#shhhhh. it's for worldbuilding reasons. does your grandfather know everything

[red-the-dragon-writes]

i think letting your characters not know why shit happens is an important part of worldbuilding in fantasy actually. like you can have the guy who can explain obscure things if you want but irl how many people do you know who can explain precisely how gravity works? saying "it keeps you on the earth" is one thing, sure, and "it pulls things towards the center of mass" is more precise, but no one is breaking out the math, you know? Or like, who's gonna look at the northern lights and go "This happens because of such and such ionizing radiation in the sky." Most people don't know that off the top of their heads, and especially in fantasy worlds literacy and scientific learning are rarely at the forefront of the average person's education.

This is mostly an excuse for me to justify my characters saying the most fucking bizarre shit about the world and never explaining it. "Why does one set of moons only appear once a month or so? I mean, there's stories about it, and I've heard such and such, but I don't know, man, does it matter? I'm tired. You can stare at the moons if you want but I am going to bed." It is my personal belief that this makes the world feel realer. Denser. There's enough shit to know about; deliberately leaving things outside the characters' sphere of knowledge makes it more like the world we live in.

and it also gives you a chance to let your characters' different interests show! If you got one guy who loves space, just absolutely obsessed with astrophysics or whatever, and your protag likes animals and doesn't care about that stuff, you can have that character go and launch into the complicated details of ionizing radiation in the upper atmosphere and the northern lights and solar winds and stuff. and you can have your protagonist listen or zone out. and then respond. boom, you have established quite a bit about both characters in that one exchange, but the fact that there is information, unnecessary random shit, that people just either know or don't know about-- that's realistic, you know? sometimes people know things. Sometimes they don't. Let them not know.

#I don't do old wizards for a lot of reasons but one of them is that every time i try to let my old wizards not know everything #i get 'hey why is your old wizard not wise :( ' #shhhhh. it's for worldbuilding reasons. does your grandfather know everything #red rambles #writing advice