Writing Workshop: Romeo and Juliet, Fairy Tales, and World Building

Last month I was in Verona, and passed by the house that’s been labeled Juliet’s house (from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.) It was over 40 degrees Celsius (or for us Farenheit types, 104°F) and incredibly humid. But there were hundreds of visitors obediently lined up in snake queues to visit, snap pictures of the “…wherefore art thou?” balcony, and rub the breast of the Juliet statue. As I passed by, I heard one of the tourists marvel, “How did they figure out this was Juliet’s house?” I wanted to ask her opinion of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, but in the interests of preserving what little international-relations credibility I possess, I held my tongue.

In thinking about it later, though, I have to say that this is Shakespeare in top form. The completely fictional world he built for poor Romeo and Juliet to make their bad decisions in is still letting audiences suspend disbelief centuries after his play was first performed. As far as I can tell, nobody stops in the middle and says, “If Juliet was old enough to have her own mobile phone, she would just text Romeo ” Yo, 😘, 🙋’m ❌️ ☠️ for 🫀. 👤🤝👤 🙋 at the 🪦 ➕ 👉️👫’ll 🎉.”**

**”Yo, lover, I’m not dead for reals. Meet me at the cemetery and we’ll party.”

We all know there are books where the world or the setting is a character in its own right. Consider the Emerald City in Wizard of Oz, Hogwarts in Harry Potter, or the trope-defining Middle-earth in Lord of the Rings. But just as compelling are the non-fantasy worlds. Think of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple in her village of St. Mary Mead, the rapidly disappearing American South of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind, or the Canadian home of Anne of Green Gables on Prince Edwards Island. In each case, the author has built a complete little world, often recognizable but still with its own set of rules.

And yes, we’ve all heard how the difference between setting and worldbuilding is like the difference between weather and climate. Setting, I was taught, is like the weather: it’s what’s happening in the specific time and place where the story occurs. Worldbuilding, on the other hand, is supposed to be more like the climate: a process of defining the larger world in which that setting occurs.

I think that’s nonsense.

I would say that setting might be the immediate surroundings in the world the writer builds, but both are degrees of the same thing. Setting IS defined by the writer’s worldbuilding. As such, it might be only the barest of bones, such as a set I once saw in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot that consisted of a ladder and a stool. Or it could be Manderley, the brooding estate of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, so weighted by tradition and history that its very name engulfs the present and defines the future of the never-named young bride.

The other writers in this workshop could give a master class in worldbuilding. Georgia Rose’s thriller series about the tiny village of Melton creates a setting so familiar it’s almost cozy British mystery shorthand—until we realize the village’s chocolate box façade hides an entire world seething with volcanic levels of guilt, envy, and hatred. The Granville Mill at the center of Judith Barrow’s Howarth family saga is a symbol of the history and life of the residents of a Lancashire village—first as source of jobs and income, then a darker menace as it becomes the wartime prison that dominates their lives. On a much lighter note, Darlene Foster’s intrepid young heroine Amanda immerses herself and her readers in each of the locations where she solves her mysteries. And don’t even get me started on Terry Tyler’s dystopian sagas that build our so-familiar world into epic (but still slyly familiar) destruction.

Yes, these are settings, but each one is part of a world built by its author. What makes a successful setting, let alone a believable world? Another way to think about this is to ask what goes into building a world that allows a reader to suspend disbelief in something that was never real.

There are numerous guides and suggestions out there for worldbuilding. Before I mention some of them, I’m going to selfishly begin with the only two actual rules I think we need.

Rule 1. Blogger Simon Provencher’s ‘Golden Rule’ of worldbuilding says “… unless specified otherwise, everything inside your world is assumed to behave exactly as it would in the real world.”

Rule 2. My personal corollary to Rule 1: your world needs unbreakable rules that will serve as the laws of physics for your fictional world, no matter how fantastical you make it.

Taken together, these rules mean if there’s magic, it must have specific and firm boundaries. If there are superpowers, your audience should know where they came from and what their limits are. If there’s an event that wipes out most of the world population, put some actual science around how it was developed and delivered. Establish rules for the way your world works and follow them. Even if your main character is The Chosen One, he still doesn’t get to whip out a new magic talent in the nick of time to save the day. Again. If your heroine is a medieval peasant, she doesn’t get to champion equality and justice for all (unless her name is Joan of Arc, and even then, she gets burned at the stake.)

Consider the three Gs of worldbuilding:

1. Genre. Obviously, the world of a gritty damaged detective/police procedural is going to look different from a YA fantasy romance. What is your world’s culture like? What language(s) do they speak?
2. Geology. What does the landscape look like? What kind of topography, weather, animals, urban areas does it have? Are there any of the normal laws of physics that don’t apply?
3. Game Plan. What is the history of your world? Is it exactly what the history books show? Is it an alternate history where the dinosaurs weren’t wiped out/Atlantis exists/Hitler won/World Wars did (or did not) happen? Who is in charge? What does your world’s politics, religion, magic, government look like? How did they occur?

Why do we accept that animals can talk, magic wands can send you to the ball, or dragons can fly?

For most of us, our earliest encounters with worldbuilding are in the form of fairy tales. Some say fairy tales embody universal tropes that pass along the most basic traditions of social information and behavior. In other words, they build worlds that explain our lives:

• • Watch out for those who are different.
  • Fear the unknown.
  • Obey your mother, or the big bad wolf will eat you.
  • Play your cards right, and a fairy (or a prince or an enchanted frog) will rescue you.
  • Follow the rules, and you will live happily ever after.

But that can’t be the whole answer because fairy tales aren’t actually all that traditional. The ones our grandchildren hear are not the same ones our grandparents told, and they bear little resemblance to their early versions. If the stories don’t change constantly, their meaning becomes irrelevant. Certainly we don’t want our children to hear that the path to true love is for a monster to kidnap and imprison a girl until she agrees to marry him. Or that a young woman can’t possibly live happily ever after unless some prince ‘rescues’ her. Or that your stepmother will always try to kill you. And maybe eat your heart… [check out If Disney Princes Were Real, from BuzzFeed]

 

 

We just have to go back and look at the original versions to see what I mean. In one of the earliest known sources for many of our familiar fairy tales, Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of Tales/Il Pentamerone (1634), Cinderella is a conniving girl who murders her first stepmother in The Cinderella Cat but still ends up marrying a prince. In Charles Perrault’s original version from Stories or Fairy Tales from Past Times: Tales of Mother Goose (1697), Little Red Riding Hood strips naked, climbs into bed with the wolf and is…er…eaten. (Contemporary 17^th century readers would have understood the reference, because the term for a girl losing her virginity was elle avoit vû le loup — she has seen the wolf.) In Basile’s The Little Slave Girl (Snow White), a girl cursed to die at age seven grows to adulthood in an enchanted sleep while encased in a glass coffin, only to be awakened and enslaved by her jealous aunt.

Given the way fairy tales have evolved—you only have to take a look at the kickass heroines in modern interpretations of Cinderella such as Ella Enchanted or Ever After—it’s clearly not respect for tradition that makes us accept the magical worlds of fairy tales.

So what makes the worldbuilding of fairy tales so compelling?  I think it’s the one thing fairy tales have had in common since their earliest beginnings: the ending. We’re suckers for the happily ever after – so much so that we willingly suspend disbelief in the world’s reality in order to get our HEA fix.

I think it’s that early training that prepares us to suspend disbelief as we enter worlds built by writers. What makes millions of people stand in the blazing heat so they can rub the breast on a statue of a girl who never existed? What makes grown humans learn to speak Elvish? Or secretly wait for our letter from Hogwarts? It’s all down to writers who build a world so spectacularly enticing, we willingly suspend belief in order to live in that world, at least until we reach The End.

 

Resources:

Worldbuilding Templates: (online fill in the blanks for a large number of world facets ranging from your world’s biology, culture, economy to morès regarding sex, politics, religion, etc.) Obviously, these are more useful if you’re building an entire fantasy world from scratch, but still useful even if your setting is your own neighborhood.

• Storyplanner https://www.storyplanner.com/story/plan/world-building-detailed-plan
• The Novel Factory https://www.novel-software.com/worldbuilding-questionnaire/
• Kindlepreneur https://kindlepreneur.com/worldbuilding-template/
• Reedsy  https://blog.reedsy.com/worldbuilding-guide/