Guest post written by The Rumor Game author Thomas Mullen
Thomas Mullen is the internationally bestselling author of six previous novels, including Darktown, an NPR Best Book of 2016, which was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Southern Book Prize, the Indies Choice Book Award, and was nominated for or won prizes in France, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The follow-up, Lightning Men, was named one of the Top Ten Crime Novels of 2017 by The New York Times and was shortlisted for a CWA Dagger Award. He lives in Atlanta.
The Rumor Game is a gripping historical thriller set in World War II-era Boston and follows a determined reporter and a reluctant FBI agent face off against fascist elements.
It’s always great to get positive feedback, but the first time someone complimented me for the “world-building” in one of my novels, it took me a moment to understand what they meant.
As a novelist, I spend a lot of time thinking about character, plot, style, and setting. As my first novel was set in 1918, I needed to do a lot of historical research to make sure I knew what I was writing about. I honestly didn’t think of this as world-building—I’m not even sure I’d heard the phrase at the time, 20 years ago. Maybe it’s bandied about in writing seminars, but I hadn’t formally studied creative writing and honestly hadn’t even been thinking in those terms.
Over the years, though, I’ve come to realize how important world-building is, and how it stretches across novels.
My new novel, The Rumor Game, set in Boston during World War II, is my eighth novel. Six of my books have been set in the past, but two have been what the critics these days call “speculative fiction”: The Revisionists (2011) was set in the present, but one of its characters was a time traveler from the future; and my most recent book, Blind Spots (2023), was set in a world mostly like our present one, except for the fact that everyone’s eyes have stopped working and we use implanted devices to see.
What I’ve learned from writing the two different types of novels is that world-building is every bit as important whether your story is set 100 years ago or in a futuristic world with fabulous inventions.
When we read, we want to feel like we’re right there with the characters. The unique way they talk, the slang and other terms they use—whether it’s people in Game of Thrones throwing around phrases like “the Iron Throne” or “Winter is coming” while debating the merits of dragons in warfare, or the lords and staff of Downtown Abbey discussing valets and earls while calculating dowries or discussing women’s suffrage—do so much to sweep us away into a new place, a new time.
Unless you’re writing something autobiographical, anything you write will require some degree of world building to convince your reader that they’ve been transported there. If you’re writing historical fiction, that means doing a lot of research, not just about what inventions existed and what jobs people had but, more importantly, about what was on people’s minds. What were the big debates of the time? What controversial new schools of thoughts were elbowing their way into the discourse? What were the big disagreements of the age, the fault lines, the arguments? What would your characters be discussing, worrying about, hoping for? What are some things we today typically accept as true about human nature that were still being hotly contested back then? The more of this you know, and the better you’re able to use it to inform your story, the more convincing your world will be.
It’s equally true of speculative fiction, although here you need to rely a lot less on research and more on imagination (a tool of the writer that’s too often overlooked, in my opinion). Sure, you can always research things like new technology or even time travel, but much of what you need to create you’ll have to come up with yourself. Then you need to use these ideas to make the reader believe they’re truly there, every bit as much as if it was a historical setting. Again: what are the big issues that people in your speculative world are debating? What are their hopes and dreams, their fears, their obstacles? What new slang do they use, how do they travel, how do they read (God, I hope they still read!). How do any new inventions or government systems inform how do they interact with each other, how they commit crimes, how they fall in and out of love?
All of these things will help you figure out your characters and build your plot. Part of the magic of fiction is that there are no visuals, so we writers get to use words that paint invisible pictures inside our readers’ minds. As we tell our stories, we build new worlds inside people we’ll never meet. Hopefully, if we do our job well, those worlds become a part of them.
I’m drawn to the evocative prose of historical fiction, which brings history to life with its vivid descriptions and immersive storytelling.