Worldbuilding for the Undead (or do wraiths eat bacon?)

[naomi_jay]

So Death for the Born is doing the rounds at my writers' group, and one of the issues that keeps coming up is wraith physiology. My main character, Yasmin, is a wraith who can take either the form of a human being or mist. And this seems to be a huge sticking point, because everyone wants to know if she has a fully functioning human body when she's in human form. Does she need to eat, sleep, use the toilet, etc? Does she breathe? If she has lungs, a heart, whatever, where do they go when she turns to mist?

And the answer is mostly, I don't actually know. I wrote the first half of this book for Nanowrimo 2007, so at the time it was just a case of "get the words down, sod it if it doesn't make sense!" So I didn't stop to think about whether or not Yasmin had human needs whilst in human form. I know she sleeps (mostly for narrative convenience; a character who's awake 24 hours a day requires a lot more plot than I had at the time). I know she eats human food, but she doesn't need to - it's a comfort thing. (The last chapter reviewed had her in bed eating a bacon sandwich which bothered one of the group who felt it ought to be a vampire sandwich).

Most of the other undead creatures in the book are pretty well set. I know my vampires, my Lich Lords, my ghouls, how they function, what they need to survive, and what can hurt them. Yasmin is a bit different and I hadn't really figured out all the answers by the time I finished the first draft. Having spent hours agonising over whether or not she has kidney stones, I came to the conclusion that I might be overthinking things. I'm not sure. Are these the tiny details on which the whole book will rise or fall? Or are they the tiny details that readers will overlook because they accept that we're dealing with supernatural creatures?

I'm setting the rules in place as I redraft, figuring out how much physical damage she take, what happens to her bacon sandwiches when she turns to mist, and whether a vampire could kill her. I swear though, if I have to spent another writers' group meeting trying to explain why vampire sandwiches are not going to happen, I'm scrapping the whole book. It's bacon all the way.

Comments

[i-am-toast.livejournal.com]

I like my workable science in sci-fi/horror (which is one reason I loved the TV series Ultraviolet) but I imagine it is much less important in the genre you're writing in. You're not aiming it at sciencey sci-fi geeks who will throw it in the bin when there's a bit of nonsense about vampires and religious iconography, for example. Bram Stoker didn't piss about with where the lungs went and he didn't do too badly.

[naomi-jay.livejournal.com]

Lol, yeah, I do think one of the problems is that a lot of the people at the group are hardcore sci-fi fans. They expect maps and diagrams of how everything works. The more fantasy-orientated writers are happy to let it slide.