Primary or Secondary: Should Worlds Collide?

So now you’ve decided to write a fantasy novel. Great! You can exercise your imagination in the fantasy genre in a way that doesn’t quite work in any other. It doesn’t mean you don’t have to be consistent with what you decide to do, but you can work free of the constraint of what can happen, and allow yourself to wonder ‘What if it could happen?’ That’s great; you’ve literally opened yourself up to writing about whole new worlds.

But what world should you pick? Are you going to write about magic in our world (the primary world)? Or are you going to create a secondary world to work in? The first gives you inherent structure; no matter how many vampires, angels, demons, elves, dragons, or ancient magics you put in, it still has to be recognizable as the same world we all live in. A secondary world gives you more latitude to express your ideas, but requires careful world-building, so that the reader recognizes it as some place that makes gut-level sense, and can therefore identify with it.

Or should you do a combination of both? There are really two ways of doing this: postulating an alternate Earth in which things have evolved partly along the same lines as our own world, but are also partly different, or taking characters from a primary world and putting them into a secondary world (or vice versa). There have been some very fine books written of these sorts. However, I want to focus on the latter; mixing characters from our primary world and a secondary world.

Books where our world intersects with another have been among the best books ever written: I grew up on the Chronicles of Narnia, Alan Garner’s “Elidor”, Joy Chant’s “Red Moon and Black Mountain”, and quite a number of other really fine books that are precisely written to accomplish something by that juxtaposition. In the Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis was working with a meld of children’s story and subtle Christian allegory, and he needed to ground the story in our world in order to make the allegorical parts make sense. In “Elidor”, magic first encountered in the land of Elidor follows the protagonists home to our world, which is where they must deal with it. In “Red Moon and Black Mountain”, the main characters must learn lessons that they could not encounter in their own world, and then bring them back home.

There are many examples of adult fantasy doing this as well: In Barbara Hambly’s original Darwath trilogy introduces two protagonists from our world because, as outsiders, they did not think like those in the story, and their Earth-based problem solving and perspectives help to come up with solutions that the inhabitants of Darwath cannot. As a more recent example, Lev Grossman’s “Magicians” trilogy juxtaposes our world and Fillory in order to sketch out themes of the seductive power of magic and fantasy.

But I’ve seen a lot of books which take a character from our primary world, throw them into a secondary world, and immediately have them be home, acclimatize immediately, and be part of that world so thoroughly that it’s like they were never a part of our own.

Why is this a problem? There are a number of reasons. For one thing, you just finish up with your setting, only to have to re-establish another for no good reason. That can lessen the punch of the story, and the beginning of your book is not the place you want to soften your impact. Even if you make the character switch worlds in a dramatic way, the incongruity of the two settings may simply confuse the reader, who is trying to put the pieces together. Furthermore, you are creating a ‘gun on the wall’ (or ‘Chekov’s gun’): a theater term for the fact that if you introduce an element that the audience (or the reader) identify as having major potential to affect the plot, such as hanging a gun on the wall, it needs to be used later on in the play or the audience will feel unsatisfied. Creating a primary world origin and then ignoring is like hanging an unused gun on the wall.

I understand the temptation to do it. It can be a way the writer connects with the story; they may see themselves in the character, and feel like it helps them to identify better with their protagonist. But easy is not always best, and the tradeoff of the author’s ease of identification may be a distancing effect on the reader, because it may cause the author to skimp on the kind of character building needed to carry the story.

One of the hardest parts of writing a novel is coming up with a coherent and complete structure. I myself am a ‘pantser’, tending to write first and restructure the plot afterward. Clearly I see nothing wrong with this, or I wouldn’t do it. But at some point the writer has to look at their story structure and decide what they ultimately want it to accomplish. A pantser has to be especially careful with making sure the elements of the narrative fit together in the revisions. And one of the most important elements is the decision of what function the story’s protagonist plays in the story. If the author does not understand that point, they may well make the mistake of starting the main characters in one world when doing so is simply a distraction and a waste of impact. If you don’t know why you want your character to start one place and go another, you might want to rethink your plot.

So when you’re beginning your story, consider this: what world, or combination of worlds, will help you tell your story best?