Worldbuilding: The Back of the Book

Okay, who else likes a good glossary with their fiction? Or even better, that and a bibliography?

Long story short, sometimes writing a good story is like writing a really, really cool For Want of a Nail fanfic. You find one, or better yet several, tiny cracks in “it was this way” that lean toward “it could have been that other way”, and use them like a free-climber to swarm up an impossible cliff, and leave everyone cheering about how utterly cool that was. But to do that, you have to find the cracks.

And that takes research. Oh so much research.

Note, I’m not complaining. A lot of texts on history, culture, art, and biology are absolute gems to read. (Sometimes it feels like they’re just as pricey, too, but there you go.) It’s time-consuming and sometimes a headache, but nailing down How X Worked and finding little facts about it you never knew before are my idea of fun.

(Yes, writers are weird.)

Thing is, though, if you’re reading a heavily-researched book, sometimes you want more than what the author puts in the text. Sometimes you want to know what the sources are so you can back-check it yourself – either because you think they are Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, or because you think they’ve got a great take on things and you want to know what info they used to get it.

With an urban fantasy or contemporary romance, you may not need any sources. However, if you’re doing alternate or fantastic history….

Actually, if you’re doing any history. We don’t know what the past was like exactly, we just approximate it based off the best evidence we have and some sophisticated wild guesses. So. If your book leans toward historical, you might attract people who read history in nonfiction forms, and they would probably appreciate knowing what you’re digging into to build your world.

…Possibly so they can laugh and mock, but hey.

Glossaries are also good, particularly when you may be using a lot of not-familiar-to-most terms in the text. For example most people who read this blog have probably heard of chi, qi, and ki, but they may be less familiar with the Korean term for “life force” – gi. So into the glossary it goes, with notes that these are all words for the same concept; just Chinese, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. The readers can pick out for themselves which characters use which version, and draw conclusions accordingly. Similarly, wokou, wako, waegu. All mean pirates, in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, respectively. Who uses what term is significant. Readers can likely get a feel for that reading the text, but if they have a glossary to turn to, they can check that suspicion and get an “aha!” about who that character is, what language they think in, and where they call home.

It’s the thrill of discovery, of finding out there’s more to the story if you want to go looking for it. And it can be so cool.

Plus, there’s just something amusingly Mad Scientist-ish about standing atop a pile of references and laughing maniacally. Mwah-ha-hah!

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