1. Kirsty says:

    “if the writer can’t explain where people grow food or where they go to the bathroom”
    This is my problem with Stargate Atlantis (which I love, btw, but it always niggled me – going on a one-way trip with no obvious provisions for these things)

    • Keith W says:

      In the very first episode they show a very looong line of supplies going thru the gate with them. I imagine there was some food store mixed in with all the equipment. As far as the bathrooms, well they were going to a city, and the ancients, were basically human, so it follows to reason that there would be facilities like that in the city, just because we didn’t see them, doesn’t mean they weren’t there.

      • Emily Golus says:

        Yes, that’s something I didn’t mention. If your characters are hiking through the woods or traveling through a city, the audience implicitly knows where people do their business and you don’t need to explain. The same goes for Earth-like worlds with green spaces–we can assume there are farms somewhere. The trouble comes in where there are extreme settings, such as a city of ice caves or a desert asteroid, where food and waste could be a logistical problem.

  2. Kirsty says:

    I agree – you can suspend your disbelief for all kinds of impossible things, but the real-life things need to be real life.

  3. Great article. To some extent, what you state here is one reason I’ve become a plotter… so I can think through all the implications of my story to be sure they make logical sense.

  4. Making worldbuilding details deep and accurate helps make stories easier to write sometimes, too. Yes, it becomes a lot of details to work through, but at the same time it can help fix writers block. Realistic worldbuilding gives characters challenges, at the very least, and thus more story/plot material. Especially when the author considers how each of these worldbuilding elements would interact with each other.

  5. A.K. Preston says:

    Really liked your thoughts regarding fictional villains. It always makes me roll my eyes when I see an antagonist who is self-consciously evil. Unless you’re talking about a primordial, Luciferian-type being, virtually every evil person still thinks of themselves as “good” (even Hitler). In fact, the entire point of a well-crafted story is to set up a moral argument between the ideas of the protagonist and antagonist. The common “Disneyfied” depiction misses this completely.

What do you think?