlds with logical convincing consequences and that kind of result in something you find acceptable?
So probably the most classic book that I keep going back to for this is Gene Wills' Book of the New Sun, and indeed the entire solar cycle, which is... I think that's sort of 11, 12 books and a bunch of shorts as well.
If only because it is one of the most spectacularly multi-layered and complex sort of narratives. And also, I mean... to leap slightly sideways i mentioned you know there is a bit of a bad odor sometimes when people talk about world I would direct those people to Gene Wolfe because he creates this enormously consistent, logical, sort of fallen future world. where everything that everyone does makes sense in the setting that he presents, whilst also being phenomenally weird.
um in a variety of ways and you know he goes into incredible length of living detail but at the same time the story he is telling is one of enormous kind of mystical symbolism and just sort of with huge sort of cosmic spiritual themes. And these two things don't detract from one another. They support one another. And this level of immersive world building actually helps. It's not this kind of... sort of nerdery that in some way detracts from.
the big themes of a story it absolutely helps it because if that book hadn't had that enormously believable world i don't think it would have been remotely as compelling um and similarly i would look at i mean things like The level of little details you get in Anne Leckie's Imperial Raj books, for example, or Yoon Harley's Ninefox Gambit and books like that is just...
These are big, and these are great big space opera stories, but at the same time, they are stories about real people in a real, you know, facing real... stakes and issues in a believable, coherent universe. Yeah. So in your personal experience, like... Is there one book or story where you got really into the weeds in that kind of way, where you're thinking about the interlocking relationship between the world and the consequences and the logic of it?
I was talking about writing or reading at this point? Yeah, for writing, yeah. I mean, it... It's kind of my process to try and get into those reads as much as possible. But I think the ones that it's happened most in... My early one, the Shadows of the Apt, my very first one, has a lot of detail. I mean, that came out of a role. So a lot of that detail pre-existed before I decided I would make a series of books. And so I had all of this stuff to draw.
And there is, I mean, there's so much that doesn't make it to the books, but there's also, there's so many little details in the books about how those initial choices are made about the world. So the way of the technology and the insects and all of that, how those things change the way people's lives, that's that cascade of consequences we're talking about.
You get the same in the Tired of Philosophers books, which, as I mentioned previously, it's a setting that keeps on giving as far as writing it is concerned, because there's always more and there's always some little reference. that springs to mind that could then theoretically be expanded to its own entire book. Um... And also the final architecture, the space opera one, turned out to be a remarkably compelling and complex.
setting with a lot of just a lot of little details about especially because it's a story about how human society has adapted to an absolutely catastrophic sort of reversal in that Earth gets destroyed and a number of other human colonies gets destroyed and you have a generation of people who have basically lived as refugees.
And then where does that go? And what changes did that make? And what things like, what are your signifiers of success? And one of the characters, what she does is... she likes to dress fancily and fancily means you have long flowing clothes because that is basically conspicuous consumption so i can afford to have all this cloth i am not just living out with you
feeding my clothes into the printer every night to have them printed out again the next morning. I can have all of this stuff and this shows that I'm a kind of a fancy and well-to-do person. And things like that, the markers of wealth. and the markers of social structure as they are played out in all sorts of little things like what people eat and what is their entertainment and that kind of thing.
and just who has access to what and why and that kind of thing that's always absolutely fascinating to consider and in this way every all of these little buildings rather than just being just this complete oh yes and in this country and in this city they they yeah they just communicate by hot air balloon or something like that it's just like all of the things in form because the details play back into the the wider sense Everything is giving you...
information about the place in a very efficient manner because it's also kind of taking place in the background of this It's not that you don't stop for three pages of exposition. but I don't anymore now that I'm a better writer than I used to be, about how things work. You just have it in there.
woven in to the wider scene for, and if a reader picks it out, then they get that extra value from it, but probably they don't have to to follow the story. Different readers will pick out different details.
And they'll pick it up differently on different read-throughs, even if they do more than one reading. And you end up playing games. I mean, this is the thing that Wolf does an awful lot, and I'm nowhere near that kind of level of intricacy, but you play games where you can drop in a reference. And you think, I don't know if anyone will get this. This is kind of a joke just for me. And we will kind of see it. And then, you know, two and a half years later, someone will turn up saying, well, look.
When you said this thing, were you thinking about that? And he said, yes, someone has finally got that thing. And I now feel absolutely validated for putting it in. And the key thing is you need to put it in a way that doesn't in any way slow the pace. And that is one of those things you kind of get a feel for as it goes on.
Well, let's kind of build on the examples that we're talking through with your projects to kind of look through, I don't know, the steps of building the world and beginning to kind of put that onto the page. Your personal steps that you take to make sure you're being conscious of the choices you're making. Let's talk early in your drafting or ideating process. How airtight is your world building? How early is your world building?
becoming airtight. Is there room for flexibility in those early stages? Can you talk us through that? So even though I do all of this work at the beginning, I don't think you should ever consider your world belly airtight because Often you will get these very serendipitous ideas turning up during the writing process.
hopefully because you put the work in at the beginning those ideas are not overturning everything you put in they are hopefully adding and enriching For example, in Children of Time there is a fairly bald plot device which is this nanovirus. that the spiders have that allows, and one of the things it ends up allowing them to do, because the virus mutates a bit, is it allows them to pass information down generations.
And where that came from is my wrestling with the idea, well, early on, the spiders are basically still fairly solitary animals and they don't have a society particularly. So how do you start developing? What if you could have this? And it partly comes from the fact that in the real world, this particular species of spider has a very peculiar... Regional variants of behavior.
and it's the same species and it's not enormously clear how spiders in this area have a tactic to deal with this particular prey that the same species in the next area does not have because that prey isn't there. And so I was thinking, well, look, because there is no way to pass information. You don't get observational learning in spiders or anything like that that we are aware of. And so I just invented this plot device to say, well, this...
And then, later on, there is a basically a plague plotline and the spiders are trying to investigate the plague and they basically have to work out genetics and they find there are some spiders are resistant to the plague they have a genetic immunity to it and then they find out can we take that out and put it into other spiders the plague that way and in doing so they discover their own
inbuilt ability to record information then that becomes a big part of that technology later on and none of that was planned in the book. All of this comes from as you write the book. that cascade of consequences is still unrolling and you're still, you hit a kind of, well, how are they going to do this? And you realize, well, actually, logically, because of this thing three chapters before.
There is actually a solution to this problem that on the page was just somehow they get out of it. And you realise actually you've built towards this without realising because of the things you put in the work. And so I think you never want it airtight. You always want to have a bit of flex. And sometimes that does mean, alright, I will have to go back and do some improvement. which is always extremely grudging for me. But you accept, all right, it's going to be better if I go back and do it.
Or at least do it on the editing pass. Make a note. I will go back and change this thing for future me. But those are sort of... problems that you can deal with in a way that's like, okay, I know the story is going to improve because I improved it along the way. Now I have to go back and basically strengthen everything that's leading up to these things that came. But on the flip side, it's like, you can make some legit mistakes that, you know, down the line.
This messed me up, but what are some like major mistakes that you have made yourself in regard to this? you know, consequences and logical downstream effects. And at the same time, like if you've seen, you know, or read books or movies or TV shows or even video games where it's like the logical inconsistency. Yeah, I mean, as any of my editors would be able to tell you, my big problem is overexposition.
Because one of the problems is if you're doing all of this world building, you then get very keen to share it with your readers, which can lead to an awful lot of stuff that the book doesn't actually need just because you want to show how terribly clever you've been. For example, in the Tiger and the Wolf. Do you know Jennifer Schwarzenegger Conan?
movie. There's that preamble at the beginning, which is, you know, in the days before the oceans drank Atlantis and all of that kind of thing. I mean, I had like two and a half pages of stuff like that. And that all went, thankfully, it all got cut. And weirdly, I think it was actually useful to write because it firmed up a lot of ideas. And a lot of those ideas then kind of just are introduced much more organically later on in the book and just are interwoven.
But the idea of just dropping it all at the beginning of the book, saying, right, I'm now going to tell you about my world, is temptation that should probably be resisted in most situations. And sometimes, you know, sometimes actually literally just telling someone... this is how this works is by far the most efficient way of doing it. So sometimes tell, don't show is genuinely a thing, but not in that case. As far as seeing...
things that tend to, tend to kick me out of emotions. There is a certain, I mean, let's talk about fantasy cities. There is a certain traditional fantasy city from a certain sort of era of fantasy. and in the city is. There is probably a wizard's tower and there's a big temple and the palace where the king lives and there is almost certainly a kind of a thieves guild and a shady market. And literally nobody else in the city. Nobody lives there.
Nothing is ever done. And I'm not saying you need to have on the page all the intricate minutiae of who kind of cleans out the dunnies in the city or anything like that, but you need to at least give the impression that cities don't just... builds a city for the king and the high priest and the guild master of the thieves guild to live together in a house
and do their stuff. It's just having the idea that actually... And partly, the fault of this is partly that that particular type of fantasy tends to also be only really concerned with kings and high priests and guild masters of the Thieves' Guild. as characters and the idea that just random person might have any any role to play in the future of the you know the destiny of the whatever the hell
doesn't tend to arise. And you get these adventuring parties composed entirely of the princes of various countries and that kind of thing. And I'm aware that that's kind of a Tolkien thing as well. Tolkien is drawing from... medieval romances where literally everyone is a prince because they are the only people allowed to have adventures but I kind of feel we need to outgrow this this kind of monarchical brown nosing that fantasy gets itself into. But just the idea that
I mean, it's like when the evil forces of the Dark Lord come to threaten this city with a siege and stuff, you're going to say, do I care? Because literally no one lives there apart from these three guys and their immediate retinues. Or that's certainly the impression I've been given. That idea of it's kind of like every city is just like a dungeoneering hub with the vendors and the quest givers, and that's literally it, is a bit...
I think we probably want to move beyond that. Yeah. Immediately what came to mind when you were talking about this, I'm like, Elder. Or yeah, like any video games, seriously, right? Or it's like, yeah. I think video games you have. resource-based constraints. And also, video games have worked really hard. I mean, even Elder Scrolls and Skyrim, they worked really hard to have little living communities where people did stuff.
So video game designers have been fighting against having to produce that sort of thing, and it comes down to how you can make what resources you've got for your game. Yeah, it's like the resources of earlier generations. You're not constrained in the same way with a book. You have an unlimited budget of extras. Yeah, we don't have to worry about polygons. Yeah, the resources of earlier generations kind of... made it impossible to have that level of lived in.
kind of environments. Think Ocarina of Time, right? Just the square. I'm thinking of the progression of Elder Scrolls video games. You go from Morrowind to Oblivion to Skyrim and the progression through each one. is like back in the days of like Morrowind and sometimes even in Oblivion it's like Things felt very much like this city exists to give me Thieves Guild quest-
And apart from the guard, everyone is literally standing in the same place and so forth. But it's a constraint that as gaming resources have grown, people have. I've been very keen to get away from and to produce these much more sort of complex an organic feeling world because they're aware that that is a major bar to emotion if everyone is just standing on a street corner waiting to give you a quest. Man, this fruit vendor never fucking sleeps. People need their fruit.
They knew they were 24-7. So we talked a little bit in part one about in specifically, you know, the city of Alash Chances. in this series you're working through, the way that it's kind of developed. has been it sounds like based on on our last conversation kind of um in a more pantsing type style of discovering it discovery writing to use the fancier term um as you're going
Is that your normal process? Are you generally more of a plotter? Or do you use a mix of both? Because you've obviously written many, many things. How do you approach consequences in world building differently or the same, if it is the same, regardless of which effort or I'm sorry, method you're using? So, traditionally I'm absolutely a plotter. So I will...
Generally have you know a chapter by chapter beat by beat plotline and it won't be massively detailed It will usually be like a couple of pages of work most just bullet-pointed chapter by chapter this is what happened and this is what happens and so forth and there is usually a certain amount of flex and sometimes I end up rewriting bits of it on The thing I do, whatever I'm doing, though, is I will do the work.
and i will i will run through that kind of thought experiment well you know if this is my initial big thing then that has these knock-on consequences. I tend to think of it like you drop the stone into the pond and you see the ripples expand and you just follow the ripples. and see what changes what. So the idea is if that's the big change you can't have this and then you can't have that and if you're hard at that then what are you doing instead of it and that kind of thing.
And also you get a lot of the fun thing, well, if you've got all of this, if this is your set all. potentials of resources. Whether I'm looking at, say, the Shadows of the Apt, the Insect Kingdom, or whether I'm looking at the Spiders and Children of Time, if they've got those resources, what do they do with a similar problem?
So I often do the thing, all right, here is a familiar problem that we know that people in real history has faced, but here are a group of people with a very different set of solutions. And so, for example, you get in the Echoes of the Fall series that starts with Tiger and the Wolf, everyone is a...
And that has an enormous, and it's not just like, oh, yes, they're aware. It's just like literally everyone with a shape changer. That is the standard thing. In fact, when they run into people who don't shape change, that is terrifyingly unnatural. those people basically don't have a soul from their point of view um but it has a lot of knock-on effects uh it obviously affects how do you then
relate to the natural world. How does your religion express itself? What does your technology do or not do? Because if you can turn into an animal, you suddenly have a lot of resources. You have senses and natural tools that humans... So some things you don't probably need to invest in.
And then you think, right, when you turn into an animal, what goes along with you? How quickly do they take? And the fact that you can, for example, in this series... the shape changing is instantaneous means that you get these absolutely mad fight scenes where people are going in and out of animals.
in the middle of a fight and because you're taking your clothing and equipment and weapons along with you and you gain some benefit. So, for example, if you're wearing... bronze armor then your beast form has the durability of the armor you're wearing and that kind of so it's just like you make these little decisions and all how does that
If that happens, then how does this work? And if that, the decision I made there, then affects what people do with it. Because one of the other things to bear in mind when writing these sort of things is people are very clever.
People are extremely good at using what they've got or at least trying to extrapolate from the way they believe the world works. If you look at medieval philosophy, One of the weirdly very, very modern things is the idea that magic is a... sort of hand wavy foggy sort of thing if you look at people who we would think of as magicians in the middle ages They were very, very analytical. They were determined, this is how the world works. I believe this, this and this, ergo.
Let us see what we can do with it. Where can we put the crowbar in to make the world do what we want using how we think the world works. And people will always do this. So whatever you've got going, it's just like, oh, yes, we have this magic that does this, this and this. They're not just going to keep it in a box.
that magic will get used. And if there is a cost to that magic, then the cost will be figured into how it is used. But people will still find ways to relate to that magic that is beneficial to their life. whether it is that the... In Days of Shattered Faith, there is the god of the city of Alkalend, which is an enormous frog. literally just a big frog called cacrops but cacrops is a fertility god and so you have this whole thing of
Obviously, at some point, that's what the god is doing for them. It's blessing the fields and indeed the people and making them fertile. But that then becomes, right, we're going to have this enormous celebration. there's this annual big festival we'll have and that's the other thing is just when people are doing this they build stuff around it and similarly
There is an older religion which is very, very anti-demon, so they have a whole ritual where people are ceremonially burying little jars. And this is all being seen from the point of view of someone who is fresh off the boat and has no idea what's going on, and it's all spectacularly surreal to them. But what's actually going on is they are commemorating the imprisonment of demons. way back in history when there was some big demon-using empire that got overthrown.
and it's just kind of become a standard part of their yearly calendar. We'll have the big demon-burying festival, even though there aren't any demons around anymore. Yeah. I mean, it's like modern humans, the fact that we celebrate Halloween every year. It's like most people don't know where these... these kind of like ingrained moments in our lives, these ingrained experiences in our...
in our cultures come from. Yeah, and that's a very good example of that because obviously there are religious precedents to Halloween and there are sort of other various supernatural things and so forth, but actually what's going on is people are taking all of that and using them as an excuse to have a good time, and that is a very human thing to do. Humans love to do that. I live in a small neighborhood outside of Quito.
And man, the people in this neighborhood will have whatever fucking excuse they want to be like, let's get drunk in the streets and like throw confetti and have like a brass band and stuff. And I'm like, y'all party hard. yeah and a lot of this comes out so you have At various parts of the world there is like a winter tradition of right we're gonna have a great big
Yeah, we're going to eat a lot of food at this point. And a lot of this comes from, right, you've got a bunch of food. You need to slaughter the animals. You're not going to be able to feed over the winter and so forth. You've suddenly got a surplus of food that is not going to keep forever. So you have a big party and you have a big feast and everyone at least gets this one big meal.
And then that just becomes enshrined in the culture and you get far enough away from it. It's not immediately obvious where it comes from. and it gets transformed into a variety of different forms. But you get this idea that a necessity becomes a tradition, becomes a celebration. Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of cool to think about the ways in which culture...
develops around basic human needs that then take on a life of their own to become something greater than the origin point. And I think this thinking about the ways in which logical knock-on consequence. Do you have any tips for how people can
both organize and play these things out. You had a lot of examples there. Well, that's what I'm thinking. How are you storing this information? It's not just living in your brain, I imagine. I know when it comes to TTRPGs as well and stuff like that, you're able to kind of play it out. It used to be that it did all over my brain. I've started to make more notes now because as I get older, it's harder to necessarily remember all the details. And so I will do...
You know, a reasonably copious kind of little world Bible of all of these little things. I mean, it basically just comes down to lists of things I've thought of that are fun to have in this world. And I'll break them down, right, here are some different cultures, here are some different factions, here are some different sort of magical things that are going on.
and then you work on the characters and the characters are all arising out of this. So if you've got a faction, what sort of people are in this faction who is currently calling the shots? Where do I want the main characters to come from to have some interesting and clashing sort of background and that kind of thing.
Even if it's just notes, like bullet point, I use Scrivener, so I just have one part of my Scrivener doc where it's just like a list of cool shit, like cool ideas that I have. And then I think the... kind of like playing those out
The ideas will be there, but the actual extrapolation of it, usually I do in my head. Yeah, well, and I'll come back sometimes. Really, really important. Oh, yeah. And I'll find stuff where I'll be like, oh, fuck, I forgot I was going to do that. It didn't end up working out, but, you know. Or you forgot something, and by trying to remember it, you come up with something even more interesting. Damn. you know there are different ways you can play
Yeah, well, and I want to dig into kind of how, obviously, we've talked about your process as you start with World. My process is the same, conveniently, because I find that it... the world is what builds the characters just like our world is directly or indirectly what built us, right?
We hear a lot of writers talk about this phenomenon where the character comes to a life of their own and then you have to try to wrangle the character and the character will kind of... go off on their own direction.
what is your process if you've experienced this what do you do if a character or a plot element is kind of urging you to change an aspect of the world that you've already established do you tend to prioritize what the character is looking to do or do you stick with the world as you've already created it what's your process there so i do get this um but most of the time and again it's Hopefully because I've done my job properly at the beginning with all the world stuff most of the time.
The experience I get is not so much that the character wants to deviate from the world, but more that my initial understanding of the world was incorrect. And the character is showing me, actually, no, this is how it would really work.
or this is the thing that would be in the world. And it's, you know, sometimes it does take a character to kind of go places you wouldn't normally go and illuminate things you wouldn't normally see. But it's... I think it's more that just my first, there are potentially logical consequences to the world that I hadn't initially appreciated that one character's experience is bringing out.
Yeah. Yeah. Because I think it is good to, because that's the flexibility that you were talking about earlier. It's like the characters will... sort of test the limits of the world that you've created and that flexibility comes into play when you're like, okay, is this thing that you're really sort of like pushing the boundaries on?
Is that going to completely break the world? Or is it just going to, you know, like your reference about the left wall, is it just going to kind of like tap the left wall as opposed to trying to not? kind of thing. And we're going to do a bit of a hypothetical here as we wind down. If someone unknowingly, you know, because there are decisions that you make.
that come back to bite you in the ass. So if someone unknowingly shits the vet early on, but finds themselves restricted later by the consequences of their world-building choices, are there potential ways that they could go back and fix... certain elements without completely breaking I mean, that's got to be case by case, I think. I mean, I have, it does happen, I have had it happen.
Usually with me, I will bullheadedly plow on for another two to three chapters in the assumption that no, no, I can make this work. And then you'll get, you'll just basically, it's a bit like... refusing to ask directions when you don't know quite where you're going and eventually you just end up at midnight in this weird village somewhere and you're just right now i'm just gonna have to go all the way back to that last signpost because this is not where i need to be uh and
I always think I've got to learn to recognize these things sooner. But unfortunately, I think a certain amount of stubbornness is also part of my writing process now. I think we all have to be a little stubborn or we wouldn't be still here. Let's kind of expand on that, though, because I think it's something that...
I know. I fear. I think Adrian has talked about fear. No, we both messaged. I think a lot of people fear this, though, if you're writing a series, right? So if you've gone two or three chapters beyond. and you can turn around and find that signpost still great. But now there's a book that's on the shelf and people have bought it and have read it. And there's canon for your world technically. And now you're in book three and just realize.
shit. Yeah, I mean, I think my official authorial advice on that one is your crap out of luck. I mean, I... The other advice I've got which is spectacularly unuseful for almost everyone is be sufficiently far ahead of the publishing curve that you can go back and make changes in edits before that book hits the shelves. Once it's on the shelves you're kind of stuck with what you've got.
If you can find a way to say, well, all right, that is indeed how it works, but this is a special case because, or actually that's how they believed it worked, but you've got to be very careful with that because readers are not stupid. and they will pick up on Dex, Ex Machina stuff coming in at the last moment. Again, I think if you do your building work well enough, you're at least reducing the likelihood of getting into that kind of bind.
I was very lucky with Shadows of the Apt series in that I was far enough ahead that I was writing book seven. When editing book four and book seven goes for part of world we see briefly in book four and I was able to change all that stuff in book four to come into line with the stuff I'd subsequently thought of. But it was literally down to the wire of I made a large number of changes into final proofs, which they absolutely tell you never to do. But I just, I did get away with it. But yeah.
I think to a certain extent when you're at that point, you've got to just deal with the hand you yourself dealt yourself. And if you're self-publishing, I guess you have a little bit more flexibility. It's like, just sneakily going to update my KDP file for this. And then just, what, gaslight the people that bought the physical comics? Like, that's not what it was. Yeah, just go into all the reviews on Goodreads and be like, you're wrong. Right? Like, it's so crazy. What version did you read?
Oh, my God. Oh, man. Yeah, please don't gaslight your readers. That's not going to establish a good relationship there. Adrian, closing out, do you have any final parting words regarding world creation consequences? Yeah, I mean, I think I want to just point up something I mentioned briefly before I am, which is just I did don't. Don't overlook the usual. The thing that makes this sort of world that we've been talking about is very much the living detail of it, which means that it is not...
necessarily the great prophecy, the Dark Lord, the huge things. It's the little... It's the fact that... What do people do to... Racks.
What is the secondary media of your world? Are there plays? Are there poems? What are the poems like? Why are the poems like? And that kind of thing is just, is there something in the... the kind of the high level world building you started off with that's going to produce a particular form of cuisine or does it mean the particular color is taboo or all of these little things you can express the stuff going on in your world in all of these living
details that you don't have to stop and explain earlier on but ideally they'll come a point in the world where your reader will realize oh the reason they do this is because of that and that's always a really fun moment.
for the reader to suddenly make that connection and understand that all of these what seem to be just this this little eccentricity of these people actually know they're the very good reason for it um that the people may or may not even remember but you can suddenly draw you know just connect your little red string on your conspiracy board and understand, oh, all of these things are kind of... coming from this one thing, from this one place.
Yeah, and all of these living details, they can be small and often throw away, but I like to say that living details accumulate and they will eventually... They're like individual pixels and what makes them... An entire image. Yeah, exactly. Nice metaphor. Look at you. This is what happens when we don't record at night. I'm like actually sharp and awake. I'm just sharp, yeah. Just like, take that energy that she would apply to work.
to the podcast yeah sorry Dana you're getting sleepy MJ today yeah screw you we want MJ to be on the podcast full time All right, well, Adrian, thank you so much for doing this masterclass with us. I hope everyone enjoyed this two-parter with Mr. Tchaikovsky. Thank you for dealing with the consequences of all our bullshit. It's been an absolute pleasure, my friend. Where can folks find you online?
So Blue Sky is my social media platform of choice. I'm at AptShadow there. If you want to get hold of me or just see what I'm doing or just... see the ridiculous number of books. AdrienneTchaikovsky.com is the website. There's a contact form. It's sporadically updated with news and it does have a complete books list. if you want to see the things I've written that you haven't even heard of yet.
and if you want you can go pick up adrian's work yeah like city of last chances days of shattered faith is out now children of time that whole trilogy is complete shards of earth and the final architecture that's complete you got Shadows of the Act. Yeah, you got a whole bunch of them. Yeah, Elder Race. I think I got that one over here too. I was going to say, there's another one in your camera shot.
If you want something short and petite, you can get Elder Race. That's a good one, too. Adrian's got the whole swath of length and genre. But you can also follow SFF Addicts on all the platforms. pod you can follow me at adrian m gibson you can go check out mushroom blues my debut novel if you want a murder mystery with mushroom people
Yeah, you can find me across all the main socials at MJKoonBooks. You can check out my website, MJKoon.com. Or you can, well, all and all of the above. You can check out my fantasy heist duology. So. Among thieves, thickest thieves, thick-ass thieves. Let's do it. and support Thorin.
He's an hungry cat. Adrian's got a cat, too. Feed these cats, people. Right. They need food. Buy our books so we can buy our cats treats and food. Yeah. That is the logical knock-on effect of being a cat on a gross approach. I mean, it is, though. Yeah. All right, well, thank you everyone for listening or watching. For now, keep reading, keep imagining, and we'll see you next time on SFF Addicts.