With blood. Or ketchup. Your choice, really.
No, seriously. Could someone write a dystopian about how the world just eats hambergers all the time? It’d be like the fictional version of Fast Food Nation.
On another note, sorry this is so late and I haven’t been blogging all week. I moved home last weekend and life’s basically been crazy since then.
Anyway, for this War-Paint episode, we’ll be talking about how to create a dystopian world.
It’s really not that complicated. First, you have to have something readers can connect to, like roads, and houses, or at least a habitable environment of some sort. This can be very closely related to science fiction settings where people could live underground or on the bombed out surface of the globe, or in airships for all I care. The only things that make it dystopian are the problems your main character runs into.
Also, dystopians can very much mirror our own society, like George Orwell’s world of Oceana mirrors Great Britain.
Your readers really just have to just be able to picture and feel your world. This comes from you incorporating the five senses. That’s not to say, however, “write a giant four-page description of every aspect of your world and drop it randomly into the middle of your novel”. No. That is info dumping which no one does because it’s NOT COOL.
See, people of the literary world, and most non-brain-dead readers like it when we sprinkle in the details of a world. Personally when I start my stories I like beginning in media res or dropping my readers into the middle of the action with little to no background aside from what the blurb on the back or the inside jacket would say.
So, how I world build is by using descriptions. In Divine I put the reader on the street with Caddy immediately. I have her stand in the shadow of a building, watching people rush by the New Italian streets bartering for things they can’t possibly afford in a collapsed economy. It’s through this short few moments of observation that the reader learns of airships from a foreign nation trade with the people of Cidy, and that Caddy’s not interested in buying anything on her own or coming into her money in any legal way.
Right there is an embodiment of your non-guilty, dystopian thief.
I use new technologies in my work since Divine is set a good couple of hundred years into the future, so they have things like airships and holoscreens and com centers and whatnot, so those are fun gadgets, many of which appear within the first chapter. However, in The Hunger Games, there weren’t really any new technologies.
Instead of a sparkling society with vast economic issues and rampantly equal materialism, you get rundown North Carolina settings, a sparkling Capitol that rules everything, and children killing other children. Spoiler alert: people die.
Both are dystopian worlds however because they deal with big issues. Divine on economic stability and the corruption of power, and The Hunger Games deals with the unjust treatment of people, is a social critique on the distribution of wealth, and comments on the fact that rights can be revoked, stripping the human race down to one of it’s most primal forms during the games.
A friend of mine’s even working on a book that calls out the government for getting rid of the arts in school, taking the issue to another level of course, but that’s the main point.
Your dystopian has to do something similar. You might not even realize what you’re critiquing when you first start writing. I didn’t, well kind of, but not really. It took me about a week to catch on to what my focuses were. But there’s a present day issues present in all of the dystopian novels today, and it’s quite fascinating to dissect.
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