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About a million years ago, I attended the Viable Paradise writers workshop in Martha’s Vineyard, MA. It was the 6th running of the class (I think they’re up to 16 now), and I was really fortunate to be instructed by the likes of Steven Gould and James Patrick Kelly.

Since then, dinosaurs became extinct, mammals came first to dominate the earth, and then to develop sentience and finally franchise cafes where you can pay $7 for a cup of coffee, and one thing from that class has really stuck with me. It was a lecture from James MacDonald, where he described his father’s commitment to detail in building model ships. He told the story of his father building a scale model ship (some WWII frigate, I think), where every part was exactly 1/16th of a inch of the actual size.

When his father got around to building the ship’s galley, he was sure to put in a stove, with burners and knobs, and a refrigeration unit. He also put in a 1/16th inch scale meat locker, for cold storage.





And inside that meat locker? 1/16 inch scale hams.





Now, once the ship’s model was complete, there was no way you were going to be able to see inside the ship’s hull. Even if you could, you wouldn’t be able to see inside the galley. Even if there was some kind of cutaway in the hull to see the galley, you probably wouldn’t have been able to make out the meat locker and you *sure* as hell weren’t going to be able to see the hams. The casual viewer of the model would never know they were in there.





But MacDonald’s father knew they were in there, and that, he argued, was what was important.





This is, of course, an analogy to writing. The “Hams in the Meatlocker,” are the details and worldbuilding that writers must do to fully understand their characters, the mechanics of their magic-system, the politics and cultural niceties of the societies they portray. There is a ton of work a writer must do to fully conceptualize a story. And it’s critical that this work be done; without understanding the depths of a characters flaws, goals, hopes, interests and idiosyncrasies (and I mean down to the most minute detail: what kind of music do they like? Who’s their favorite baseball team?), a writer can’t make their characters real and compelling. Without understanding every detail of how magic is called, bound, channeled and cast, you cannot have a magic-system that stands up to the kind of scrutiny smart readers (and genre readers tend to be awfully smart) are going to subject it to.





So, like MacDonald’s father, you *must* make the hams. And, like MacDonald’s father, you must *hide* them.





Because even though it took a TON of work to come up with all that stuff, your reader doesn’t care. They didn’t come to see your hard work, the scaffolding you built to prop up the facade. They came to be entertained, to sit back and enjoy a good story. The Turkey City Lexicon (and if you haven’t read it and aspire to write SF/, you should. It’s here, and lists the following as a classic background problem in stories: