Entertainment in your Storyworld

We’ve spoken before about how little details can help color your storyworld. Societal habits, mating customs, dinner choices, and environmental aspects are all key to fleshing out a believable living space. Another aspect to consider is the way in which your characters entertain themselves.

Sometimes entertainment plays a central role in a book. The entire concept in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games is a deathsport reality show, partly to show the Capitol’s control over the Districts, but also partly to entertain the masses. Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One shows a world in which reality is miserable and everyone escapes into a massively multiplayer online game. This “game” supports commerce, education, and other activities, but entertainment is a major aspect, especially considering the bleak reality outside of the virtual reality “OASIS.” And Aaron Gansky’s Hand of Adonai series presents a World of Warcraft type game in which the protagonists get trapped, Tron-style, and must figure out how to escape.

In those three examples, the entertainment medium is actually the centerpiece of the novel, but it’s also the major point of tension. Specifically, each of the forms of entertainment is broken or twisted in some way, and the characters must overcome the challenges that arise.

Should entertainment play a major role in any other type of novel though? What if you have a story in the Wild West? Or a post-apocalyptic survivalist tale? A Space opera? I would argue that entertainment should be valued by your characters if you want them to feel like real people. That’s because all humans desire to have comfort and enjoyment at least part of the time (hopefully their lives aren’t always threatened by events like the ones in your novel!).

For example, John Scalzi’s The Ghost Brigades is a book about super soldiers defending humanity from a ghastly assortment of different alien species. And yet, Scalzi helps to make the storyworld feel alive with little windows of enjoyment. In one scene, a pilot is playing poker with some friends, in another, a father pirates a broadcast signal so his daughter can watch TV, and most importantly, an alien race is revealed to have no need for arts and entertainment. And this alien race realizes its lack of culture and strives to create it.

Or take Little House in the Big Woods. The novel chronicles the survival of a young girl and her family in the wilderness. Despite the struggles, there are times where she and her sister enjoy the musical talents of their father, or the two inflate and seal a pig bladder and kick it around like a ball. Personally that’s disgusting to me, but it really does help me picture the world in which little Laura Ingalls lived.

If your story is a non-stop adventure, you might feel like you don’t have time or space in your book to show scenes of enjoyment. That may be true. While not a book, the first season of the TV show 24 really pushed its story along with scant little room to explore its characters’ hobbies. Nevertheless, the first scene with the protagonist shows Jack, his wife, and his daughter finishing a late-night game. This one scene helps establish Jack’s normal life before the world started falling apart. It thus gives us an idea of what he’s fighting to get back through the whole first season.

Even if your story is very dark and the adventure extremely perilous, I would really encourage you to figure out some hobby or interest your character has to make him more personable. This is especially true if the world is very different from our own, because the character’s chosen entertainment could be used to show how foreign or similar that world is to ours. For example, a sorcerer in a fantasy adventure might enjoy magical sculpting – which might be a sort of enchanted pottery making. Or maybe he enjoys reading books of far-off adventure. In the first case, the hero has a hobby similar to one found in our world, but he clearly lives in a different reality. In the latter scenario, the sorcerer has an interest akin to that of your readers, making him relatable despite his extraordinary talents. Both are useful, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish.

That’s all for now, and possibly for a while. My wife and I are expecting our fourth child in a few weeks. Being a stay-at-home dad with four children ages 6 and under (and homeschooling the oldest two) will mean I won’t have much time to make regular updates at A3. So after two years of storyworld contributions, I’ll be taking a sabbatical for a little while. In the meantime, if there are any particular topics you’d like to see covered in the future, please leave a comment below and I can cover that subject when I return! Thanks guya and gals!

Ghost Brigades Image from: http://www.alisoneldred.com/imageJohnHarris-Illustration-2-58.html

Pig Bladder Kicking Picture from: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/270638258827560791/

24 Family Picture from: http://www.buddytv.com/articles/24/hottest-tv-dads-jack-bauer-24-17503.aspx