Author's Notes on: Strange Settings
What weird and wild worlds lie in store?
I have a deep adoration for writing weird settings.
Genre blends are my absolute favorite, and I love reading and writing them whenever possible. Specifically, for me, fantasy seems to leak into pretty much every project I touch. I can’t seem to start a new project without throwing at least SOME dragons or anomalies at it.
[Looking at you, The Cardinal Directive]
The only trouble with this is that the weirder your setting gets, the more you have to hope your readers are willing to come along for the ride.
Suspension of disbelief is your reader’s willingness to put aside their own logic to accept the logic of the world you’ve created. For the most part, once something becomes more well known to the wider public, it becomes much easier for audiences to accept it as book-logic. For example, if you introduce a fantasy world where magic can be cast via wands, few people are going to be jarred out of your story by that concept because wand-based magic is a staple of lots of fantasy settings.
Now, if you introduce readers to a fantasy world where magic is cast exclusively through phaser beam-based guns… at least a few people are gonna tilt their heads. But — and this is important — that in itself isn’t a bad thing.
When you introduce a setting that comes a bit out of left field for readers, there’s always gonna be some tilted heads. Don’t let that discourage you! You’ve introduced two or more concepts that don’t usually go together. It’s normal that people take a second to adjust to it. Some people may reject it outright, but most will be willing to give you a chance to expand on your idea and ground it in the universe you’ve built.
See, the trick with weird settings is that you have to believe in them just as much as you want your readers to.
If you aren’t confident in your material or contradict your book’s logic, you’re far more liable to lose readers than just having an off-the-wall concept. Setting norms and expectations in your world makes it far more likely that a reader will stick with it.
The weirder the setting, the more important it is to set up its logic and commit to it. You need to set up what is normal in this world, what’s rare, and what’s weird. I usually try to keep myself from using examples from my books in free articles (as free articles are meant to be enjoyed without any prior knowledge of my content), but I’ve been thinking about The Cardinal Directive nonstop for several weeks, so I’ll be supplementing these descriptions with spoiler-free examples from Cardinal’s universe.
The Normal
It’s fairly easy to set up what’s normal in a setting that readers consider strange.
The two most common ways I’ve seen are 1) make your protagonist as clueless about the setting as your readers are or 2) have your characters interact casually with things that are normal in the universe.
The first option works on an easy principle — when your protagonist and your reader are on the same page, anything you explain about the setting to the character works as an explanation to the reader too. The character is often likely to share very similar reactions to the reader as well, which fosters a connection to the protagonist.
Meanwhile, if you’re working with characters that are already familiar with the setting, I prefer showing them interacting casually with things the reader would consider “weird”. It helps them accept that this is a part of the character’s world that’s normal for them. Cardinal has a science fiction-style setting that heavily features dragon-like creatures in its narrative. That concept can be a bit strange, so I show the characters interacting with their draconic counterparts regularly. The dragons have names and personalities and interact much like domesticated animals do.
I specifically choose certain words to describe the sounds each of the dragons make as well. One of the dragons, Oreo, has feathers and is described as being bird-like, so for him, I use words like “squawk”, “chirp”, and “trill”.
This gives the reader something to base their disposition about dragons on. It communicates that these creatures, while potentially dangerous, are friendly and common enough in this world that you don’t need to blink an eye at them.
Another way to communicate normalcy to a reader is to introduce them to names for the various things they’ll be encountering — and furthermore, to slang based off those names. It’s not for everyone, and you should be careful not to overdo it, but giving the reader a term to use makes it a lot easier to accept that this is a normal part of the book’s world. That’s not even mentioning the fact that it makes it a lot easier for everyone to talk about it, both in terms of your characters and your readers.
Cardinal’s dragons are explicitly not dragons, but “dragon” is a very simple term that conveys the idea that even if these guys look kinda different, if the average person saw one and had to call it something, they would call it a dragon. The vehicles that the supply runners in the story use are technically considered LAHC’s (Low-altitude hovercrafts), but that isn’t a pretty acronym and isn’t easy to say as a word. So instead, they use the slang term for them — lochsleds. Even without knowing what a “lochsled” is, anyone that sees the word understands that it’s some kind of sled, and that’s the important part.
From just those terms there, I can compress “bioengineered martian reptiles pulling low-altitude supply hovercrafts” to “dragon dogsled teams”, which is a lot easier to explain and describe to people.
If you want to commit to a lot of in-universe terms, consider using a glossary! I haven’t seen many books that use them anymore, but it’s supremely helpful and I do recommend it if the list gets longer than five words. It’s a handy tool to have both for your readers and yourself.
The Rare
This refers to stuff that still exists within the world’s rules, but isn’t seen as often. It’s normal, but it isn’t common.
Rare things exist in a weird middle space between normal and weird that’s subjective for each character. Cardinal’s protagonist, Alison, is very familiar with the Martian desert and its many oddities. She knows there are things out there that defy explanation. For her, these things are normal, but not common, whereas anyone living in one of the planet’s biodomes would consider them to be very weird.
Rare things also may fall in a space where their existence is only seen as special to those that know they’re rare, so it’s important to have characters react accordingly. If a normal civilian saw a supply runner wearing a red spacesuit, they might think nothing of it. Alison meanwhile would be much more likely to notice it, because she knows from working in her field that most suits are not red. A red suit blends into the Martian desert and would be a lot harder to locate in the event of a rescue mission.
The Weird
Alright. It’s time to get weird.
Weird stuff doesn’t necessarily need to violate your world’s logic or rules, but it should be things that get your characters, who have been living in that world with that logic their entire lives, to say “huh. that’s weird”.
Weird things are different from rare things because the oddity of their existence holds up a lot longer than rare things. With rare things, the characters tend to encounter them, acknowledge the fact that they’ve never seen something like that before, but then log it for a later date so if they ever see something like it again they’re able to acknowledge that things like that can happen.
Weird things stick out, and oftentimes seeing them again doesn’t make them any less weird. They can become common, but they are never normal.
The Cardinal Directive has some things like this, but unfortunately, that would be getting into spoiler territory, so I’ll leave that up to you to find out.
Instead, I’ll use a more real-world example: Imagine you live in a house where you can see the beach. One day, a man comes with a giant suitcase and throws it into the water. The tide brings it back to him. He picks it up, and he leaves.
This is weird. This is something that there is no apparent justification for.
Over the next year, every Tuesday the man comes back with his suitcase, chucks it in the water, retrieves it, and leaves. The man’s appearance has become common and routine, but what he’s doing is still just as strange because there’s still no apparent justification for it.
Even if one day five people accompanied the man and all threw suitcases in the ocean, it being common and shared amongst several people still doesn’t make it normal. If four people threw in suitcases and one threw in a briefcase, that’d be rare (ie a variation on the common thing you’ve seen), but still weird.
Where the real fun begins are weird things that specifically exist to break the logic of the world.
You have to be careful with this! This can’t be seen as an accidental contradiction to the logic you’ve spent all this time building up. This is a purposeful contradiction to how the world you’ve set up is meant to work.
What makes this variant weird is that it bucks the laws of nature you’ve set up. If rare is “you don’t see that every day”, weird is “that shouldn’t happen”.
You can buck all the rules of the universe you’ve set up or just a specific few — that part is up to you. Sometimes things are “weird” because they defy all expectations, while other times they’re “weird” because it’s not easy to understand why they obey some of the universe’s laws, but not others. Sometimes “weird” encompasses “that shouldn’t happen”, but also “that shouldn’t happen like that”.
The man with the suitcase is one brand of weird. But if one day he threw the suitcase into the ocean and a bunch of terrifying creatures poured out of it, that’s an entirely different brand of weird.
Weird stuff should provoke the most universal reaction out of your characters because they don’t have to be specialized or knowledgeable in anything to know when something is weird. Weird things are often portrayed as creepy as well, if for no other reason than that they often represent the unknown, which is initially frightening even if they turn out to be completely harmless.
Ultimately, despite the fact that I’ve attempted to categorize these concepts, a lot of things in your story won’t fall neatly into these boxes. There is a large amount of blending that goes on between all of them. The main idea is to just have a basic understanding or feeling about what your characters think is normal, what is something that exists in the world but they haven’t seen often, and what is something that they did not expect to ever see.
When you’re working in a strange setting, it’s imperative to foster an idea in the reader’s mind that these characters are like them — they live in a world that is very different, but they interact like real people, react like real people, and just like we have strangeness in our world, so do they in theirs. Your characters are a huge part of what grounds your setting and how they react will be taken as a sign of how the reader should react.
In general, it’s important to set up the norms and expectations of your setting regardless of how strange it is or isn’t, but in my experience, a reader’s suspension of disbelief is tested a lot more with strange settings than in a book set in modern reality.
As a final note, I also want to warn against a pitfall I’ve seen and experienced a lot. When working in a strange setting, don’t feel the need to explain everything. Your readers don’t always need a full scientific explanation for how the world’s strangeness works so long as they have enough information to understand it conceptually.
The Cardinal Directive tells the reader outright that the normal Martian atmosphere is deadly to humans, but that dragons are bioengineered to survive it. We also see that they are capable of surviving Earth-like atmospheres, as they are kept in barns within the biodomes when not on missions. Readers have been shown that dragons can do these things.
I don’t need to come up with a detailed, scientifically accurate explanation for how an animal would be able to adjust to two very different atmospheres, and even if I did I would run the risk of getting tangled up in my own logic. The reality is, though I’ve done a fair bit of research on Mars for The Cardinal Directive, I don’t know enough about biology and space to design an organism that could handle that kind of atmospheric change. If I tried very hard to explain it on a scientific level, I’m much more liable to make a claim that falls apart upon further examination.
Unless you know what you’re doing, staying away from the deep specifics is often a safer bet for not testing your readers’ suspension of disbelief too much. Cardinal claims its dragons are bioengineered, so readers can make the appropriate assumption that somehow, scientists were able to create an animal that could do that.
This goes doubly so for fantastical settings. There is a healthy level of exploring your magic system, but you can go too far trying to make it make sense when it’s really not necessary. Just look at the backlash Star Wars got for introducing midi-chlorians.
I really love writing in fun settings like Cardinal’s. If you haven’t checked it out, I recommend you do! It’s posted on this blog as paid content every Friday and we’re just getting started with all the weirdness to come from it.
If you’re working with a strange world of your own and weren’t sure how to navigate setting it up for your readers, I hope this has helped! I’ll likely be revisiting other facets of this topic in the future, like characters and other methods of grounding a story that are all important for letting your narrative come to life.
For now, though, that’s all for me! Thank you for reading, and I’ll catch you in the next article!