Iceberg style of worldbuilding

Last night I was having a discussion with Chris H. about a critique that I had received for “The Unmodified Man”.  The core of this critique was that one of the characters in a flashback (other than the character experiencing the flashback) was the same character in the present, and that that character was playing what amounted to the same role.  This could be a potential point of confusion for the reader.  I agree.  During the relating of my reasoning for having this character in both flashback and the present to Chris and how I intended to address this issue, I found myself talking about “evolution of character relationships over time”, and “give a feel for how organizations might be different when people live much longer than we currently do”.  This led to my trying to label what I was doing and I coined the terms “iceberg style” of worldbuilding, and its counterpart, the “styrofoam style” of worldbuilding, to help explain this reasoning.

In the “iceberg style”, the author presents only a fraction of the world to the reader, yet the reader is aware that there is much, much more to that world than they are seeing (i.e. a strong “keyhole effect” is generated).  The “styrofoam style” of worldbuilding is essentially superficial, a sort of what-you-see-is-what-get form of worldbuilding where 90% is “above water”.  Clearly, I am implying that the “styrofoam style” is the inferior of the two, but this is a little misleading.  I think there are times when writing genre fiction that the “styrofoam style” is just fine, such as when the author is relying upon the reader’s prior experience with the genre to fill in the details.  This is most common in satire and parody, but it has a role when the author is trying to compress the process of story telling or not place emphasis on the world.  (I should be able to come up the some examples of where the “styrofoam” style isn’t a negative, but I am completely failing to do so.  I’ll add some examples later, if I think of any, or someone helps me out.)

As to the solution to the issue that started this, I will continue to use the same secondary character in both the flashback and present roles, but will use his last name in flashback and his first name in the present, both (potentially) reducing confusion about which part is flashback and which is not, and emphasizing that the relationship between the main character and the secondary character has changed.

Related posts:

1. Fritz’s Mini-Rant on the Decay of Western Civilization and the Role of the Writer
2. Wanted: Genre Writers’ Group
3. Underrated authors post on SF Signal

This entry was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 11:54 am and is filed under Critique, Critiquing, Genre, Idea, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.