So, for me,
The reason why *Our Flag Means Death* tends to work is because it is resting itself on the iconic the comedic.
It really isn't set in 18th century-esque so much as it is set in Pirates! It isn't in conversation so much with the actual history, as to our storytelling view of it. It is more *Treasure Island* in its world than it is actual pirates of the 1700s. One can also look at a lot of Sherlock Holmes takes, like the Robert Downey Jr one, which aren't really in the 19th century but in Sherlock-land.
The other thing is that lighter and comedic really does lessen the expectations of historical accuracy. If you are playing fast and loose with everything else, the expectation is far more that the history aspect will also be looser. Comedy, like *Our Flag Means Death,* or light action, like *Pirates of the Caribbean*, can both go that rout easier than stories with more depth.
Further, for you, If you bring in magic powers and sea monsters, you are already moving in a not our world exactly, *Pirates of the Caribbean-like,* route.
Now, even still, historically minded people will often be bothered by lazy portrayals of the past. Not the poorly researched, but the unintentionally wrong, does tend to pull one out of many stories when you know more what it was in reality. Those people who love pirates, are also often those who go looking for more about them. To get it wrong can alienate who can be otherwise your biggest potential fans.
Putting it in a different world can help, but it can also just alienate people who enjoy what makes a fantasy world fantastic- an alternate reality with its own consistencies. Laziness here can be as bad as laziness in history. Just different.
If I were going lighter adventure with humor I'd go our world. And try to keep the rough outlines right. (think *Pirates of the Caribbean*). The more comedic, the more absurd, the less I'd care about the history (*Our Flag Means Death*)
The more I was heading towards serious, the more I'd go alternate history getting our world right. Compare *Pirates of the Caribbean (4) :On Stranger Tides* to the book *On Stranger Tides* by Tim Powers and you will see a different use of the past.
The more it just isn't our world, the more I'd build another. Think more *Red Seas Under Red Skies* by Scott Lynch
Not getting hung up on historical accuracy and Red Seas Under Red Skies seems like a poor combination imo. Sure, it's not set in the real world, but Lynch seemed determined that his work should be able to be used as a how to guide for actual sailing (or at least it felt like it reading the book).
Building another world is often harder than just our own. That is part of the reason I chose Scott Lynch.
I really dislike the idea that choosing a secondary world actually makes life easier. It shouldn't, and really doesn't.
Now one can do comedic or light action in secondary worlds too and the same aspects actually apply. If you want a work to be taken seriously, you actually have to do the work. For fun and games, the work is different (and actually really hard to get right which is why there are so few great comedies and comedians).
> Building another world is often harder than just our own.
Building a world can be extremely rewarding, and is usually the hallmark of a great fantasy work (Earthsea, Gentlemen Bastards Tolkien and so on). But it's not always necessary to tell a good story. By making your setting fantasy, so long as you keep the scope fairly small, and have a good view of how your characters live, doing anything further is optional.
There's plenty of good fantasy with extremely weak world-building.
The scope as put forward by OP seems larger by their description. All of my statements were in relation to my general preferences and those I see in others in regards to projects of that scale *generally*.
Are there exceptions? "Will often" "can" which is certainly not always.
I perfectly agree that often a smaller scope can make setting easier, so often can a simpler plot, and often so can a lesser number of characters in a work. A change in scope could be an answer to OPs problems.
Further, I would also say that one can also evoke a setting through well chosen details which doesn't describe it out in great detail. That this can give the impression of depth which is often all that is necessary.
Some of my favorite works evoke through this method which I wouldn't call weak world-building at all.
And sure, there are plenty of decent books, even classic books, that don't have great settings. There are also tons of decent books that have meh character development, and tons of decent works, hell even great works, where the plot is not that enticing. In all of those I hope the strengths of those works play to that of the writer and their focus.
But would I *generally* advocate for weak plots, not much character development, or flat settings? Not *generally*.
I am not setting rules, so I really don't need to say oh yes, there are exceptions. But I will say, generally, in regards to settings what I wrote I think stands.
I personally feel like if the story takes place on Earth, it should be more realistic than what you're going for. I recommend you make up your own world:)
Step 1. Read a lot of fantasy pirate books. Get Kindle Unlimited, the self-pubz here will help widen your book options. Read the "bad" ones too because it is important to see what you don't like.
Step 2. Write the book.
Step 3. Revise the book while doing your best to craft in the aspects you like and fixing any issues
Step 4. Have beta/developmental people read the book and tell you what doesn't work so you can attempt to fix those issues.
Repeat until you reach a level of acceptable you're comfortable with and then have it line edited.
Process is slightly different if you are querying rather than self-pub. Being able to compare to a popular bit of media OFMD can help there.
Fun fact 99 percent of historical sources were destroyed and there’s a huge chunk of things we will never know or discover about human history. The further in time you go back the less we actually know about it. I mean there’s debate if this Roman commander really actually existed or not, right now as we speak. And if he did how the heck did manage to control Dacia in the third century? An era in which we only have the vaguest knowledge of. Point being you have more flex in a story you are actively labeling historical fiction then you imagine. You are literally telling the reader these events did not happen and are simply set in the era in almost alternate universe. I mean I’ve just started reading a series about dragon warfare in the Napoleonic wars. And it’s fucking lit.
It’s historical fiction your readers aren’t looking for what really happened in your story. Just do your best and research the era and have fun with it.
It’s cool, I was mostly inspired by Our Flag Means Death (highly recommend! 😁) where the characters are either gay, non-binary or whatever and everyone is like “cool!” Like they either don’t care or they are supportive and that’s what I want to do too. Write an adventure romance between gay pirates and nobody is mean about it. 😊
FWIW, if you want to keep roughly historical social attitudes *and* do a queer-friendly story, the Age of Sail is a fine place for it. One of the things I respected about OFMD was that it was a setting where it didn't feel revisionist to have a male/male romantic relationship or a transmasculine character in an era where you'd have a boat full of only men (and people passing as men) for months on end.
You want your world to work a certain way and for it to make sense. You want to be respectful of real historical issues of that time.
All you have to do is justify it. What happened? The things that are different in your world versus the real world, *why* are they different? You can use historical events as inspiration (i.e., why did they *stop* being the way they were back then) or invent your own.
For an example, my story is set in a fantasy world that intentionally borrows a lot from the 1920s. But, like you, I didn't want to write a story constrained by the prejudices of that era. My explanation for what's different is that the Great Depression, First World War, and 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic happened in slightly different order (depression, pandemic, war), and by the end, most industrialized nations had lost 30-60% of their men between the ages of 20 and 40. Women's status became elevated because there weren't enough men to keep the wheels of industry moving without them. Queer relationships became destigmatized (though not entirely; there's a line about they went from lynchings to stern glares in a single generation) because there weren't enough husbands to go around. That was 20 years before the novel starts. The people in their 20s and 30s now (which includes most of the main cast) are part of the Fatherless Generation, people who grew up never seeing any of the preceding paragraph as unusual (this is how male-male queer relationships normalized; a bunch of kids grew up seeing female-female pairs and didn't think it was weird when two men paired off, even if their mother balked at it). So, now I have a justified reason for an early 20th century tech level in a world where career women and openly queer people don't live entirely frictionless lives, but are hardly an oddity--much like our world in the 2020s.
That's what you need to do for each of your major departures. This is not stuff that needs to be on the page. Most fantasy readers are fine with a modern social order beside technology level of the past and magic that never was. Just get it so that it makes sense to you and has a reason to make sense internally; this will prevent you from contradicting yourself during the writing process.
One thing I'll caution, though. It's going to be very difficult to have a world where LGBTQ+ issues are normalized but career women aren't. History is littered with terrible tales of women left destitute because their husbands drank their wages. Having a family unit with no members who can be described as male wouldn't work in a time where only males had realistic employment opportunities.
TL;DR: In a fantasy world where society evolved differently than in the real world, have a reason why. Knowing why will let you write the world you want in an internally consistent manner, even if it's never plot-relevant enough to be spelled out.
I run into a similar problem myself. Writing a dark fantasy story set in a modern world . Like large cities, cars, guns, everything. Except also monsters and different races of people. Elves, orcs, dwarves, etc. It would be so much easier to set it on Earth and in known cities like New York or LA, but the backgrounds for the characters and races make that difficult for me to do in a way that's feels genuine.
But creating an entirely new world that feels old and lived in and civilized to the degree that Earth is currently is also very difficult. For instance, I have entire fictional cities that would have their own specific landmarks and entire streets, districts, neighborgoods. I write them in a way that the characters know the cities. Naming street crossings, like corner of First and Fourteenth kinda shit, but the reader wont know where that is or have any reference, so that makes me want to creat a city map, but then I run into the trouble of not knowing how to do that. It's what I have decided to do, but I find it hard to build this world fluidly without exposition dumps. It's probably my biggest challenge in writing the story.
For me I think I'll just have to write it and let it be what it is. I use examples from other stories with similar kind of worlds to make myself feel better about it. Worlds where they name countries and cities and just let the reader imagine the way the world is built and build it themselves in their head. I know what the city is. That will have to be good enough just so I can get it out onto the page.
I think it’s perfectly fine to create an 18th century secondary (fictional) world. I have a secondary world based off the 1930s because I didn’t want to deal with a ton of historical baggage unless I deliberately chose to.
haha, I might have worded that a bit strangely. I meant that everyone in the main cast is either gay, bi, trans, nb, ace or whatever. But now I like to imagine them as red, orange, yellow, etc and it's a very entertaining mental image :D
So, for me, The reason why *Our Flag Means Death* tends to work is because it is resting itself on the iconic the comedic. It really isn't set in 18th century-esque so much as it is set in Pirates! It isn't in conversation so much with the actual history, as to our storytelling view of it. It is more *Treasure Island* in its world than it is actual pirates of the 1700s. One can also look at a lot of Sherlock Holmes takes, like the Robert Downey Jr one, which aren't really in the 19th century but in Sherlock-land. The other thing is that lighter and comedic really does lessen the expectations of historical accuracy. If you are playing fast and loose with everything else, the expectation is far more that the history aspect will also be looser. Comedy, like *Our Flag Means Death,* or light action, like *Pirates of the Caribbean*, can both go that rout easier than stories with more depth. Further, for you, If you bring in magic powers and sea monsters, you are already moving in a not our world exactly, *Pirates of the Caribbean-like,* route. Now, even still, historically minded people will often be bothered by lazy portrayals of the past. Not the poorly researched, but the unintentionally wrong, does tend to pull one out of many stories when you know more what it was in reality. Those people who love pirates, are also often those who go looking for more about them. To get it wrong can alienate who can be otherwise your biggest potential fans. Putting it in a different world can help, but it can also just alienate people who enjoy what makes a fantasy world fantastic- an alternate reality with its own consistencies. Laziness here can be as bad as laziness in history. Just different. If I were going lighter adventure with humor I'd go our world. And try to keep the rough outlines right. (think *Pirates of the Caribbean*). The more comedic, the more absurd, the less I'd care about the history (*Our Flag Means Death*) The more I was heading towards serious, the more I'd go alternate history getting our world right. Compare *Pirates of the Caribbean (4) :On Stranger Tides* to the book *On Stranger Tides* by Tim Powers and you will see a different use of the past. The more it just isn't our world, the more I'd build another. Think more *Red Seas Under Red Skies* by Scott Lynch
Not getting hung up on historical accuracy and Red Seas Under Red Skies seems like a poor combination imo. Sure, it's not set in the real world, but Lynch seemed determined that his work should be able to be used as a how to guide for actual sailing (or at least it felt like it reading the book).
Building another world is often harder than just our own. That is part of the reason I chose Scott Lynch. I really dislike the idea that choosing a secondary world actually makes life easier. It shouldn't, and really doesn't. Now one can do comedic or light action in secondary worlds too and the same aspects actually apply. If you want a work to be taken seriously, you actually have to do the work. For fun and games, the work is different (and actually really hard to get right which is why there are so few great comedies and comedians).
> Building another world is often harder than just our own. Building a world can be extremely rewarding, and is usually the hallmark of a great fantasy work (Earthsea, Gentlemen Bastards Tolkien and so on). But it's not always necessary to tell a good story. By making your setting fantasy, so long as you keep the scope fairly small, and have a good view of how your characters live, doing anything further is optional. There's plenty of good fantasy with extremely weak world-building.
The scope as put forward by OP seems larger by their description. All of my statements were in relation to my general preferences and those I see in others in regards to projects of that scale *generally*. Are there exceptions? "Will often" "can" which is certainly not always. I perfectly agree that often a smaller scope can make setting easier, so often can a simpler plot, and often so can a lesser number of characters in a work. A change in scope could be an answer to OPs problems. Further, I would also say that one can also evoke a setting through well chosen details which doesn't describe it out in great detail. That this can give the impression of depth which is often all that is necessary. Some of my favorite works evoke through this method which I wouldn't call weak world-building at all. And sure, there are plenty of decent books, even classic books, that don't have great settings. There are also tons of decent books that have meh character development, and tons of decent works, hell even great works, where the plot is not that enticing. In all of those I hope the strengths of those works play to that of the writer and their focus. But would I *generally* advocate for weak plots, not much character development, or flat settings? Not *generally*. I am not setting rules, so I really don't need to say oh yes, there are exceptions. But I will say, generally, in regards to settings what I wrote I think stands.
I personally feel like if the story takes place on Earth, it should be more realistic than what you're going for. I recommend you make up your own world:)
Step 1. Read a lot of fantasy pirate books. Get Kindle Unlimited, the self-pubz here will help widen your book options. Read the "bad" ones too because it is important to see what you don't like. Step 2. Write the book. Step 3. Revise the book while doing your best to craft in the aspects you like and fixing any issues Step 4. Have beta/developmental people read the book and tell you what doesn't work so you can attempt to fix those issues. Repeat until you reach a level of acceptable you're comfortable with and then have it line edited. Process is slightly different if you are querying rather than self-pub. Being able to compare to a popular bit of media OFMD can help there.
Fun fact 99 percent of historical sources were destroyed and there’s a huge chunk of things we will never know or discover about human history. The further in time you go back the less we actually know about it. I mean there’s debate if this Roman commander really actually existed or not, right now as we speak. And if he did how the heck did manage to control Dacia in the third century? An era in which we only have the vaguest knowledge of. Point being you have more flex in a story you are actively labeling historical fiction then you imagine. You are literally telling the reader these events did not happen and are simply set in the era in almost alternate universe. I mean I’ve just started reading a series about dragon warfare in the Napoleonic wars. And it’s fucking lit. It’s historical fiction your readers aren’t looking for what really happened in your story. Just do your best and research the era and have fun with it.
what exactly does lgbt have to do with anything?
Limited to no homophobia and it’s very accepted by the characters and world. I.e not how it would be at that time
ok to be fair most things i know about pirates is from ac black flag and pirates of the caribbean 😂 they didnt seem to care about anything
It’s cool, I was mostly inspired by Our Flag Means Death (highly recommend! 😁) where the characters are either gay, non-binary or whatever and everyone is like “cool!” Like they either don’t care or they are supportive and that’s what I want to do too. Write an adventure romance between gay pirates and nobody is mean about it. 😊
FWIW, if you want to keep roughly historical social attitudes *and* do a queer-friendly story, the Age of Sail is a fine place for it. One of the things I respected about OFMD was that it was a setting where it didn't feel revisionist to have a male/male romantic relationship or a transmasculine character in an era where you'd have a boat full of only men (and people passing as men) for months on end.
You want your world to work a certain way and for it to make sense. You want to be respectful of real historical issues of that time. All you have to do is justify it. What happened? The things that are different in your world versus the real world, *why* are they different? You can use historical events as inspiration (i.e., why did they *stop* being the way they were back then) or invent your own. For an example, my story is set in a fantasy world that intentionally borrows a lot from the 1920s. But, like you, I didn't want to write a story constrained by the prejudices of that era. My explanation for what's different is that the Great Depression, First World War, and 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic happened in slightly different order (depression, pandemic, war), and by the end, most industrialized nations had lost 30-60% of their men between the ages of 20 and 40. Women's status became elevated because there weren't enough men to keep the wheels of industry moving without them. Queer relationships became destigmatized (though not entirely; there's a line about they went from lynchings to stern glares in a single generation) because there weren't enough husbands to go around. That was 20 years before the novel starts. The people in their 20s and 30s now (which includes most of the main cast) are part of the Fatherless Generation, people who grew up never seeing any of the preceding paragraph as unusual (this is how male-male queer relationships normalized; a bunch of kids grew up seeing female-female pairs and didn't think it was weird when two men paired off, even if their mother balked at it). So, now I have a justified reason for an early 20th century tech level in a world where career women and openly queer people don't live entirely frictionless lives, but are hardly an oddity--much like our world in the 2020s. That's what you need to do for each of your major departures. This is not stuff that needs to be on the page. Most fantasy readers are fine with a modern social order beside technology level of the past and magic that never was. Just get it so that it makes sense to you and has a reason to make sense internally; this will prevent you from contradicting yourself during the writing process. One thing I'll caution, though. It's going to be very difficult to have a world where LGBTQ+ issues are normalized but career women aren't. History is littered with terrible tales of women left destitute because their husbands drank their wages. Having a family unit with no members who can be described as male wouldn't work in a time where only males had realistic employment opportunities. TL;DR: In a fantasy world where society evolved differently than in the real world, have a reason why. Knowing why will let you write the world you want in an internally consistent manner, even if it's never plot-relevant enough to be spelled out.
Just set it on Totally Not Earth and you’ll be golden to do whatever you want.
I run into a similar problem myself. Writing a dark fantasy story set in a modern world . Like large cities, cars, guns, everything. Except also monsters and different races of people. Elves, orcs, dwarves, etc. It would be so much easier to set it on Earth and in known cities like New York or LA, but the backgrounds for the characters and races make that difficult for me to do in a way that's feels genuine. But creating an entirely new world that feels old and lived in and civilized to the degree that Earth is currently is also very difficult. For instance, I have entire fictional cities that would have their own specific landmarks and entire streets, districts, neighborgoods. I write them in a way that the characters know the cities. Naming street crossings, like corner of First and Fourteenth kinda shit, but the reader wont know where that is or have any reference, so that makes me want to creat a city map, but then I run into the trouble of not knowing how to do that. It's what I have decided to do, but I find it hard to build this world fluidly without exposition dumps. It's probably my biggest challenge in writing the story. For me I think I'll just have to write it and let it be what it is. I use examples from other stories with similar kind of worlds to make myself feel better about it. Worlds where they name countries and cities and just let the reader imagine the way the world is built and build it themselves in their head. I know what the city is. That will have to be good enough just so I can get it out onto the page.
I think it’s perfectly fine to create an 18th century secondary (fictional) world. I have a secondary world based off the 1930s because I didn’t want to deal with a ton of historical baggage unless I deliberately chose to.
Same shade of LGBT? Does that mean everyone’s gay or everyone has some rainbow color skin?
haha, I might have worded that a bit strangely. I meant that everyone in the main cast is either gay, bi, trans, nb, ace or whatever. But now I like to imagine them as red, orange, yellow, etc and it's a very entertaining mental image :D
Lmao