Quote:
Originally Posted by John Carroll
Interestingly enough, the characters know more than I do. They've lived there all their lives and I'm just a visitor telling a story about the moments of their lives.
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Answer the following without looking them up anywhere:
What is the diameter of the Earth?
What is the mass of the Earth?
What percentage of the Earth's landmass is your continent of residence?
What percentage of the Earth's landmass is Antarctica?
How far from the Earth is the Sun?
How far from the Earth is the Moon?
And some trivia:
What is the approximate location (latitude and longitude are best, but even "about 80% of the way north from X" would be acceptable) of the following:
...the homeland of the Tswana?
...the homeland of the Munduruku?
...the homeland of the Khanti?
...the former location of Qashliq?
...the location of Timbuktu?
...the location of La Muy Noble y Leal Ciudad de Nuestra Señora Santa María de la Asunción?
...the location of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula?
...the capital of the smallest (by population) state/province/etc. in your country?
What is the capital of Turkmenistan (no, it's not Turkmenbashi-anything)?
What is the capital of Yemen?
What is the capital of Malta?
In what regions or countries can the following animals be found:
...the echidna (spiny ant-eater)
...the emerald tree boa?
...the green tree python?
...the tuatara?
...the muntjac?
...the addax?
What location is famous for the worst weather in the US?
What European country has the most miles of railroad track?
What is the per-capita GDP of Mali?
No, I don't expect you to know most of those; hell, I had to look up a few, and I'm the one writing them. But your average medieval peasant will know exactly
zero of them. He doesn't know much about his world. He may know a lot about the particular part of the world he lives in, and how the things he deals with on a daily basis work, but that's
all he knows.
Few people realize how much more the educated person of 2010 knows than his predecessors. People today have access to information that our ancestors could only dream about. Looking around me, I can see thousands of books. Prior to the printing press, dozens of books constituted an astoundingly large library, within the reach only of institutions (mostly monasteries) or very wealthy individuals. About half of my books are filled with knowledge -- they're references of some type. And that's just touching the surface of what I can find out because this computer in front of me extends my mind to hitherto undreamed-of lengths. I know more about ancient Rome than a scholar in the Renaissance would, despite only a dilettante's interest, because so much more is available and accessible. I don't spend my days in subsistence agriculture (and dodging dragons) either, and I have artificial light, which together give me the leisure time to read those books.
An ordinary person from your world is going to know about what he does to make a living, and he's going to know a fair bit about his immediate environment ... places within walking distance of home. But he couldn't answer those questions about his world. He doesn't know the equation for the volume of a sphere or know what tidally locked rotation is.
You do.
You know how the world works. You know where the countries are, and what's across the ocean, and what kind of people live over
there. You know what kind of geography is present, where the major mineral deposits are, how much a dragon needs to eat, and all the rest. Or you should; if you don't, you'd better figure it out before you realize your story is going to require a mountain
here and you've written about people all around there who have never seen anything but plains.
It's not a real world. They're not real people. You're not visiting a place that exists. They're
your creation, and you owe it to your readers to know everything that might be relevant about that world, and to create it to fulfill the readers' expectations and desires. That includes knowing a whole heck of a lot more about that world than anyone who lives there possibly could.