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Hey there! You're reading the Tuesday Telegrams, a bimonthly newsletter from author Naseem Jamnia. Every other Tuesday, I send out a Telegram that's either writing related or a personal essay. You're currently reading a writing-related Telegram, which is where I give updates on projects, behind-the-scenes look at my work, craft discussions, recent publications, event news, and other publishing things.

You can change whether to receive a writing-related, personal, or all Telegrams in the footer of this email. Go to "Update your profile" and choose from the drop-down menu.

Unfortunately, it seems that once I turned 30, my body decided to give up the ghost. I've been dealing with a sciatica flare and wrist/hand pain since last week, so the moral of the story is, I have to keep this Telegram short. Apologies!

Yesterday, I did a classroom visit with my old MFA program, and someone asked me about non-western worldbuilding. They wanted to know how you balance wanting to write a world that isn't European inspired with exposition, etc. This question comes down to reader expectations, the audience you're writing for, and the audience who is reading you.

In NK Jemisin's worldbuilding workshop, she talks about different levels of immersion. She argues that the more unfamiliar a world, the higher the immersion level should be (Keep in mind here that "unfamiliar a world" is focusing on a western readership that is used to seeing European-inspired worlds.) So, if you're playing outside the European/Christian/US-inspired world, have the reader more, and not less, immersed in the world, often by using a first person perspective. Of high immersion, she says, "Explain little. The strangeness of the world is conveyed mostly through context, and rarely in the narrative. Glossaries and epigraphs can help."

(I'll come back to glossaries, although epigraphs can be used to great effect—Robin Hobb and Martha Wells both do them expertly in their fantasies. Ironically, for all that I think Jemisin is one of, if not the, best speculative fiction writer of our age, I don't find her chapter-ending epigraphs as effective.)

Unfortunately, the difficulty in writing these "unfamiliar" worlds in first person is that unless that POV character is new to the world, what they'll focus on—what they'll describe, notice, think about—is not what the unfamiliar reader is necessarily going to understand. The way to get around this is to dig into that character's voice and figure out what they do notice, and give information that way. For example, I have a character who is of noble background, and the thing she particularly notices is clothes/dress/physical presentation. That can give the reader some cultural flavor without getting into details or heavy exposition.

(Again, unfortunately, there will be those readers who complain regardless—who don't like that they're thrown in without explanation or exposition, who don't want to do the work of meeting the world where it is and trusting the author knows that world and things will piece together for the reader as the pages continue. This is generally a sort of "shrug, what can you do problem"—except when that reader is an editor who uses that excuse not to buy the book. Granted, in that situation, you probably don't want them as your editor anyway.)

But I also think that sort of stuff comes down to brushstrokes: adding worldbuilding details as just that, details, lines or clauses or small observations. Brushstroke details bring the world to life, because much of culture, particularly everyday culture, happens in small moments—foods and cooking techniques, clothing options, slang, common phrases, swears/curses/insults, architecture and landscape, personal adornments, etc. Brushstroke worldbuilding is about showing cultural norms without spending time on them: "As they did every week, Jamnia grumbled about the lack of sidewalks as they drove two minutes to the nearest grocery store with its packed parking lot" tells us 1) Jamnia is used to having sidewalk access; 2) sidewalks are not the norm where they are now, forcing them to drive; 3) foodstuffs come from stores, of which there are multiple; 4) a lot of people drive to grocery stores, which is normal.

The nice thing about brushstroke worldbuilding is that it caters to multiple audiences—assuming the audience you're writing for is different than the majority of your audience. This is the case with me: I'm writing for Persian readers, particularly queer Persian readers, but I know the majority of my audience are not Persian (although the majority of my audience is queer). In doing brushstroke worldbuilding, I'm giving those in the know a nod to our culture, and those not in the know a glimpse of what that culture is.

Now, to return to glossaries, and, by extension, non-English words: there are those readers who love glossaries because it caters to them. Plenty of writers are writing to audiences who are unfamiliar with the landscapes they're describing, and a glossary can reduce that barrier to entry. But I think that's catering directly to an audience who may not be your primary audience if you're not writing to a western gaze.

Context should be enough for any "foreign" idea (and word; this is why I abhor italicized non-English words). The reader might not know the exact definition, but they should get the gist. (Google is a reader's friend, but when something doesn't use the Roman alphabet, it gets tricky to look up transliteration and actually find something.) I tend to do more hand-holding in the context around my non-English words than I do for explicit worldbuilding ideas: "pickled vegetable torshi," "soup-e mahecheh; lamb shanks should be cheap," "snacking on tart lavashaak." Regardless of if you know what torshi, mahecheh, and lavashaak are, you can intuit they're food-related items. Do you need to know that torshi is pickled vegetables used as a condiment for certain dishes, or that mahecheh refers to the shank, or that lavashaak is fruit leather? Not really, even though I imbedded those literal definitions in two of the examples.

Exposition is a necessary evil. But exploring the details of a culture, insofar as they build out your world—you don't need to go heavy in those. A lot of little strokes is how you build a painting.

My hand is speaking to me, so I'll have to stop here for today, but I hope this was useful!

Here are the usual links to aid Palestinians who are undergoing genocide:

• ​Operation Olive Branch​
• ​Care for Gaza​
• ​Adalah Justice Project​
• ​PCRF​
• ​Jewish Voice for Peace​
• ​ROOM Magazine's round up of resources; Autostraddle's round up too​
• ​The BDS Movement​
• ​Resistbot to contact your officials​

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