Babel Clash

Do the world-building in the natural downtime between action scenes.

(A lone cricket chirps. Even though it’s December. In Michigan.)

Ah. Yeah. A little more. Well, first we could talk about the downtime. I know we’re discussing books, but allow me a brief stray into movie territory, to make a point.

I’ve heard it said that directors love baseball movies because baseball scenes pretty much film themselves. Having never directed a movie, I’ll just assume this is absolutely true. I mean, other than overseeing the lighting of dozens of shots and deciding on the arrangement of camera rigs and making sure the sound is right and managing two hundred crew and thousands of extras and praying the weather cooperates, how hard can it be? But here’s where the claim holds up, to whatever extent it does: baseball has its dramatic pauses built in. It’s all but impossible to screw up the timing.

In fact, just for fun, imagine filming a climactic baseball scene but, in a flash of creative genius, stripping away the pauses. No stare-down between the pitcher and the batter. No cutaway to the runner leading off first base, tensed to dive back at the bag if the pitcher turns. No shot of the batter’s grandpa on life-support at Mercy General, watching the game on the wall-mounted TV, sure to flatline if there’s one more swing-and-a-miss.

Nope, not in your movie. You’re going to shoot baseball like it’s ping-pong. One-two-three, he’s out, next! One-two–crack!–runner on first, next! One-two-three, he’s out; hell, it’d be unwatchable. Or unreadable, in other cases. There are, after all, plenty of baseball novels, and none of their authors have screwed up the timing, either.

Okay, so baseball has a natural dramatic structure that makes a surprisingly good model for just about any action scene you want to write. But we’re talking about the overall pacing of the story, balanced with world-building. Does the baseball metaphor apply to an entire storyline?

I think it does. It’s still about bursts of activity separated by pauses, whether on the scale of a chapter or a novel.

And they’re not pauses. Or not JUST pauses, anyway. They’re containers. You fill them up with things that make the impending action matter. Like how steep the odds are against the hero (two outs, two strikes, bottom of the ninth; cut to the coach clutching his hat and holding his breath). Like what’s at stake (grandpa on life support). Like how much the characters have changed (cut to the fellow player who ridiculed the hero early on, but now stands quietly confident near the dugout, speaking under his breath, “You got this, kid, bring us home…”)

It’s not much different at the scale of the overall story. At that level, the pauses aren’t short-paragraph cutaways (they may be chapters or parts of chapters) but they serve the same purpose. They establish what’s at stake (Harry Potter learns how horrible the Dementor’s Kiss is, and you better believe it’s going to matter, later on). They clarify what will constitute winning (Gandalf explains to Frodo that the Ring can only be unmade where it was made, inside a volcano smack-dab in the middle of the bad guy’s turf).

But what else are those examples doing, besides their day jobs? They’re world-building. One piece at a time. As best I can tell (and it’s worth pointing out here that I’m exactly negative seven days into my career as a published novelist, so, you know… take all of this with a grain of salt), the trick is to illustrate and enrich the world of your story by letting your dramatic pauses do double-duty. Every glance at the scoreboard, or the hushed crowd, or the teammates gripping the dugout wire-mesh, is also a glimpse of the unique world in which your story is set. If that world is a fractured dystopia three hundred years in our future, you might spend half a chapter clarifying how utterly screwed your hero is, now that there’s a unit of face-skinner mercenaries from New Chicago hunting him down. In doing so, you set the game board for what’s coming, but you also shine some light on the board’s darker recesses. (There’s a New Chicago? And, holy hell, there are mercenaries that skin people’s faces? What kind of f’ed up place is this?)

When it’s done correctly, I think world-building can piggyback on the lean muscle of storytelling without much difficulty.

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