Episode 123 - Building Engaging Worlds with Jacob Hess
March 8, 2022
This week on The Indy Author Podcast, Jacob Hess discusses BUILDING ENGAGING WORLDS. He talks about the importance of building a consistent world; how much is too much; genre-specific considerations; using backstory as a reader magnet; and the importance of taking the same care in building your characters' interior worlds as you do in building their exterior world. Do any of those topics pique your interest? Check out my new YouTube playlist, 2 Minutes of Indy, where you can find a brief video clip from the interview on each of those topics!
Jacob Hess grew up in Oregon and received a Master of Divinity from Western Seminary in Portland, Oregon. He and his wife now live in Seattle, where he works as a minister in their local church. Jacob has always had a love for stories, whether they're told with pen and page or the rhythms and rhymes of song. He agrees with J. R. R. Tolkien, who said, “the Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story, has always been boiling, and to it have continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty." As humans we simply cannot escape a need to tell stories as a way to reach beyond ourselves and connect to the deeper truths of who we are and what it means to live a life of meaning.
"When I first started writing, I did a lot of exposition, almost like Charles Dickens style. And that was helpful for me to understand what this world was like and what it looked like, but it would have just been boring for the reader. Because they don't want to read all of that exposition. They want to see characters doing things that have an impact on the world around them." —Jacob Hess
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[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Jacob Hess. Hey, Jacob, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Jacob: Thanks for having me.
[00:00:07] Matty: I am happy to have you here. So to give our listeners and our viewers a little bit of background on you, Jacob Hess grew up in Oregon and received a Master of Divinity from Western Seminary in Portland, Oregon. He and his wife now live in Seattle where he works as a minister in their local church, and Jacob has always had a love of stories, whether they're told with pen on page or the rhymes and rhythms of song. He agrees with JRR Tolkien, who said, "The pot of soup, the cauldron of story has always been boiling, and to it has continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty." And as humans, we simply cannot escape a need to tell stories as a way to reach beyond ourselves and connect to the deeper truths of who we are and what it means to live a life of meaning. And so I asked Jacob to join me today to talk about WORLD-BUILDING, how to create a believable world.
[00:00:56] And so we're going to be talking about both sort of genre-specific tips and more general tips, but I thought it would be helpful, Jacob, to start out just by you describing the genre that you're writing in the books you're writing, to give some context to our conversation.
[00:01:11] Jacob: Yeah, so the genre that I'm writing in is, I'm doing a series that's very action based. So there's kind of two genres going on at the same time. There's an external genre, which is the external action that you see. And then there's an internal genre, like the journey of the characters through the story. So the external genre is like an action epic, kind of rebellion-type story.
[00:01:36] So in the same lines as like a STAR WARS or LORD OF THE RINGS or AVATAR or something like that. And then the internal genre is a worldview maturation, which looks like TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD or the internal struggles of Katniss from HUNGER GAMES or THE WIZARD OF OZ, how she transitions through that story. So there's those two genres going side-by-side through the books.
[00:02:03] Matty: And did I sense a bit of Story Grid in there, are you a Story Grid nerd?
[00:02:07] Jacob: Yeah, yeah, I do. I do use Story Grid.
[00:02:12] Matty: I'm always a big proponent of Story Grid because, if people don't know that, just please hop online and search for Story Grid. It's a podcast. Actually, I think it's morphed a lot over time, but originally it was Tim Grahl and Sean Coyne talking about basically how you can assess a story from a more data and fact-based perspective than just, oh, I felt like in the middle was a little slumpy or whatever.
[00:02:40] Jacob: Right.
[00:02:41] Matty: And,
[00:02:41] I had Anne Hawley who was one of the early Story Grid editors on the podcast way back, this was in episode 18 and it was THE IMPORTANCE OF MASTERWORKS.
[00:02:50] Jacob: Oh, cool.
[00:02:50] Matty: So that's just like a sideline ad for the Story Grid and for episode 18 with Anne.
[00:02:57] So let's start out describing when we're thinking about this, the action-based genre sort of STAR WARS, LORD OF THE RINGS, when you first started, do you write standalones or series, both?
[00:03:11] Jacob: So I'm working on a series right now. I've written the first one and I'm in the process of editing the second one. And then I've started the third one, but I haven't gotten too far into that yet.
[00:03:22] Matty: So just give us like the one-minute description of what the world is that you're building for your books.
[00:03:27] Jacob: Yeah, it's its own universe, similar to THE LORD OF THE RINGS, which doesn't have anything to do with our known universe. And there's lots of planetary kind of different races and things and on different worlds and they interact through a central government. And then there's like tiers to the universe, like the systems that are closer to the center of the universe are higher in societal opinion, and then the ones as you go further out, they're more on the fringe of society. So that's how it's built and structured.
[00:04:00] And then there's different races, different languages that they have, and different cultures and things. So I have to build those different cultures one by one, as my character interacts with them. So I build out like that.
[00:04:15] Matty: So when you were working on the first book, did you already know it was a series when you started that?
[00:04:19] Jacob: Yes, I had the end in mind when I started, but it's morphed and changed quite a bit as I've gone along, but the end that I had in mind is still in place. And so I always planned it to be like three books long, and I'm sticking with that still.
[00:04:34] Matty: Okay.
[00:04:36] And when you were working on the first one, what was your approach to world-building? Did you document or think through the whole world before you started writing, did it develop as you were writing?
[00:04:47] Jacob: When I first started, I didn't really know what I was doing, so what I started with was writing the arcs of my characters, where they started and where I wanted them to end up, which is helpful. Some of that's the same, but a lot of it's changed as well.
[00:05:04] I didn't do a ton of world-building necessarily. What I did was I made a really specific outline of the story, which completely changed as I started it and figured out that it wasn't working and things like that. So for me, world-building has been something that I've done as I've written. And I think that's the best way to do it, because the best way to describe a world to your readers is to have your characters interact with that world. It can be daunting and even distracting from the story if there's these big, long portions of exposition that bog the story down, or maybe things that aren't interesting to people who didn't create the world.
[00:05:44] But as I've written more, I have created different descriptions of the different races and things like that. But that's more come as I've created the world, as I've created the story that my character's in and as he's interacted with the different beings throughout the story.
[00:06:01] Matty: I'm just thinking through my own experience. So I think this is interesting because you have a more fantastical world that you're building. I'm thinking in terms of my Ann Kinnear stories and, in my case, they are largely reality-based, but there is this one aspect, because the protagonist is a woman who can sense spirits and she has a business based on that ability, and so there is this world-building aspect of understanding and portraying and ideally being consistent with her ability.
[00:06:35] And so I feel like I have it pretty easy because it seems completely plausible to me that an experience that a person who had that ability would have with the spirits, she's contacting would be very different from spirit to spirit. And so I haven't felt bound to consistency.
[00:06:57] Here's a counterexample, Charlaine Harris's Harper Connelly books have a woman who, very similar to Ann, has this sort of sense about death and has a business around it. But her ability is strictly, if I remember correctly, that she can sense the last moments of a dead person, and as a result, can often find some clues that help bring the bad guy to justice, if someone was murdered, for example.
[00:07:26] And so I think she only wrote three books of that. And my suspicion is, Ms. Harris, please get in touch with me if I'm completely in left field, but that was such a specific world-building aspect that it didn't leave a lot of room for alternative approaches. Whereas the way I've approached it is that, sometimes Ann can communicate with them, and sometimes she can't. Sometimes they're very present and sometimes they're not. Sometimes the spirits she communicates with are tied to a particular location and sometimes they can venture out further, which all seems completely plausible to me. And I think so far it seemed plausible to the characters.
[00:08:08] But I would imagine that's in contrast to a situation where, let's say you've created a new technology for your book and the technology enables people to let's say, transport from the spaceship to the ground. You can't really then later on say, oh, and you know what, they can also do it across time and space dimensions. Once you've set that up, you have to be more consistent. I'm curious about your thoughts about anything that I just said in there.
[00:08:38] Jacob: Yeah, I (BUILDING A CONSISTENT WORLD) think one of the important things about building a world is that it's consistent with itself. It can be fantastical, but if you're breaking your own rules in your story, the reader is going to catch that pretty quickly, and then they're going to check out. Because we live in a world that has rules that stay the same. If you jump off something high, you hit the ground, you will be hurt. And so you got to do the same thing, even if you have fantastical elements, they have to be consistent with itself.
[00:09:09] So I've created different ways to travel through space, and there's one specific way that they can travel from system to system. And I haven't changed that because I know that will be distracting to the reader, as the story's progressed, but I'm not a scientist, so I don't need to explain the science, I just need to describe what they're doing, if that makes sense.
[00:09:33] Matty: Do you feel as if there is a level of groundedness in the reality that people know that you have to bring, even to a fantastical world, to make people feel comfortable believing it?
[00:09:48] Jacob: I think genre really helps with this, because when somebody picks up a sci-fi novel, they are expecting it to be different from our world. And so when they open up that book and it has all these fantastical elements, they're not thrown off by that. They do expect it to make sense within the world that's been created, but they're actually looking for something different than our world when they pick up a book like that. Or when they pick up a book like HUNGER GAMES, they're looking for some apocalyptic universe that has something very similar to our world, but different as well.
[00:10:24] So there's different expectations with genre that I think help a lot with world-building, because it helps us think specifically about what our world should look and feel like for the readers, because every genre has its own conventions and its own obligatory scenes within it that help guide the reader through the story.
[00:10:47] Matty: Yeah. I'm thinking again of my other series and I'm thinking of the Lizzy Ballard series and spoiler alert, so all my books have something to do with what happens when an extraordinary ability transforms an ordinary life. So in the Ann Kinnear series, it's her ability to sense spirits, in the Lizzy Ballard thrillers, when she gets angry, she can affect people's minds so that they basically have a stroke.
[00:11:09] And so I wanted to do something to set that up, so it seemed plausible, but it was a tricky line to walk because I didn't want to get into so much detail that I was begging the reader to question, like enough to make it seem plausible, but not so much to give fodder for people going, does that really make sense?
[00:11:31] And so I did some research into brain activity, and the idea of electricity seemed to come up a lot, the idea that the brain produces certain electrical impulses under certain circumstances. So I thought, that sounds good because I could have someone give her, for example EEG, I think is the technology that would be used to do that and see that there some like unusual brain activity in certain circumstances, but that was it. I didn't want to go further than that.
[00:11:58] (HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH?) Is there a point where you feel like you're seeing a red flag that says, okay, this is more than I need to provide? And I think it also harkens back to what you were saying before about, you don't want to use everything you've thought through for your world.
[00:12:13] Jacob: Yeah, like I said, I'm not a scientist, so I'm not describing the science of space travel. There are some novels that do that and that's okay. Like hard science fiction is different than the soft kind of fantastical science fiction that I'm writing. And so in the hard science, people are actually looking for a little bit more description about what's going on scientifically with the sci-fi elements.
[00:12:37] But in my book, I don't go in depth into those things. For one, I'm not really qualified to do that, but number two, I think it distracts from the elements that are really the focus of this kind of story that I'm writing, which is more what's going on within the characters and how they're reacting to the different things in the world around them.
[00:12:58] Matty: I did find that this isn't exactly world-building, but a lot of the times I'm basing my physical locations of my books on actual locations. And actually, here's a good example that I just encountered with a book that I'm working on now, that it involves a winery and there's a specific winery that's near me that I'm thinking of as I'm writing this, and the owner of the winery lives in a house several miles away. And there was a specific house that I'm thinking of where these people live. And so there was this scenario where someone had to wait for someone who was either going to leave from the winery or the house. And I thought, where would they wait?
[00:13:36] And the only place in that stretch of road that I've driven many times where someone could wait without looking creepy, like hanging out in a neighborhood, is a fire station. So I had this whole little bit about how they get permission from the people at the fire station to wait in their parking lot and they make a contribution so that the fire station inhabitants will be happy to use the break room or whatever.
[00:14:01] And then I realized that none of that really made any sense or added to the story or was necessary because it's fiction, and I could just give them a nice park to wait in or something like that. And so that was one of those ones where I was on the road to getting way too wrapped up in what I saw as the reality of the situation and realized that it really wasn't necessary.
[00:14:24] Have you ever found that now you're too far down the road of your portrayal of your world?
[00:14:29] Jacob: (KEEPING A WORLD-BUILDING BIBLE) When I first started writing, I did a lot of exposition, almost like Charles Dickens style. And I think it was really bogging down the flow of the story. And what I was doing was I was describing this world that I was making up as I was going. And that was helpful for me to understand what this world was like and what it looked like, but I had to take all of that out, and really change how the story was flowing, because it would have just been boring for the reader. Because they don't want to read all of that exposition, they want to see characters doing things that have an impact on the world around them. And yeah, I took a lot of that out.
[00:15:13] Matty: Do you document both the things that you've put in your story and the things that you've thought about but not actually included in the book as a story bible or a reference for yourself?
[00:15:23] Jacob: Yes, I do have a list of different words and their meanings, because all these different cultures have different languages, and they use some words that I've made up. And so I have just a list of what those words and what they mean, and I also have a list of the different races that are included and what planets they're from and what system that's in. And then I also have a list of the different races and their histories, like the kind of their known history and development through the world. But I don't have any of that in the book.
[00:15:58] And partly, I did that for myself, so I could just understand this world better so I could describe it better for my readers. But another thing I have used it as well in blogs and things, so I've put up blogs about these different races and these different cultures to help give people insight into the book. But someone could read this book without knowing any of those things and still understand what's going on and actually enjoy the story.
[00:16:25] Matty: Have you ever made decisions about your story that you're working on, your work in progress or future books based on the responses you've got from those kinds of blog posts? Like someone gets really intrigued with the background of certain planetary inhabitants and you might decide that you want to give some more time in the book to that?
[00:16:46] Jacob: No, not really. I haven't gotten a lot of specific feedback like that. Because my story is structured already, the way it's going, so I probably wouldn't change it too much.
[00:16:57] Matty: I can imagine for authors who are writing a series that isn't very defined as it sounds like yours is, like my Lizzy Ballard books where a trilogy, but the Ann Kinnear books will hopefully go on forever. And so I'm thinking of two things, one is that (BACKSTORY AS READER MAGNET) people are always wondering what to provide as reader magnets. Time after time and on the podcast guest after guest has emphasized the idea that having an email list that you control, and it's not controlled by social media platforms is very important. And that one of the ways to attract people to that is to offer them a reader magnet. And I think that kind of like glossary of terminology or the backstory of different characters in the book are super good things to use in that way, because people feel like they're getting this extra behind the scenes look.
[00:17:43] And I can also imagine that you could use it as market research if you decided to continue beyond. You get through your three books and you're now looking back through the comments you've gotten to your blog posts or maybe responses you've gotten to your email newsletters, and you see a theme of people saying, oh, I wish I had known more about this. And then use that as a way to see what the readers are looking for.
[00:18:07] Jacob: Yeah, actually, I do have a free ebook, like short story, on my website, if you sign up for my email list. And it's a story that takes place prior to the books, the series that I'm doing, THE BRIGHT ABYSS series, and it's the backstory of one of the characters, he's one of the main characters. And it would distract from the main story that I'm telling if I included that in the book, but it was a good kind of free short story that I could give to someone who was interested in checking out the actual series. So yeah, something similar to that, like what you're saying can be really helpful for people to start engaging with your story or just free content that people can enjoy along with the series that you're writing.
[00:18:52] Matty: And it can also take the sting out of having to hit delete on a chapter, if you've written it, you realize it's really not serving your purpose, like I had described with this whole fire station scenario. It can lessen the sting if you say, okay, it's not going to show up in this book, but it's going to be great fodder for an email newsletter, reader magnet, a blog post, whatever that might be.
[00:19:14] Jacob: Yeah, it's always good to reuse stuff if you can.
[00:19:19]
[00:19:51] Matty: So now you're a book in, a book and a half, book plus work in progress. When you first started out, what is something that you thought was very important to the world-building exercise, but then, with the experience you've had, you've realized was not really necessary to the world-building experience?
[00:20:09] Jacob: I thought making these big, long descriptions of the characters was important for the story. So I made descriptions of each character, where they started, where they ended up, and it was just way too specific for where I was at when I was starting to write. And so all of that has pretty much changed.
[00:20:29] So I think what is more helpful is understanding the genre that you're writing in. And then, from understanding that genre, making a not specific outline, but an outline that's easy to change as you go. So something that maybe you just start with, your beginning, your middle and your end and from that, starting to write, and then as I started to write with a better understanding of the genre, I had more handholds as I was writing. So the more that I wrote, I was able to keep, because it was actually fulfilling the development of the characters as they grew.
[00:21:05] Matty: I was listening to the Neil Gaiman Masterclass on story-building, world-building and one of the things he had suggested is that if people are stumped, and I can imagine this as especially valuable to younger writers, like, you know, high school age writers or something like that, who maybe haven't been out in the world that much in their actual real world, and his recommendation is take something and then tweak it a little bit.
[00:21:33] So if you're a high school student, who's in a fantasy world let's say, you know your school very well, but what if that school is on another planet? Or what if it's underwater or what if the teachers are all fill in the blank? And I'm just curious, can you look back on your own writing career, whether it's published or not published and see yourself acting on that?
[00:21:58] Jacob: I think it is helpful. (DON'T NEGLECT THE INTERNAL WORLD) Stephen King has a write what you know advice, which I think is helpful. I think he uses the description on writing where if you're a janitor, just be a janitor on a spaceship. But I think that can be helpful. I think with your controlling idea, like the controlling idea, that's what you want someone to get out of your story, what you want them to learn and take away from in your story. I think it's important and good to have a controlling idea that you know and understand and you're intimate with.
[00:22:29] For one of my stories, for the second book in THE BRIGHT ABYSS series, the character is really learning a lot about humility and about giving away power instead of trying to take it. And those are lessons that I've had to learn throughout my life. And so I think because I've struggled with those things myself, I'm able to bring that out in my characters more clearly. And so it's not that I was this hero that's trying to save the world from these evil shadow creatures, but I have had to struggle with the same kind of things that the characters in the story are struggling with, to a certain extent.
[00:23:05] So I think that can be helpful. Like the character in my story is a mechanic and I am not a mechanic, but I have struggled with humility and pride and with thinking that I knew more than I did, just like the main characters in my story have struggled with. So I think that can be helpful. If you think about the lessons that you learned through life, how can that apply to the story you're telling and to the character in your story and what they're learning?
[00:23:33] Matty: Yeah, I think it's an excellent point that you don't want to neglect the internal world-building for the external world-building. And as exciting as your spaceship is, nobody's really going to care unless the characters that are inhabiting it are interesting. Like it makes me think of ALIEN, where they had quite an elaborate world built there, but I wouldn't have been interested in that story if I hadn't gotten a sense of what each of the crew members was like and what their goals were and what their conflicts were and things like that.
[00:24:08] Jacob: Yeah, for sure.
[00:24:11] Matty: I'm thinking about the worlds I've built for Ann Kinnear and Lizzy Ballard. I live outside Philadelphia, many of the books take place around Philadelphia and I do have fun, in some cases, I have used real places, but have changed the names. So as an example, I got a graduate degree from Penn, and I use the idea of Penn. If you read the Lizzy Ballard books, then anybody who knows Penn will recognize that what is called William Penn University in my books is actually the University of Pennsylvania. And I did that because early on in that story, there was a chance that the route I was going to take is that something nefarious was going on at the university. So I obviously didn't want to call it University of Pennsylvania.
[00:24:57] But I've also had fun because, in the Ann Kinnear books I had Ann going to the William Penn University Hospital, and I also think it's a fun Easter egg. If people are reading across both series, I'm going to be curious to see how many people recognize that there's crossover between the world of Ann Kinnear and the world of Lizzy Ballard in some of these references to real places.
[00:25:22] Do you think at all about spinning off a second series and overlapping some, but not all of the aspects of the world you're building?
[00:25:30] Jacob: Not really. I'm already thinking about different kinds of stories that I'd like to tell, after I finished this series. So yeah, I'm not really thinking about maybe crossover things. You only have so much time to live, and so I have other kind of stories that I would like to write at some point.
[00:25:48] Matty: And do you think that there will be elaborately built worlds for those?
[00:25:52] Jacob: I want to do one more post-apocalyptic story, more in the veins of THE HUNGER GAMES, which will require a lot of world-building. And I wanted to do another one that's more realistic based, but just maybe a little further in the future, that’s more of a crime story, which involves somebody entering into people's minds when they're in a coma, to try to bring them out of a coma.
[00:26:19] So yeah, that would probably have to be more realistic than some of the other fantastical ones. And then there's another story that I'm kicking around. It's more romantic, it's like a romance story, which involves different societies that are split up into men and women that are very distinct and don't cross over. So I was thinking about that as well.
[00:26:39] But yeah, I think some of those will require more fantastical world-building, some of them will require more research. Because one of the things that's so nice about the story that I'm writing right now is I only need to research as things pop up, because I'm just making it up as I go. Which there's something nice about that. It requires more imagination, but it doesn't require as much research necessarily, unless I run into something that is similar to our world and I need to research about that.
[00:27:09] Look like I've had to research some things on mechanics and things like that, because one of my characters was fixing a broken spaceship. So there is research that's required, but it's not as much as if I was doing it based in our known universe.
[00:27:23] Matty: That makes me think of Andy Weir's THE MARTIAN that evidently, that was a heavily researched one, and I think I actually heard Mr. Weir himself say that the only fact in there, fact in air quotes that he put in, even though it wasn't really realistic, was the big sandstorm on Mars. They're going to Mars, because the atmosphere on Mars is such that you would never have a violent sandstorm. But he just got so entranced with the idea of the violent sandstorm as did, you know, probably any person who read the book or watched the movie, that he thought, okay, I'm willing to fudge this. But evidently, everything else was as close to a realistic scenario as he could make it.
[00:28:02] Jacob: He did a lot of research for that book, that's the hard science genre. So people were expecting to have some realistic science in there.
[00:28:13] Matty: Yeah. Now we all know more about growing potatoes than we ever thought we would.
[00:28:17] Jacob: Right.
[00:28:18] Matty: Are there any red flags for you that you've gone too far down the research rabbit hole?
[00:28:23] Jacob: I haven't had to do a ton of research, and I think that's a good thing, because I think that can become a distraction as you're writing, unless you're planning on doing research. Because I only have so much time to write, because I do work full time, and so I try to have specific goals that I'm trying to meet every day when I sit down to write. And so, if I'm spending a lot of time doing things that I haven't planned on doing, then I know I'm probably being distracted by something.
[00:28:52] There has been times where I'm like looking up pictures of things to try to describe something, and I'm like, I'm probably spending too much time on this. I need to just write something real quick and then come back to it later and flesh it out more. So there have been moments like that, but thankfully, I've typically caught myself in the midst of that, in the midst of those moments. But yeah, there has been some moments like that.
[00:29:14] Matty: I think that there are two approaches that people have to watch out for. One is that you know what you're writing about, now you realize you've spent 18 hours reading about medieval weaponry or something like that. But the other thing I think that can feed into world-building is just general interest, where you're not doing it for a particular book.
[00:29:35] And so the two examples I can think of for me is, I'm endlessly fascinated by storm chasing. And I could actually imagine a scenario where Ann Kinnear gets involved with storm chasers. That's the benefit of Ann Kinnear having a business that involves contacting dead people for money, that you can really put her in almost any scenario that's of interest. And I can imagine doing that and I've watched lots and lots of storm chasing videos, storm chasing analysis, and things like that. And I just think of it as a hobby for me and someday it may find its way into a book, but maybe not.
[00:30:09] And then the other thing that I find is fascinating is anything to do with South Pole stations. I've just gone through this binge of reading, I read two books about south polar exploration. And then I found this YouTube channel with this guy who does videos, like a tour of the South Pole station. And it's really fascinating, and I have to admit, I haven't yet figured out a way to get Ann to the South Pole in a realistic manner.
[00:30:37] But the South Pole station one is fascinating, because you could take that just as is, and for many, many people, they're not going to know anything about it. But you could really almost lift that as-is and either set a story at the South Pole research station, or just make it into a spaceship. But now it's ALIEN, you know, it's like something that you've learned from real life, but now you're twisting the one thing.
[00:31:01] So maybe looping back to that conversation earlier about, if you're a high school writer and what you know best is your school, then just twist that one thing. And as you had mentioned about the Stephen King advice as well, tap your hobbies, the things that you're naturally interested in as a source for world-building.
[00:31:19] Jacob: Yeah, for sure.
[00:31:21] Matty: Were there any other world-building tips that you had that we haven't hit yet?
[00:31:27] Jacob: Yeah, I would say, (CONSIDER GENRE) genre is really important and I think that comes from my Story Grid studies, but I think it really helps you specify the world that you need to build, because every genre has its own obligatory scenes. It has its own conventions, and that's going to influence what kind of characters you have in your story. It's going to influence what your characters do in your story, which is going to have an effect on what your world looks like and what it feels like.
[00:31:56] So I would say really study the genre that you want to write in. And when you have a good idea of what that genre looks like and what other people have done in that genre, you can twist it and change it for your own story, so that it's new and refreshing, but it's also easy to connect with for readers who are looking to read in that genre.
[00:32:19] Matty: One of the things I really like about Story Grid is you can use it either exactly the way you just described or retrospectively. So I think that's especially true for people who are writing their first book and it's not a business for them yet, they don't know if there's going to be more than one, they're just writing the story of their heart and then they get done and they think, I wonder what I just wrote. I wonder what shelf this would be shelved on. And I really liked being able to use the Story Grid and say, oh, I see that I've built the world in this particular way. That's very representative of fantasy or that's very representative of sci-fi or something like that, and if you can reverse engineer your way to understand what your genre is, based on an assessment of what characteristics of your world match which genres in a source like the Story Grid.
[00:33:02] Jacob: Which is actually what I did. I wrote the story and then I had only just started learning about Story Grid. So I used it to define where my story fit and to refine it as well, and to make it something that was more engaging and more readable for people.
[00:33:25] Matty: Jacob, thank you so much. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and all your work online.
[00:33:33] Jacob: So you can learn about THE BRIGHT ABYSS series by going to jacobehess.com, letter E in between the Jacob and the Hess. So yeah, anything that you need to find out about the stories, you can find out there and you can sign up for my email list and actually get a free copy of my short story called THE FIRST ENCOUNTER, which is connected to THE BRIGHT ABYSS series. And just check it out, see if it's something that you're interested in. And from there, you can also learn a lot about the characters and the different races and cultures, because I have a lot of posts about those things as well on there.
[00:34:12] Matty: Thank you.
[00:00:06] Jacob: Thanks for having me.
[00:00:07] Matty: I am happy to have you here. So to give our listeners and our viewers a little bit of background on you, Jacob Hess grew up in Oregon and received a Master of Divinity from Western Seminary in Portland, Oregon. He and his wife now live in Seattle where he works as a minister in their local church, and Jacob has always had a love of stories, whether they're told with pen on page or the rhymes and rhythms of song. He agrees with JRR Tolkien, who said, "The pot of soup, the cauldron of story has always been boiling, and to it has continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty." And as humans, we simply cannot escape a need to tell stories as a way to reach beyond ourselves and connect to the deeper truths of who we are and what it means to live a life of meaning. And so I asked Jacob to join me today to talk about WORLD-BUILDING, how to create a believable world.
[00:00:56] And so we're going to be talking about both sort of genre-specific tips and more general tips, but I thought it would be helpful, Jacob, to start out just by you describing the genre that you're writing in the books you're writing, to give some context to our conversation.
[00:01:11] Jacob: Yeah, so the genre that I'm writing in is, I'm doing a series that's very action based. So there's kind of two genres going on at the same time. There's an external genre, which is the external action that you see. And then there's an internal genre, like the journey of the characters through the story. So the external genre is like an action epic, kind of rebellion-type story.
[00:01:36] So in the same lines as like a STAR WARS or LORD OF THE RINGS or AVATAR or something like that. And then the internal genre is a worldview maturation, which looks like TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD or the internal struggles of Katniss from HUNGER GAMES or THE WIZARD OF OZ, how she transitions through that story. So there's those two genres going side-by-side through the books.
[00:02:03] Matty: And did I sense a bit of Story Grid in there, are you a Story Grid nerd?
[00:02:07] Jacob: Yeah, yeah, I do. I do use Story Grid.
[00:02:12] Matty: I'm always a big proponent of Story Grid because, if people don't know that, just please hop online and search for Story Grid. It's a podcast. Actually, I think it's morphed a lot over time, but originally it was Tim Grahl and Sean Coyne talking about basically how you can assess a story from a more data and fact-based perspective than just, oh, I felt like in the middle was a little slumpy or whatever.
[00:02:40] Jacob: Right.
[00:02:41] Matty: And,
[00:02:41] I had Anne Hawley who was one of the early Story Grid editors on the podcast way back, this was in episode 18 and it was THE IMPORTANCE OF MASTERWORKS.
[00:02:50] Jacob: Oh, cool.
[00:02:50] Matty: So that's just like a sideline ad for the Story Grid and for episode 18 with Anne.
[00:02:57] So let's start out describing when we're thinking about this, the action-based genre sort of STAR WARS, LORD OF THE RINGS, when you first started, do you write standalones or series, both?
[00:03:11] Jacob: So I'm working on a series right now. I've written the first one and I'm in the process of editing the second one. And then I've started the third one, but I haven't gotten too far into that yet.
[00:03:22] Matty: So just give us like the one-minute description of what the world is that you're building for your books.
[00:03:27] Jacob: Yeah, it's its own universe, similar to THE LORD OF THE RINGS, which doesn't have anything to do with our known universe. And there's lots of planetary kind of different races and things and on different worlds and they interact through a central government. And then there's like tiers to the universe, like the systems that are closer to the center of the universe are higher in societal opinion, and then the ones as you go further out, they're more on the fringe of society. So that's how it's built and structured.
[00:04:00] And then there's different races, different languages that they have, and different cultures and things. So I have to build those different cultures one by one, as my character interacts with them. So I build out like that.
[00:04:15] Matty: So when you were working on the first book, did you already know it was a series when you started that?
[00:04:19] Jacob: Yes, I had the end in mind when I started, but it's morphed and changed quite a bit as I've gone along, but the end that I had in mind is still in place. And so I always planned it to be like three books long, and I'm sticking with that still.
[00:04:34] Matty: Okay.
[00:04:36] And when you were working on the first one, what was your approach to world-building? Did you document or think through the whole world before you started writing, did it develop as you were writing?
[00:04:47] Jacob: When I first started, I didn't really know what I was doing, so what I started with was writing the arcs of my characters, where they started and where I wanted them to end up, which is helpful. Some of that's the same, but a lot of it's changed as well.
[00:05:04] I didn't do a ton of world-building necessarily. What I did was I made a really specific outline of the story, which completely changed as I started it and figured out that it wasn't working and things like that. So for me, world-building has been something that I've done as I've written. And I think that's the best way to do it, because the best way to describe a world to your readers is to have your characters interact with that world. It can be daunting and even distracting from the story if there's these big, long portions of exposition that bog the story down, or maybe things that aren't interesting to people who didn't create the world.
[00:05:44] But as I've written more, I have created different descriptions of the different races and things like that. But that's more come as I've created the world, as I've created the story that my character's in and as he's interacted with the different beings throughout the story.
[00:06:01] Matty: I'm just thinking through my own experience. So I think this is interesting because you have a more fantastical world that you're building. I'm thinking in terms of my Ann Kinnear stories and, in my case, they are largely reality-based, but there is this one aspect, because the protagonist is a woman who can sense spirits and she has a business based on that ability, and so there is this world-building aspect of understanding and portraying and ideally being consistent with her ability.
[00:06:35] And so I feel like I have it pretty easy because it seems completely plausible to me that an experience that a person who had that ability would have with the spirits, she's contacting would be very different from spirit to spirit. And so I haven't felt bound to consistency.
[00:06:57] Here's a counterexample, Charlaine Harris's Harper Connelly books have a woman who, very similar to Ann, has this sort of sense about death and has a business around it. But her ability is strictly, if I remember correctly, that she can sense the last moments of a dead person, and as a result, can often find some clues that help bring the bad guy to justice, if someone was murdered, for example.
[00:07:26] And so I think she only wrote three books of that. And my suspicion is, Ms. Harris, please get in touch with me if I'm completely in left field, but that was such a specific world-building aspect that it didn't leave a lot of room for alternative approaches. Whereas the way I've approached it is that, sometimes Ann can communicate with them, and sometimes she can't. Sometimes they're very present and sometimes they're not. Sometimes the spirits she communicates with are tied to a particular location and sometimes they can venture out further, which all seems completely plausible to me. And I think so far it seemed plausible to the characters.
[00:08:08] But I would imagine that's in contrast to a situation where, let's say you've created a new technology for your book and the technology enables people to let's say, transport from the spaceship to the ground. You can't really then later on say, oh, and you know what, they can also do it across time and space dimensions. Once you've set that up, you have to be more consistent. I'm curious about your thoughts about anything that I just said in there.
[00:08:38] Jacob: Yeah, I (BUILDING A CONSISTENT WORLD) think one of the important things about building a world is that it's consistent with itself. It can be fantastical, but if you're breaking your own rules in your story, the reader is going to catch that pretty quickly, and then they're going to check out. Because we live in a world that has rules that stay the same. If you jump off something high, you hit the ground, you will be hurt. And so you got to do the same thing, even if you have fantastical elements, they have to be consistent with itself.
[00:09:09] So I've created different ways to travel through space, and there's one specific way that they can travel from system to system. And I haven't changed that because I know that will be distracting to the reader, as the story's progressed, but I'm not a scientist, so I don't need to explain the science, I just need to describe what they're doing, if that makes sense.
[00:09:33] Matty: Do you feel as if there is a level of groundedness in the reality that people know that you have to bring, even to a fantastical world, to make people feel comfortable believing it?
[00:09:48] Jacob: I think genre really helps with this, because when somebody picks up a sci-fi novel, they are expecting it to be different from our world. And so when they open up that book and it has all these fantastical elements, they're not thrown off by that. They do expect it to make sense within the world that's been created, but they're actually looking for something different than our world when they pick up a book like that. Or when they pick up a book like HUNGER GAMES, they're looking for some apocalyptic universe that has something very similar to our world, but different as well.
[00:10:24] So there's different expectations with genre that I think help a lot with world-building, because it helps us think specifically about what our world should look and feel like for the readers, because every genre has its own conventions and its own obligatory scenes within it that help guide the reader through the story.
[00:10:47] Matty: Yeah. I'm thinking again of my other series and I'm thinking of the Lizzy Ballard series and spoiler alert, so all my books have something to do with what happens when an extraordinary ability transforms an ordinary life. So in the Ann Kinnear series, it's her ability to sense spirits, in the Lizzy Ballard thrillers, when she gets angry, she can affect people's minds so that they basically have a stroke.
[00:11:09] And so I wanted to do something to set that up, so it seemed plausible, but it was a tricky line to walk because I didn't want to get into so much detail that I was begging the reader to question, like enough to make it seem plausible, but not so much to give fodder for people going, does that really make sense?
[00:11:31] And so I did some research into brain activity, and the idea of electricity seemed to come up a lot, the idea that the brain produces certain electrical impulses under certain circumstances. So I thought, that sounds good because I could have someone give her, for example EEG, I think is the technology that would be used to do that and see that there some like unusual brain activity in certain circumstances, but that was it. I didn't want to go further than that.
[00:11:58] (HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH?) Is there a point where you feel like you're seeing a red flag that says, okay, this is more than I need to provide? And I think it also harkens back to what you were saying before about, you don't want to use everything you've thought through for your world.
[00:12:13] Jacob: Yeah, like I said, I'm not a scientist, so I'm not describing the science of space travel. There are some novels that do that and that's okay. Like hard science fiction is different than the soft kind of fantastical science fiction that I'm writing. And so in the hard science, people are actually looking for a little bit more description about what's going on scientifically with the sci-fi elements.
[00:12:37] But in my book, I don't go in depth into those things. For one, I'm not really qualified to do that, but number two, I think it distracts from the elements that are really the focus of this kind of story that I'm writing, which is more what's going on within the characters and how they're reacting to the different things in the world around them.
[00:12:58] Matty: I did find that this isn't exactly world-building, but a lot of the times I'm basing my physical locations of my books on actual locations. And actually, here's a good example that I just encountered with a book that I'm working on now, that it involves a winery and there's a specific winery that's near me that I'm thinking of as I'm writing this, and the owner of the winery lives in a house several miles away. And there was a specific house that I'm thinking of where these people live. And so there was this scenario where someone had to wait for someone who was either going to leave from the winery or the house. And I thought, where would they wait?
[00:13:36] And the only place in that stretch of road that I've driven many times where someone could wait without looking creepy, like hanging out in a neighborhood, is a fire station. So I had this whole little bit about how they get permission from the people at the fire station to wait in their parking lot and they make a contribution so that the fire station inhabitants will be happy to use the break room or whatever.
[00:14:01] And then I realized that none of that really made any sense or added to the story or was necessary because it's fiction, and I could just give them a nice park to wait in or something like that. And so that was one of those ones where I was on the road to getting way too wrapped up in what I saw as the reality of the situation and realized that it really wasn't necessary.
[00:14:24] Have you ever found that now you're too far down the road of your portrayal of your world?
[00:14:29] Jacob: (KEEPING A WORLD-BUILDING BIBLE) When I first started writing, I did a lot of exposition, almost like Charles Dickens style. And I think it was really bogging down the flow of the story. And what I was doing was I was describing this world that I was making up as I was going. And that was helpful for me to understand what this world was like and what it looked like, but I had to take all of that out, and really change how the story was flowing, because it would have just been boring for the reader. Because they don't want to read all of that exposition, they want to see characters doing things that have an impact on the world around them. And yeah, I took a lot of that out.
[00:15:13] Matty: Do you document both the things that you've put in your story and the things that you've thought about but not actually included in the book as a story bible or a reference for yourself?
[00:15:23] Jacob: Yes, I do have a list of different words and their meanings, because all these different cultures have different languages, and they use some words that I've made up. And so I have just a list of what those words and what they mean, and I also have a list of the different races that are included and what planets they're from and what system that's in. And then I also have a list of the different races and their histories, like the kind of their known history and development through the world. But I don't have any of that in the book.
[00:15:58] And partly, I did that for myself, so I could just understand this world better so I could describe it better for my readers. But another thing I have used it as well in blogs and things, so I've put up blogs about these different races and these different cultures to help give people insight into the book. But someone could read this book without knowing any of those things and still understand what's going on and actually enjoy the story.
[00:16:25] Matty: Have you ever made decisions about your story that you're working on, your work in progress or future books based on the responses you've got from those kinds of blog posts? Like someone gets really intrigued with the background of certain planetary inhabitants and you might decide that you want to give some more time in the book to that?
[00:16:46] Jacob: No, not really. I haven't gotten a lot of specific feedback like that. Because my story is structured already, the way it's going, so I probably wouldn't change it too much.
[00:16:57] Matty: I can imagine for authors who are writing a series that isn't very defined as it sounds like yours is, like my Lizzy Ballard books where a trilogy, but the Ann Kinnear books will hopefully go on forever. And so I'm thinking of two things, one is that (BACKSTORY AS READER MAGNET) people are always wondering what to provide as reader magnets. Time after time and on the podcast guest after guest has emphasized the idea that having an email list that you control, and it's not controlled by social media platforms is very important. And that one of the ways to attract people to that is to offer them a reader magnet. And I think that kind of like glossary of terminology or the backstory of different characters in the book are super good things to use in that way, because people feel like they're getting this extra behind the scenes look.
[00:17:43] And I can also imagine that you could use it as market research if you decided to continue beyond. You get through your three books and you're now looking back through the comments you've gotten to your blog posts or maybe responses you've gotten to your email newsletters, and you see a theme of people saying, oh, I wish I had known more about this. And then use that as a way to see what the readers are looking for.
[00:18:07] Jacob: Yeah, actually, I do have a free ebook, like short story, on my website, if you sign up for my email list. And it's a story that takes place prior to the books, the series that I'm doing, THE BRIGHT ABYSS series, and it's the backstory of one of the characters, he's one of the main characters. And it would distract from the main story that I'm telling if I included that in the book, but it was a good kind of free short story that I could give to someone who was interested in checking out the actual series. So yeah, something similar to that, like what you're saying can be really helpful for people to start engaging with your story or just free content that people can enjoy along with the series that you're writing.
[00:18:52] Matty: And it can also take the sting out of having to hit delete on a chapter, if you've written it, you realize it's really not serving your purpose, like I had described with this whole fire station scenario. It can lessen the sting if you say, okay, it's not going to show up in this book, but it's going to be great fodder for an email newsletter, reader magnet, a blog post, whatever that might be.
[00:19:14] Jacob: Yeah, it's always good to reuse stuff if you can.
[00:19:19]
[00:19:51] Matty: So now you're a book in, a book and a half, book plus work in progress. When you first started out, what is something that you thought was very important to the world-building exercise, but then, with the experience you've had, you've realized was not really necessary to the world-building experience?
[00:20:09] Jacob: I thought making these big, long descriptions of the characters was important for the story. So I made descriptions of each character, where they started, where they ended up, and it was just way too specific for where I was at when I was starting to write. And so all of that has pretty much changed.
[00:20:29] So I think what is more helpful is understanding the genre that you're writing in. And then, from understanding that genre, making a not specific outline, but an outline that's easy to change as you go. So something that maybe you just start with, your beginning, your middle and your end and from that, starting to write, and then as I started to write with a better understanding of the genre, I had more handholds as I was writing. So the more that I wrote, I was able to keep, because it was actually fulfilling the development of the characters as they grew.
[00:21:05] Matty: I was listening to the Neil Gaiman Masterclass on story-building, world-building and one of the things he had suggested is that if people are stumped, and I can imagine this as especially valuable to younger writers, like, you know, high school age writers or something like that, who maybe haven't been out in the world that much in their actual real world, and his recommendation is take something and then tweak it a little bit.
[00:21:33] So if you're a high school student, who's in a fantasy world let's say, you know your school very well, but what if that school is on another planet? Or what if it's underwater or what if the teachers are all fill in the blank? And I'm just curious, can you look back on your own writing career, whether it's published or not published and see yourself acting on that?
[00:21:58] Jacob: I think it is helpful. (DON'T NEGLECT THE INTERNAL WORLD) Stephen King has a write what you know advice, which I think is helpful. I think he uses the description on writing where if you're a janitor, just be a janitor on a spaceship. But I think that can be helpful. I think with your controlling idea, like the controlling idea, that's what you want someone to get out of your story, what you want them to learn and take away from in your story. I think it's important and good to have a controlling idea that you know and understand and you're intimate with.
[00:22:29] For one of my stories, for the second book in THE BRIGHT ABYSS series, the character is really learning a lot about humility and about giving away power instead of trying to take it. And those are lessons that I've had to learn throughout my life. And so I think because I've struggled with those things myself, I'm able to bring that out in my characters more clearly. And so it's not that I was this hero that's trying to save the world from these evil shadow creatures, but I have had to struggle with the same kind of things that the characters in the story are struggling with, to a certain extent.
[00:23:05] So I think that can be helpful. Like the character in my story is a mechanic and I am not a mechanic, but I have struggled with humility and pride and with thinking that I knew more than I did, just like the main characters in my story have struggled with. So I think that can be helpful. If you think about the lessons that you learned through life, how can that apply to the story you're telling and to the character in your story and what they're learning?
[00:23:33] Matty: Yeah, I think it's an excellent point that you don't want to neglect the internal world-building for the external world-building. And as exciting as your spaceship is, nobody's really going to care unless the characters that are inhabiting it are interesting. Like it makes me think of ALIEN, where they had quite an elaborate world built there, but I wouldn't have been interested in that story if I hadn't gotten a sense of what each of the crew members was like and what their goals were and what their conflicts were and things like that.
[00:24:08] Jacob: Yeah, for sure.
[00:24:11] Matty: I'm thinking about the worlds I've built for Ann Kinnear and Lizzy Ballard. I live outside Philadelphia, many of the books take place around Philadelphia and I do have fun, in some cases, I have used real places, but have changed the names. So as an example, I got a graduate degree from Penn, and I use the idea of Penn. If you read the Lizzy Ballard books, then anybody who knows Penn will recognize that what is called William Penn University in my books is actually the University of Pennsylvania. And I did that because early on in that story, there was a chance that the route I was going to take is that something nefarious was going on at the university. So I obviously didn't want to call it University of Pennsylvania.
[00:24:57] But I've also had fun because, in the Ann Kinnear books I had Ann going to the William Penn University Hospital, and I also think it's a fun Easter egg. If people are reading across both series, I'm going to be curious to see how many people recognize that there's crossover between the world of Ann Kinnear and the world of Lizzy Ballard in some of these references to real places.
[00:25:22] Do you think at all about spinning off a second series and overlapping some, but not all of the aspects of the world you're building?
[00:25:30] Jacob: Not really. I'm already thinking about different kinds of stories that I'd like to tell, after I finished this series. So yeah, I'm not really thinking about maybe crossover things. You only have so much time to live, and so I have other kind of stories that I would like to write at some point.
[00:25:48] Matty: And do you think that there will be elaborately built worlds for those?
[00:25:52] Jacob: I want to do one more post-apocalyptic story, more in the veins of THE HUNGER GAMES, which will require a lot of world-building. And I wanted to do another one that's more realistic based, but just maybe a little further in the future, that’s more of a crime story, which involves somebody entering into people's minds when they're in a coma, to try to bring them out of a coma.
[00:26:19] So yeah, that would probably have to be more realistic than some of the other fantastical ones. And then there's another story that I'm kicking around. It's more romantic, it's like a romance story, which involves different societies that are split up into men and women that are very distinct and don't cross over. So I was thinking about that as well.
[00:26:39] But yeah, I think some of those will require more fantastical world-building, some of them will require more research. Because one of the things that's so nice about the story that I'm writing right now is I only need to research as things pop up, because I'm just making it up as I go. Which there's something nice about that. It requires more imagination, but it doesn't require as much research necessarily, unless I run into something that is similar to our world and I need to research about that.
[00:27:09] Look like I've had to research some things on mechanics and things like that, because one of my characters was fixing a broken spaceship. So there is research that's required, but it's not as much as if I was doing it based in our known universe.
[00:27:23] Matty: That makes me think of Andy Weir's THE MARTIAN that evidently, that was a heavily researched one, and I think I actually heard Mr. Weir himself say that the only fact in there, fact in air quotes that he put in, even though it wasn't really realistic, was the big sandstorm on Mars. They're going to Mars, because the atmosphere on Mars is such that you would never have a violent sandstorm. But he just got so entranced with the idea of the violent sandstorm as did, you know, probably any person who read the book or watched the movie, that he thought, okay, I'm willing to fudge this. But evidently, everything else was as close to a realistic scenario as he could make it.
[00:28:02] Jacob: He did a lot of research for that book, that's the hard science genre. So people were expecting to have some realistic science in there.
[00:28:13] Matty: Yeah. Now we all know more about growing potatoes than we ever thought we would.
[00:28:17] Jacob: Right.
[00:28:18] Matty: Are there any red flags for you that you've gone too far down the research rabbit hole?
[00:28:23] Jacob: I haven't had to do a ton of research, and I think that's a good thing, because I think that can become a distraction as you're writing, unless you're planning on doing research. Because I only have so much time to write, because I do work full time, and so I try to have specific goals that I'm trying to meet every day when I sit down to write. And so, if I'm spending a lot of time doing things that I haven't planned on doing, then I know I'm probably being distracted by something.
[00:28:52] There has been times where I'm like looking up pictures of things to try to describe something, and I'm like, I'm probably spending too much time on this. I need to just write something real quick and then come back to it later and flesh it out more. So there have been moments like that, but thankfully, I've typically caught myself in the midst of that, in the midst of those moments. But yeah, there has been some moments like that.
[00:29:14] Matty: I think that there are two approaches that people have to watch out for. One is that you know what you're writing about, now you realize you've spent 18 hours reading about medieval weaponry or something like that. But the other thing I think that can feed into world-building is just general interest, where you're not doing it for a particular book.
[00:29:35] And so the two examples I can think of for me is, I'm endlessly fascinated by storm chasing. And I could actually imagine a scenario where Ann Kinnear gets involved with storm chasers. That's the benefit of Ann Kinnear having a business that involves contacting dead people for money, that you can really put her in almost any scenario that's of interest. And I can imagine doing that and I've watched lots and lots of storm chasing videos, storm chasing analysis, and things like that. And I just think of it as a hobby for me and someday it may find its way into a book, but maybe not.
[00:30:09] And then the other thing that I find is fascinating is anything to do with South Pole stations. I've just gone through this binge of reading, I read two books about south polar exploration. And then I found this YouTube channel with this guy who does videos, like a tour of the South Pole station. And it's really fascinating, and I have to admit, I haven't yet figured out a way to get Ann to the South Pole in a realistic manner.
[00:30:37] But the South Pole station one is fascinating, because you could take that just as is, and for many, many people, they're not going to know anything about it. But you could really almost lift that as-is and either set a story at the South Pole research station, or just make it into a spaceship. But now it's ALIEN, you know, it's like something that you've learned from real life, but now you're twisting the one thing.
[00:31:01] So maybe looping back to that conversation earlier about, if you're a high school writer and what you know best is your school, then just twist that one thing. And as you had mentioned about the Stephen King advice as well, tap your hobbies, the things that you're naturally interested in as a source for world-building.
[00:31:19] Jacob: Yeah, for sure.
[00:31:21] Matty: Were there any other world-building tips that you had that we haven't hit yet?
[00:31:27] Jacob: Yeah, I would say, (CONSIDER GENRE) genre is really important and I think that comes from my Story Grid studies, but I think it really helps you specify the world that you need to build, because every genre has its own obligatory scenes. It has its own conventions, and that's going to influence what kind of characters you have in your story. It's going to influence what your characters do in your story, which is going to have an effect on what your world looks like and what it feels like.
[00:31:56] So I would say really study the genre that you want to write in. And when you have a good idea of what that genre looks like and what other people have done in that genre, you can twist it and change it for your own story, so that it's new and refreshing, but it's also easy to connect with for readers who are looking to read in that genre.
[00:32:19] Matty: One of the things I really like about Story Grid is you can use it either exactly the way you just described or retrospectively. So I think that's especially true for people who are writing their first book and it's not a business for them yet, they don't know if there's going to be more than one, they're just writing the story of their heart and then they get done and they think, I wonder what I just wrote. I wonder what shelf this would be shelved on. And I really liked being able to use the Story Grid and say, oh, I see that I've built the world in this particular way. That's very representative of fantasy or that's very representative of sci-fi or something like that, and if you can reverse engineer your way to understand what your genre is, based on an assessment of what characteristics of your world match which genres in a source like the Story Grid.
[00:33:02] Jacob: Which is actually what I did. I wrote the story and then I had only just started learning about Story Grid. So I used it to define where my story fit and to refine it as well, and to make it something that was more engaging and more readable for people.
[00:33:25] Matty: Jacob, thank you so much. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and all your work online.
[00:33:33] Jacob: So you can learn about THE BRIGHT ABYSS series by going to jacobehess.com, letter E in between the Jacob and the Hess. So yeah, anything that you need to find out about the stories, you can find out there and you can sign up for my email list and actually get a free copy of my short story called THE FIRST ENCOUNTER, which is connected to THE BRIGHT ABYSS series. And just check it out, see if it's something that you're interested in. And from there, you can also learn a lot about the characters and the different races and cultures, because I have a lot of posts about those things as well on there.
[00:34:12] Matty: Thank you.
Links
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Episode 018 - The Importance of Masterworks with Anne Hawley
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jacobehess/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jacob.hess.758/
Episode 018 - The Importance of Masterworks with Anne Hawley
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