Writing Advice: How to Expand Your Universe

Before we get to the question, an announcement: We have started recording Unsheathed Podcasts again! If you don’t remember, Unsheathed was the podcast that K.M. Hirosaki, Kit, and I did for a few years where we talked about writing and blow jobs and other related topics. We’ve started by going back over the original episodes and reviewing our questions for them. You can see transcripts of the first two online already, and you can listen by looking up “Unsheathed Podcast” on whatever RSS reader or podcast service you use. And over on the Sofawolf Academy, we have an Unsheathed community where people discuss the episodes and ask questions we might answer on future ones.

But here on the Substack, I’m answering other questions. This month’s question comes from Jay Dee, who writes: “How do you go about adding a new story with a different perspective to an existing universe without rehashing the existing stories?” (They also asked how much to include to make the reader feel comfortable or familiar with the world—to let them know this is the same universe, in other words.)

Having written a lot of stories in different universes myself, I feel pretty qualified to answer this question. Jay Dee actually further clarified “Forester Universe stories without Dev and Lee,” which is funny because the Forester Universe predates those two. Kory and Samaki apply to Forester University in Waterways (published a year before Out of Position), and they applied to Forester because I’d already created it for some short stories earlier, an Upper Midwest college that was a nice setting for some porny stories about college students. The proto-Forester story is “White Night,” in FANG 1, although there I don’t name the college and it supposedly takes place in “Chicago.”

Early on, when I was writing short stories, they all took place in or around the college, so including the college’s name was all I had to do to establish that they all took place in the same world. As the world became more well known, people assumed that any contemporary world I wrote with furries in it was in the Forester universe. I didn’t help the issue by putting mentions of Dev into Green Fairy and Camouflage, leading people to ask me if ghosts and time travel are real in Dev and Lee’s world.

But the point of Jay Dee’s question remains, and the fact is that more people know the Forester Universe from Dev and Lee’s books than anything else. So how did I keep writing in that world without rehashing the same stories?

Dev and Lee’s story, at its heart, is about finding yourself and standing up for your identity in the face of social pressure. Not every Forester Universe story is about that (Squeak Thief, just released, is more of a rom-heist in which confidence is not a problem for either main character), but a lot of them are because I feel like it’s an important story to tell in today’s world, especially for a queer audience. There are lots of different ways to tell the same basic story.

Hopefully, though, after spending a lot of time in your world, you’ll have some ideas about other stories you could tell. The way I come up with other stories is often through side characters. Ty Game came about because I’d written a little scene where Ty has a meeting in a gay bar and I thought, I wonder what happened there. Or I’ll have an idea for a story, and because I don’t want to make up a whole new world if I can help it, I’ll see if it works in Forester. Love Match came about because I was reading about the complicated emotions of the Williams sisters meeting each other in major finals, and I thought, what if someone was playing a final against someone they had a strong emotional connection to (beating Challengers by almost a decade, thank you)? That story fit well into the Forester universe. By contrast, my story based on The Wife of Martin Guerre, a 1500s French court case (I admit I came to know of it from the film The Return of Martin Guerre), fit better into a medieval setting, and so it went to Argaea and became Return From Divalia. Most recently, I had an idea for a horror story that got a little massaged into a paranormal adventure and became the Dangerous Spirits spin-off Azure City (out next year!).

Anne McCaffrey’s original novella “Dragonflight” became a novel of the same name wherein dragonriders, vigilant against an ancient threat, faced opposition and dwindling numbers until that threat returns and they have to face it. But with their existence justified, what happened then? Further politics led to the next book in the series, and then the desire to examine the lives of people on the fringes of society brought her to The White Dragon and the Harper Hall trilogy. There were more books after that, about how people arrived on this planet, among other things, but it was definitely not the same story over and over.

I think the answer to “how do you not re-hash the same story” is two-fold, then. First of all, if it’s an important story, why not re-hash it? Maybe that’s what readers want. Some authors make a very nice living telling basically the same story over and over again. Second of all, if you spend enough time in your world, you will discover other stories waiting to be told. See if your ideas will work in that world. Ask yourself what other stories might be suggested by the things that are unique to your world. Follow the events of your first stories and see what might follow logically from them.

Having all these ideas, how would someone who’s only read your original story/series know that another story is in the same world?

What’s important here is whatever is unique about your world. The easiest things here are people and place names. If you begin a George R. R. Martin story and see the word Targaryen in the first paragraph, you can be pretty sure this is in the world of Game of Thrones. Fans will recognize the name and immediately have a sense of the world. Similarly, early on I would just put the “Forester” name into my stories so people recognized the world and could associate it with the other stories. As the universe grew, so did the place names—Forester place names are related to our world’s names, sometimes easily decipherable and sometimes less so—and so people grew to know Cottage Hill, the gay neighborhood in Port City (Forester’s analog of New York), as well as Yerba (SF) and Crystal City (LA). Dev’s coming out became a touchstone point in the culture, so that is mentioned in many books (and is the catalyst for Danilo’s journey in Camouflage) as well.

Anne McCaffrey just needed a dragon in her books to let readers know they were going back to Pern (the Harper Hall books, not about dragonriders, were prefaced with an introduction to Pern, which also works). Whenever Malcolm Cross makes references to clones, you can be fairly sure you’re in his San Iadras world (in which he’s told several different types of stories). If there’s a distinct feature of your world, bring it up early on in your story and your readers will click into it.

I place lots of stories into the same setting because, as I said, I’m lazy and it’s a lot of work to make up a new world, but also because I like exploring different aspects of my worlds. Argaea’s stories started with nobility and branched out into stories of some of the poor people in that society. Forester Universe started with horny college kids and has spawned more stories than I can count—literally, because I’ve lost track of some of the short ones and whether or not they were published. It can be rewarding to create your own expanded universe, and people enjoy going back to worlds they know. So think about new stories, remember what’s unique about your world, and go have fun in your sandbox!