On Worldbuilding: Fictional Histories [ Tolkien | Handmaid's Tale | Game of Thrones ]

how many times do i need to say this history is complicated it's full of half-truths legends and way too many stories of zeus having affairs as animals our understanding of history comes from hundreds of oral records written records and now twitter and instagram speaking of which come follow me at these links down below that's where i answer the questions i'm pretty active on there it's pretty cool anyways history is not a timeline history is a big ball of wibbly-wobbly tiny why me stuff which is why today we're discussing world building a history and hopefully by the end of it you'll have a flowchart map to guide you in constructing a realistic multi-dimensional world history and the topic is super fitting because today's video is sponsored by world anvil and internet gym you might have heard of perfect for chronicling world histories and not only is it fantastic software but it's run by great people i would know we're friends on discord yeah but more on them later the first thing to understand is that what actually happened in history and what people think happened are two markedly different questions so to begin what actually happened and should an author start with the story and reverse engineer history or should they start with the world history before they move on to the story around 1914 granddaddy of fantasy tolkien began working on the family of ellis languages he is known for today his passion for linguistics goes so far that he even stated my work is fundamentally linguistic and inspiration the invention of languages is the foundation these stories were made rather to provide a word for the language than the reverse so with this given that elvis splits into about 17 different dialects tolkie knew that the elves would have to split into various groups throughout history to cause these linguistic changes for example tolkien wanted the avaran dialect to be one of the most distinct indicating that this was one of the oldest groups to split off which the avari did in the year 1105 of the year of the trees one of the earliest diversions of the elves tolkien made something he loved and anchor and devised a world history that would explain why some dialects are more similar or different in vocabulary syntax and grammar and building outward from an element or few elements that you really care about ensures a cohesive world that is realistically grounded because you're not shoving these things in later on and it places the unique world you want at the heart of the experience of the reader catering to a particular kind of audience who find unique world building a particularly immersive force in their enjoyment of the story but this is more of a world builders approach people like tolkien who are world first and story second and it's fine if you are like that but i think most people are writers first and world builders second i know i am octavia butler is and lois larry are what i mean here is that a second method of building a world history is extrapolating out of things necessary for your story margaret atwood wrote the handmaid's tale a story about a fallen america where the republic of gilead an oppressive patriarchal regime has risen with a particular focus on the woman's role as caregiver and mother to justify the story of this dystopia coming to be edward knew that an american civil war would need to take place after widespread infertility and that this war would use nuclear weapons in the far west leaving only the north west inhabitable and building outwards from events necessary to frame your story is a good way to ensure that the world building always supports the narrative though it does mean that the world building is often less of the experience of the reader it also helps make sure that the story doesn't feel shoved jarringly into the world which is an issue that i find world building first writers run into that's what the story can sometimes feel like whichever method you use you then build out what's from there the causes and the consequences with the most important ideas you have at its foundation so step one identify your anchors either world building elements you care about or events necessary for your story and build outwards from there and while this web model extrapolating outward from your anchors is an effective way to build a world history it can lead to one problem a one-dimensional history where a single event or a few events dictate way too much of your world building brandon sanderson is a fantastic world builder do not get me wrong the reason his worlds feel so lived in as he so masterfully ties the cultural magical political and economic dimensions of his world to one another soul casting magic in the way of kings allows for magicians to create food out of stone so armies are much more mobile with few logistical limits but at the same time when i read his books there's a distinctive feeling that too much of his world history and the world itself was defined by this cataclysmic event called the last desolation four thousand five 500 years ago that is a long time as in in that time span humanity has seen the rise and fall of the egyptian middle kingdom the greek city-states the han dynasty the birth and death of more religions than are alive today the colonial area and the life and death of brad pitt and phil denim even if there was a devastating cataclysmic war 4 500 years ago so much time has passed that its ramifications would be so abstracted from now that it'd be difficult to draw a causal connection between then and now culturally politically or economically one real world example of this is the story of the great flood which we see in the bible the epic of gilgamesh and so many other ancient cultures have similar stories there seemed to be this grand cataclysmic event that radically shaped how they lived at the time but it's very difficult to draw a strong causal connection between that event and how we live our lives and think now also i want to be clear that this is a criticism that can be leveled at tolkien but tolkien wrote his world history with an intentional degree of surrealism i feel whereas brandon sanderson does definitely go for a gritty realistic world history so we're dealing with kind of two different approaches understanding history means understanding there is no single history no single thing or person or event dominoed the rest of history so following a single chain of cause and consequence to create your world history will feel one-dimensional no history is more like a dozen chains all starting independently and then later intertwining with other chains popping up occasionally this is particularly something i notice with fantasy mythologies and magic systems or science fiction technologies like needle casting and altered carbon which often take a front and center role in the narrative relying too heavily on a few things to determine the rest of history or your world building can make a world feel static like it hasn't changed and it all sprung from that one thing and if there's one thing that history does do it's change except for zeus banging women as animals some things never change and why is that because history is complicated so instead we're gonna break it down we're gonna make it complex we're gonna start with what we'll call the six pillars of history politics culture technology economy geography and religion and this is step two tell your world history through each of these lenses writing out six timelines with vastly different perspectives that begin relatively independently of one another to remove any prime mover event with this your world testing doesn't just feel like a single timeline tracking one chain of cause and consequence but a multi-dimensional history and building on this idea that there is no one history each of these timelines will be experienced differently dependent on geography the european dark ages were a golden age of academia and technology for the muslim courts of damascus the ascent of the united states to a world power was a time of decline for britain in georgia martin's a song of ice and fire series to give a fictional example the two continents of westeros and essos have wholly different understandings of world history westeros sees the age of heroes as a time of magic and great men and women but essa sees the same time as one of terra with the ghiscari empire built on the backs of slaves rising to power yet both continents highlight the long night as a catastrophic ice age of sorts around the same time in their histories giving some shared legends and myths and cultural legacies between them in this way the long night is like the great flood stories of our world and the more levels you do the song continent versus continent kingdom versus kingdom even city versus city the more realistic it becomes looking at these six timelines from different perspectives how they experience them differently and that gives us step three identify the ways different regions see the timelines of the six pillars differently and the historical elements they share now though the six pillar timelines give multiple dimensions to your world history we can also use them to give multiple dimensions to individual events as well because no matter what category an event might fit into they always have causes and consequences on multiple levels which is something that a lot of people often forget they just say the war was caused by them wanting the land and it's like well okay but there's economic dimensions to that as well why did they need the land for their agriculture and also was it because of a nationalistic rise in the culture was it because there was a sacred religious land at one point there's so many dimensions to how these things happen and oftentimes i just read a history of a fictional world and it's given one cause and one consequence i mean look at our world world war one while there was a bunch of politicians advocating for war from the start there was a cultural glorification of war across europe and there was a fast out competing german industrial sector that they were kind of scared of caesar's assassination the senate was losing democratic power there was a cultural derivation of caesar as a person and the dispossessed poor were looking for an alternative form of government after the economic failure of the ruling class and caesar was looking like a pretty good king nice sharp cheekbones rise of the bronies i i can't explain that one i'm sorry that one's just a mystery for a good example let's look at edward's work where she doesn't rely on a simplistic understanding of history to give rise to gilead it wasn't just a patriarchal party that rose to power she extrapolates cultural and religious causes and conservative and reactionary leftist movements that led to it political causes and a crackdown on rights following a series of terrorist attacks and environmental causes that motivated the group to act and importantly the social causes when humans became mostly infertile except for a few women causing that shift in how people thought and wanted to live and it's through these key events that her world history didn't just become realistic but terrifyingly believable so step four ground your world history and forces of realistic change by giving at least three causes and consequences to each major event political cultural technological economic geographical or religious and one way to visualize this would be to draw connections between your six pillar timelines allowing you to easily see the relationship between these dimensions as they become intertwined it'll get messy but i mean what real timeline isn't and once you've worked out what actually happened you've got to work out what people think happened they're never the same thing because history is complicated though as a side note some writers do skip finding out exactly what happened and just skip to the historical accounts part of it just acknowledging that there is some ambiguity that they don't even know what happened this is what the elder scrolls does it just gives you a whole bunch of contradictory texts and it doesn't give you a clear answer technically speaking there is no canon interpretation there's just a whole lot of different interpretations that we've got to try and piece together to figure out what happened i really love that approach some writers do that some writers don't basically you don't need to know what exactly happened you could just acknowledge that people don't quite know we have different perspectives on it but you know that historical records are contradictory embellished and some people just think it's all hashtag fake news like the fact we went to the moon kidding i have to say i'm kidding because there'll be someone who didn't realize that i was kidding so instead we're going to look at four factors that answer how history gets like this and what leads to myths and legends the how the who the time and historical narratives number one how was history recorded for this we will have four levels oral history pictorial history written history and primary history oral history is kind of like a game of chinese whispers thousands of people long over centuries without the original person to tell you what they said in the first place and this is why so much of our really ancient history is so questionable homer's the iliad details the history of the trojan war and was communicated orally for a long time before being written down in the 8th century bc and while there is some historical evidence of a conflict during the bronze age the details have clearly been embellished across the years due to an inability to fact check and that we don't know how much information was lost or added full stop the second level is pictorial history by which i mean the recording of historical events in pictorial records through art architecture pottery or even tattoos egyptian hieroglyphs likely began as a language with this basis arguably it's even older than oral history but the reason that it is a step up is that pictorial history is static it is harder to alter and thus can be more trustworthy pictorial history may be wrong from the start but it does not forget and it is a lot harder to alter details carved into a mountain side than a story passed down through generations and the third level is written history it's static but it also allows for far greater detail than either oral or pictorial history and allows for multiple perspectives to be recorded more easily now it can be changed for example the written books of the new testament were translated and copied dozens of times throughout history to preserve it in that process from greek to latin to english some details or meaning were lost and a few were even arguably changed but in contrast pictorial history is extremely time and skill intensive and oral history requires an ongoing practice like the vedic chance of hinduism supported by a large group of people to keep it alive whereas written documents can survive more easily the dead sea scrolls found in 1946 were preserved for thousands of years without human assistance though as a side note i do want to mention that how widespread the ability to read and write is a really important factor if it's restricted to a certain class or gender or faction then it may be less effective at accurately recording historical events which we'll get to in a bit and the fourth level is primary history which includes audio and visual recordings as well as technologies like the internet with these technologies historical facts have never been easier to verify and records are incredibly static not only can we tell exactly what was said and seen at a time but the technology makes it a lot harder for stories to become embellished falsified facts forgotten or omitted because we remove the distance between us and the primary source we can look at the primary sources ourselves instead of trusting the written pictured or orally recorded second-hand sources of others though i do need to point out that the internet also makes it incredibly easy for anyone to send around misinformation even if that misinformation is easy to falsify to find out that it's wrong however when it comes to fantasy and science fiction there are some interesting complicating factors that might change how static our recording of history is for example some elves like galadriel and tolkien's legendarium are actually old enough to be eyewitnesses to ancient events that are recorded by very few people which we would expect to be falsified and embellished meaning their recollections may actually be relatively accurate donald's remember me features a technology capable of altering or wiping memories which is used to manipulate people into believing that they suffered tragedies they had certain relationships or saw certain things happen jk rowling's harry potter series has a magic system that involves a pensive where memories can be perfectly collected but also falsified like we saw with slughorn and the half-blood prince each of these offer fascinating world-building questions about how we can trust historical records when we can't even trust our own memories i would love to see a story go really deeply into that you could use this to fantastic thematic and narrative effect with plot twists and reveals so step 5 figure out how static the records of an event are with the level of technology recording it and embellish falsify or change the details accordingly the second factor to consider is who is recording the history for example did you know that kim jong-il was born atop a mountain his birth heralded by a swallow and when he arrived a star illuminated the sky winter changed a spring and a double rainbow arced across the sky it's a double rainbow look it goes all the way according to our glorious leader whom we would never question people nations and organizations have biases ideas they want to promote and suppress for personal interest the saxon records of the 793 viking raid of lindisfarne describes the vikings as coming with fiery dragons flying heathen men made lamentable havoc and other records describe them as demons the history of wars is written by the victor after all who recorded this history and which events they would alter change or emphasize due to their geopolitical position or character should be accounted for in your world history so step six consider how who records the history changes the way it is recorded and adjust your records accordingly and the third question is how much time has passed since the event records get more abstracted from the original account as time goes on as a general rule introducing emissions myths and falsities even in well-documented events despite world war ii happening only 80 years ago beliefs like france's failure to anticipate germany going around the megino line on the border still persist despite being able to verify that the imaginary line was designed to force germany through belgium which is exactly what happened but historical abstraction doesn't just happen through bias and the flaws of recording methods that we've been talking about over time the weird thing is is that humans are intrinsically interested in exploring why things happened more than just recording the facts which is why a lot of historical accounts tend to give some kind of conjecture along these lines this is why great ecological disasters were often turned into the mythological intervention of the gods and why myths about the maginot line persist because not only does this intrinsic desire become a problem when those recording it don't have all the facts but the simplest explanations are the ones easiest to pass on step 7 abstract records from truth to reflect time between the story and the event as well as the desire to explain why even without all the facts and necessarily you can't look at all these factors independently they all mesh together they work together to explain why history is this way you got to look at it overall and lastly i want to talk about historical narratives and how we identify with history what gives rise to myths and legends and the relationship that has to character motivation one narrative that you might have heard is that the capitalist united states defeated the communist soviet union in 1991 being a triumph for democracy and capitalism whether or not this is true the cold war has arguably shaped more of our political and economic ways of thinking than say what caused the fall of rome recent historical events and historical narratives are often more influential on what a character believes and they are motivated by even if they aren't true or older events they don't think about are actually more influential on their lives for example the ideas of the enlightenment and the french revolution are probably more responsible for how we live today but the threats and pressures of the cold war feel more immediate to people alive today because there are people who lived through the cuban missile crisis so they make decisions based on those pressures this is also why i tend to find ancient grudges between races like commonly with elves and dwarves to often feel contrived we tend to be more motivated by recent atrocities and historical narratives that we identify with that come from them a fictional example of this can be found in the fire nation in the last airbender it's not the history of the hundred year war that motivates citizens to continue to fight but the historical narrative that they were sold that this was the fire nation's benevolent way of sharing their prosperity with the world so what historical narratives are there in your story that people tell themselves whether true or not and how does that influence how characters think and act and feel motivated and a really interesting part of this is legends and myths they can spring up from misinformation or evolved records of history but they also rise from historical narratives rome's early history began with a war against the sabeinst in the north which was likely a border dispute between the tribes but rome always had this national historical narrative that their prosperity and triumph was blessed by the gods thus the records of rome's founding by romulus a son of the war god mars detailed that this war against the sabines was won not through strategy or the like but through the intervention of jupiter king of the gods the records of the sabine war which actually did happen aren't just altered due to time and recording flaws but a myth rises from it to reflect the historical narrative the romans wanted to believe and all of these factors are only complicated further by studies showing that our memories are unreliable at best after a short period inferring that they saw glass at a car crash even if there wasn't any truly meaning that we're more likely to accept answers that make sense to us for our historical narrative whatever their people's relationship with history is how would your fictional society see the arc of their history and how would this influence what legends and myths come to be creating a fictional history is really hard but it will be made easier with world anvil a fantastic online application where you create your own wiki for your fictional world you include your historical events with numerous perspectives cultural economic and political dimensions and you can attach maps of your own to give a visual for how it all played out seriously it is a fantastic tool i wholly do recommend it it's got amazing features and it's completely free to get started it's got features built specifically for being a game master for being a writer a pure world builder or even a role player you create character profiles for important historical figures and pages for whatever wars rebellions affairs and betrayals might mark your timeline so go to www to check it out links all down below and also down below there is a link to the world building flowchart that we've been building together across this video including some extra stuff that i don't think i talked about in the video it summarizes the major steps in creating a complex world history and at least gives you the basis to build outwards from that while avoiding a number of the pitfalls that i commonly see this isn't going to be where your world history ends make multiple layers to that go through these steps again on more detailed levels and you'll get a more detailed and more complex realistic multi-dimensional history so take it set up a world anvil account and then use the timeline to make your world history but that is all from me please do join the community and come follow me on twitter or instagram it's where all the fun people are and i try to answer questions as best i can and if you haven't yet go get my book on writing and world building got all of the on world building videos up to a certain point plus extra notes uh come support me on patreon if you're so inclined thank you to all of you who already do it's amazing hope you enjoyed this video this was a lot of fun to put together uh more challenging than i initially thought it was gonna be turns out you know summarizing how history works is complicated in the meantime stay nerdy and i'll see you in the future you

Channel: Hello Future Me

Views: 632,162

Keywords: explained, theory, lore, analysis, how to, worldbuilding, writing, altered carbon, netflix, tolkien, conlang, book, authortube, booktube, middle earth, map, handmaid, tale, song of ice and fire, westeros, game of thrones, iliad, homer, remember me, harry potter, half blood prince, last airbender, zuko, aang, katara, sokka, toph, fire nation, way of kings, mistborn, brandon sanderson, narnia, fantasy, kitten, avatar, sanderson, magic, sauron

Id: RbnzAJXW0Sw

Length: 26min 42sec (1602 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 07 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Penguinmanereikel]

Another very useful video by Tim Hickson on crafting fictional histories.

Here’s a seven step flowchart for creating fictional histories that Tim linked in the description of his video: https://m.imgur.com/a/CQeNyq8

[u/[deleted]]

Love this dude. I will watch this after I watch how to be a great GM’s two videos on history, too lmao

[u/SkavenKing]

Thanks again, mate.

[u/Redornan]

I really like this kind of video but every source are English and I don't know if it'll be comprehensible for non natural speaker :(