Small talk

"Dune" is a story that is centered on the weather. Being more specific, on how politics revolve around controlling and exploiting nature, and how entire cultures are shaped by their environment. It's an environmental cautionary tale / political drama, and also an eye-candy of a movie (the 2021 version, I mean) with plenty of desert shots and Zendaya looking great in the sand.

I think a lot about an article on weather and food systems in worldbuilding (serendipitously republished this week and linked below in the new Recommendations section :D) . When we travel or for any reason are out of our element, what and when will we eat changes priority in our mind and becomes more urgent. We eat to survive and there is no downplaying it. Your brain wants to make sure it will be nurtured soon. Find food and everything else will follow.

So in any new circumstance, or whenever a character is dragged into the unexpected, the logical lane would be for them to worry about basic needs. Food, shelter, hygiene. But survival instincts are boring when a character is not facing real danger. Who wants to know whether a character had a sudden urge to pee and couldn't find a viable toilet, if that doesn't move the plot? Who wants to hear about how much water a character drank when they were living the most distressing day of their life? Yet for worldbuilding these basic needs are important, especially when creating new worlds. How people seek food in this world, what can they find to eat, how does the ecosystem provide or prevent proper nutrition.

A story with a pretty good foundation of how the weather and food systems work doesn't need, in any instance, to rely on this information to create conflict. Like anything in the ground work we call worldbuilding, this is privileged information that the writer/creator can use however they want, including not using it at all. It will help to solidify the rules of this fictional world and therefore have the conflicts and arcs surface. I might have mentioned before how "Game of Thrones" is a sociological narrative, a very well crafted world with its intricate rules where the plot moves as a response to the current status quo. It's not about specific characters or rooting for your favorite candidate to the throne, hence why they die like flies, but about what people in Westeros are capable of doing because of how that world came to be where it is right now. A sudden move and everything shifts, and the characters will react to it - ad eternum. That's where the story is coming from. Not what they do, but how it affects their world.

With this love letter to worldbuilding I am reminded I haven't done much in a while. Hear, hear, the woman who is all words and zero writing! Maybe something to focus my energy in what's left of vacations...? Meanwhile, I left below some suggested reads, related to the craft of storytelling or just themselves good stories. Hope you enjoy!

-Maíra

This week's recommendations:

• Read: the cited article posing a question we should remember to answer in stories - will there be bread to eat?

• Read: short and interesting, what happens when an artist doesn't have a "mind's eye"

• Read: an all-time favorite with more on Game of Thrones and its sociological storytelling

• (hard) Read: a deep dive into the surge of health care workers quitting during the pandemic, many of them with no plans to ever continue practicing