Worldbuilding in naturist stories

Many authors feel like worldbuilding is something done for sci-fi and fantasy novels. Surely not also for contemporary novels occurring in the real world, right?

Naked Nance, by Marcel Lamotte, for example, is just about a young girl who likes to climb trees and who finds her neighbor nude in her otherwise secluded backyard. This introduces Nancy’s family to the world of naturism.

Everything that I said could have occurred in the real world, and as such, Marcel did no worldbuilding for this book, right?

The same with Ted Bun’s story Melissa, More or Less in which a widowed man connects with a new co-worker, and they go on a picnic on a clothing-optional beach.

No worldbuilding, right?

Well… Here is the thing. Even if Ted Bun’s books are very rooted in reality, the individual world of his characters needs to be created.

Marcel needed to imagine and thus build the backyard of Nancy’s family. He had to create the tapestry of characters in the book, and that’s worldbuilding too.

We normally call that “setting” rather than “worldbuilding,” but I think the difference is mostly one of scale. When we say “setting,” we usually mean the environment in which a story takes place, while “worldbuilding” suggests creating a larger fictional reality, often with rules of its own.

But both Ted and Marcel made efforts to create the realistic microcosm in which the characters of their books work. Each of which is a sort of small world with its own rules.

I do the same with my books. In Overcoming Trauma Volume 1: Nadia for example, I not only researched how a trauma nurse worked and created a fictional hospital for her to work at, but also a fictional naturist resort with a chapel of the fictional Southern Christian Naturist Church. I even wrote (with the help of ChatGPT) the Books of Christopher that they added to the Bible for their religious texts.

Fine, I was open with that worldbuilding, but Marcel and Ted did their own, privately, to ensure their stories were coherent.

It’s the same thing with The Tattoo Collector, but D.H. Jonathan added visions of murders in the dreams of the main character. A sort of paranormal event. Well, D.H. had to sit down and write the rules for his story to help us preserve our suspension of disbelief.

Ted Bun too needs to protect that! In fact, when I was first reading his book, The Summer of 71: A Crooke and Lock story. I had to put it down when a coincidence was too much for me. And yet, when I returned to the story, I was engaged by the plot and realized the genius of Ted Bun’s pacing choices. His worldbuilding allows for shortcuts in how the story progresses to preserve a fast pace of action. A coincidence for him isn’t lazy writing; it’s a plot device to remove chapters of unnecessary tedious investigations.

The Crooke and Lock mystery stories read less like actual investigations and more like action-adventure movies of the 80s. And that is a brilliant piece of story-world building that isn’t that obvious at first glance. It requires discipline and a certain talent.

In that series, worldbuilding isn’t only geography and technology. It’s also establishing what kinds of events feel plausible inside this particular story.

But there are naturist stories that require more word-building.

In Propagation, D.H. Jonathan creates (spoilers) a whole new planet with its own ecosystem, including probably the most terrifying animal predator I’ve ever read in a book. Seriously, I had nightmares about them, and D.H. was brilliant when he created them.

Marcel, in the apparently normal, real-world story The Naked Truth, also added an original sci-fi device that could be straight out of 90s sci-fi flicks. I won’t spoil anything, but I was taken as much by this side plot as by the core story, fascinated by his creation.

I did the same with Bared Connections, in which my weird (autist-coded but not autistic) protagonist Earnest creates a portal allowing him to connect two distant rooms, but which allows only living organic matter through.

This allows him to connect a rental home in another state to his apartment in New York to visit his best friend Cassie, a superstar singer on tour. But he can only travel nude through his portal, and when he invites Cassie back to his apartment, they have to do it nude.

And yet, that’s only one element of worldbuilding. We soon realize that Cassie and Earnest each have a superpower (Super Charisma and Genius Inventor, respectively), but so do the antagonists who are blocking Earnest’s plans.

I had to create rules for where those powers come from, how they form, and what their rules are.

But that’s what every author needs to do! In The Empty Nester, Ted Bun tells the story of an older couple whose kids moved out and who have to face the 2020 COVID pandemic at home when the husband is laid off. Ted created a brilliant art world that feels so real, but it’s straight out of his imagination, perhaps inspired by real-world events but still pieced together by him.

Good worldbuilding doesn’t just decorate the story. It creates possibilities and constraints for the characters.

And that brings me to my newest Kindle book, Worldless: Born in the Middle.

In this book, Jake lives on a generation spaceship built inside an asteroid. He is from the 7th generation, and the ship will arrive at its destination around the 15th.

He and everyone he knows are effectively Worldless.

I had to design how they get their air recycled (an algae deck), how they get gravity (6 habitat rings rotating around a central core), and how they can travel around (elevators in the rings, and a train in the core), how they get food (farm decks and growing deck) and even how families are formed (genetic matching selects four candidates for each young adult and they can only marry one of those four candidates to get exactly two kids).

I even designed how the genetic shake-up occurs: it’s always the men who move in with the woman they marry.

And it means that picking a wife also picks her culture. Amara is a cook of African origin, so life with her would mean different food and cultural traditions than life with Kanija, who is of Japanese origin. And yet, Kanija is from the same ring as his family. Marrying her would mean easily staying in touch with his parents and his sister. While Penelope is from a closed-off section with no ability to leave.

None of those systems exist merely because I wanted to show readers how clever my spaceship was. The marriage system creates Jake’s first problem. The geography determines whom he can see and where he can live. Penelope’s home forces a permanent choice. The ship’s aging systems shape Jake’s career. And because nobody aboard will ever see the world they’re traveling toward, preserving that ship isn’t an abstract engineering problem. It’s their entire world.

But their world isn’t the story. The story is about Jake, who first needs to select which of his four lovely candidates he will marry. They have a say too, so he needs to hurry to avoid all of them picking one of their other choices.

When he picks Penelope (spoilers), the cheese maker who lives in a closed section he can’t leave, he and his wife build a new life. He raises his kids and, later, his grandkids as he throws himself into his career.

It’s a story about love, about adaptability, and about using the worldbuilding to help the ship he lives on survive to the destination as things break down and sustainability becomes important.

But it’s also about stepping down when the new generation is ready, about being there for them, and also about making sure they are ready to fly on their own.

That Penelope, and thus Jake and his kids, lives in a naturist section of the ship is an element of the story, but it’s not the story.

And the ship isn’t the story. Just as the super powers in Bared Connections weren’t the story, or that the art world of Ted Bun’s The Empty Nester wasn’t the story.

What makes us connect to a novel isn’t usually the worldbuilding. It’s the characters; it’s their journey and the challenges they face.

The world is where they walk, but their journey is what keeps us hooked.

About the Author of this blog: You can find the author at Ericfounder.com and find his writings on his website naturist-fiction.com. He also created Naturist-books.com to list other naturist books to read.