Writing a Good Travel Narrative

You have to do both at the same time.

Here's the problem with World Building: It is engineering. Whether you are educated as an engineer or not; world building is devising a machine, an ecosystem, that "works" in some sense, is self-sustaining and relatively balanced and stable from year to year, through seasons. For a million years there have been deer or deer-like animals in the woods, predators that take them down for food, parasites that exploit them, and somehow their skills, the growth of food and water, have all been balanced in a way that the system persists for hundreds of thousands of generations.

But generally, only a small percentage of the population loves to see how machines work. Especially fiction readers, because they want an adventure with characters they can relate to, feel like they are friends, or love interests, or themselves. They want humanity in some form or another, some struggle going on for every page. They just don't want the lecture of how it works, why it is evolutionarily logical for these animals to exist, etc.

In order to inject that kind of information, it must be relevant to the characters and have consequences.

That is the trick, and it is a hard one for the author. You can get away with a hundred words of exposition about how the world works, on occasion, readers will give you that. Go much longer, and they skip ahead, to something happening, to a character saying something or doing something or both.

For your world-building to matter, it cannot just sit there as a backdrop, it must make a difference in what characters can and cannot do, it must provide resources for them to exploit or dangers for them to avoid or obstacles for them to overcome.

Once our character, a young girl, learns the only way she can possibly get to the Broken Tower before the dark moon rises is to traverse the Forest of Vipers, then readers care about the Forest of Vipers. That chunk of your world is now both an obstacle and a threat, and in dialogue or exposition you can talk about it for awhile, then spend time describing its perils as our young hero picks her way through it, and meets the handsome and helpful prince that, she was warned, by the oracle that sent her here, is possessed by an evil blood demon.

You must connect your setting to the story, meaning it must have consequences for the characters. This is another way of saying it must matter to the characters and plot and story. If nothing else, character's must react to the setting; but that kind of weak consequence has a very short line of credit. You can only have a "wow" factor for a character once or twice in a story, they can't just walk around and marvel at everything. They are supposed to be busy doing things!

writers shouldn't spend too much time writing about the journey when the destination is more important,

I disagree with this assertion. Look at Lord of the Rings, its all about the journey. Look The Sixth Sense, it is all about the journey; jump to the end and the movie is six minutes long and unsatisfying.

A journey can be central to the entire novel; and actually should be if you have done a bit of world building. It is on the journey that character is built, through conversations, dealing with minor problems and disagreements, falling in love, growing up by learning how the world really is, and so on. It is on the journeys that readers come to see personalities and real people displaying their emotions; of frustration, victory, disappointments, kindness, confusion, or callousness. We see them struggling to make progress.

Skip the journeys and most novels are very badly damaged short stories, because your heroes arrive at their destination too quickly for the reader to really care about them very much. It is in their dialogue and their decisions and actions in various circumstances and incidents that we come to know them.

posted over 6 years ago

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Amadeus‭

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