How to Craft Weirdly Compelling Fictional Worlds

What ALL Writers Can Borrow from Speculative Fiction — with Amy Shearn

Art by Mariam Chagelishvili

This lesson is part of The World-building Collection with Amy Shearn — check out all the workshops HERE to learn what ALL writers can borrow from speculative fiction to craft vivid and memorable fictional worlds.

Strange Beliefs

---

I really went back and forth on what to call this lesson, because I think the most accurate way of describing what I want to talk about here is: “How giving your characters strange beliefs can create a real sense of the unreal, which will give your story a unique quality that will make it unforgettable for your readers.” That’s a little long, but it’s basically what we’re doing here.

Because here’s the thing: every time you read a work of fiction, you’re entering the unreal. You’re believing in beautiful, well-crafted lies. Even if it’s realistic fiction, or autofiction, you’re still letting words on the page weave a reality for you. Which is pretty weird when you think about it!

Something I love in speculative fiction is when the characters have strange beliefs that are so powerful and all-consuming that they create their own atmosphere. This happens the most in ghost stories. I thought about this a lot when I was putting together my novel Unseen City, which is about a haunted house. I decided I wanted my book’s ghosts to be real in the world of the book, because my book was about what haunts the land in which we live. (If you’re interested, I wrote about some other novels that have “real” ghosts here.) Even though in the world of this book the ghosts are real, the protagonist’s belief in them sets her apart from the mainstream.

But many amazing and terrifying and thought-provoking ghost stories involve psychological hauntings – you come away from the book unsure whether there’s a real ghost at all, or whether perhaps the protagonist(s) have gone mad. Shirley Jackson’s atmospheric The Haunting of Hill House comes to mind, or Henry James’s classic mind-bender The Turn of the Screw. In the film version of Stephen King’s The Shining, it’s ambiguous whether the ghosts are real (though in the novel, they’re pretty convincingly real). In these books, the people who believe in the ghosts might well be losing their minds.

In some ways, I think hauntings are even scarier if the ghosts aren’t “real.” A real ghost – like Beloved, in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, or even the weirdos lurking around Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol – indicate unfinished business, the resolution of which will pop them like soap bubbles and send them on their way. If the haunting is inside one’s mind, things are murkier, and harder – or impossible – to fix.

Exploring the Unbelievable

---