The Writer Will Take Your Questions Now #303 -- World Building in Action Stories

How important is world building to an adventure story?

World building means different things to different writers, I believe. To me, it means simply creating a believable setting in which a story can take place. In that sense, world building is paramount, crucial, and a story can only suffer in its absence.

However, applying world building to an adventure story must follow different rules from the ones established in turn of the century literature or epic fantasy, I think. In those kinds of stories, readers are often looking for a more verbose sense of writing style or a "grander" way to telling and/or showing the tale. But in adventure writing, readers don't want a lot of description of place and the symbolism of a particular color of curtains to get in the way of the more quickly moving action.

But, the little details you choose as a writer can and will make the setting more real, and should. If a setting feels generic, I know that I've failed as a writer. A reader almost needs to be able to smell the smoke from the Jazz club or feel the desolate rocky surfaces of the lost valley in order to really emote during reading.

Perhaps three of the best examples of setting made real through details are:

1. Philip Marlowe's Los Angeles. Sure, it's a real place already, but it feels more real when Chandler writes it.
2. Gotham City. I'm convinced that place is completely real. It HAS to be. 
3. Opal City from the pages of James Robinson's Starman series -- masterfully skilled world building in that one. Jack Knight wouldn't be Jack Knight if he lived any other place.

The Writer Will Take Your Questions Now #288 -- Character and World in Pulp Fiction

How much should character and world interrelate in pulps? 

What's more important, building the world or creating the character?

I love this question. I really do. I'm a huge fan of making the world (or you can call it the setting if you feel like it) a genuine character in the story. It's why I absolutely adore the Starman series by James Robinson, and it's also why my favorite Batman stories are not the ones actually about Batman himself, but instead the ones about Gotham City and its inhabitants and how Gotham shapes who its people (good and evil and otherwise) are.

So, to apply all that to pulps (which both of those series have a lot in common with, to be fair), I think the world should help shape the character of the, well, character. I feel that if a character (main or secondary or even foil) could be moved from setting to setting without that fundamentally changing who that character is, then that's a failure of the writer to make the setting crucial to the story and to make the character unique to the setting. In that sense, neither is important.

A case in point... When you take a character like Rick Ruby out of New York, it should affect him some way. A story with Rick Ruby in Chicago or L.A. would change the way he works, would throw him off his game, would cause him to think differently, cause him to be a different (in effect) Rick Ruby than he usually is. And it is the writer's job to make that visible to the reader.

I think this is a point where a lot of the more poorly written pulps of the classic era and today's New Pulp era break down and become what some refer to as "mere" pulp. I think there's a wealth of writers both classic and new who are able to take the world-building aspect of writer literature (but not with a snotty capital 'L') and apply it to pulp fiction in a way that raises the standard from "mere" pulp to the best pulp.