Hi, all. A few years back I wrote a steampunk fantasy novel, Wind Warrior, that has a few monster races. Now, some of the background details necessary for the plot are covered, along with other world-building details necessary for the plot. By contrast, I left some details of a monster race unexplored, partly for brevity (which I value), and to make the monsters more frightening and folklore-like by having some unknown details, even to the world's inhabitants. This race is the Dearg-du monsters, humanoid blood-suckers that resemble 7-feet-tall women with cherry-red skin, vampire-like fangs, and long black hair. They only drink the blood of human women and can enchant human men into becoming their mindless followers. They have sentience and higher cognitive function, minus things like calculus, technology, and philosophy. They are major antagonists in the story, along with werewolves and a large-scale rebellion against an autocratic regime. But certain details of the Dearg-du are unknown. Why do they all look like human women? Did they branch off our evolution, or evolve to look more like us? Are there undiscovered males in the wilderness, or not? How long do they live? Do they self-fertilize? Why only drink human women's blood? In the world, the definitive book on the Dearg-du, including anatomy sketches, is titles Enigma of the Dearg-du (in the world's language, it's titled Glennaig Ap Wenh Dearg-du). Does anyone else do this for any particular reason? What prompted to ask is that a friend of mine is also writing a sort of sci-fi fantasy future story with very thorough world-building where nothing is like what we know now. It's an exhaustive process for her, and by contrast, my book's world and aesthetic are easily digestible by using turn of the century steampunk and some Celtic mythology and naming conventions. So, I ironically deepened my story a bit by leaving some things unknown, even to the world's people. Who are we to fully understand and tame supernatural beings? They're like unstoppable forces of nature. We can't comprehend them; all we can do is survive.
I think in fantasy it's expected that everything won't be exhaustively explained. Part of why I'm more a sf person, myself - I can't turn my brain off and not scrabble for explanation, even if it's a cursory one. But that's mostly in writing, less so in reading. How and why your dearg-du exist is definitely something I'd wonder about, but if your setting / worldbuilding is such that a plausible answer is "because magic" - I might be satisfied with that. What would get me is that they sound like people, not fantasy creatures. They didn't (seemingly) come into existence "because magic". If they have high cognition, they have language, science, society - they didn't just pop into being via magic. I don't think you have to explain everything, but I'd want the sense that there is an explanation. And magic can still be part of that - I'd accept that they were human women who were cursed or something. In my wip, I similarly have a group of antagonistic people who we find out very little about, but because I'm sf-minded, I do plan to elaborate on them in later projects. So I tried to present them as operating on an internal logic - just one foreign to the protags.
What izzy said. In fact, you should leave some things out. If you explain every little detail (unless there's a good reason to do so), readers will get the feeling you're just trying to shoehorn it all in, like "Look at all this cool stuff I made!" Look at Wheel of Time - Jordan never explains half the weird stuff the characters run across. Same with Game of Thrones - if you read the wiki, there's an entire continent that's largely unexplored. It's basically just window-dressing - something to give depth and versimilitude to the world. Most of the time, you don't even need to know much more about it than the characters. In the case of the dearg-du, it might be good if you know, but I wouldn't bother filling us in unless we need to know.
No. It's there deliberately to give a "Here be dragons" part of the map, where nobody knows exactly what happens, or what monsters may exist. There's your trouble, to my mind; you're being way too detailed about them. I mean, how does anybody know that they don't know calculus (How in the hell did that make it into the list of things they don't know?)? Nobody knows whether or not I know calculus, because I can count on the thumbs of one foot how often (in 70 years) I've had a conversation about it. So how did humanity find that out, when half of humanity gets blood-sucked, and the other half gets befuddled?
The calculus detail wasn't to suggest that the people in the story know that the monsters can't do calculus. It was just an example here. More like, the people in the story have never seen evidence that the monsters can build buildings, use a writing system, or even create art. Or anything else that a human civilization has been known to do, which means that the people classify those blood-suckers as non-civilized, even though the monsters have speech and sometimes cooperate with each other.
I love explanations too. That's why I tend to love fantasy stories that explain things more than I like SciFi that doesn't Are you familiar with The Dresden Files (the novels, not the Syfy series)? Though to address @Ulquiorra9000 : I also love stories that don't explain everything. Especially when the horror is explicitly about how the protagonists don't know everything either (Doctor Who episode "Midnight") Except when the explanations make the horror more horrifying (Peter Watt's Blindsight) Explanations don't make a bad story good, and the lack of explanations doesn't make a good story bad, but explanations make a good story better.
to me it's a question of relevancy. is there a natural, practical reason someone would need to know extensive background information about these creatures? could a friend of the protagonist be descended from the race in some way and they need to dig for more information because she's getting sick? without a tie-in, too much information would just confuse me. my natural inclination is to believe that what i'm being told has weight to it, particularly if i have to take a lot of time to read it. if i get a massive descriptive info-dump i'll think it holds some kind of purpose later in the story. there is a super thin line between information that enriches the story and TL;DR. an interesting thing i noticed while reading an average-quality Kindle Unlimited e-book: when descriptions and explanations start to get too long-winded and unnecessary I skim the first and last sentence of each paragraph. often everything i need to know about the paragraph is summarized in the last sentence. for example, the author may take forever and a day to describe a monster down to the length of its eyelashes, and the last sentence sums up the whole point of all that description: the monster is fricking terrifying, and the protagonist is so scared he can't bring himself to run away. i think that's important for any author: read the last sentence of a descriptive paragraph and ask yourself if all the information that came before it supports the emotion you want to evoke in your reader. if it's too wordy, you may get everything you want to describe on the page but at the cost of distancing your reader from the story. could the conclusion of this paragraph be reached with fewer words? Could sentences be combined or shortened? if you feel it's important enough to include, what purpose does it serve? another thing that i've been doing is getting all my word-dumps on a piece of paper. every absurd question that could possibly be asked without any thought for rhythm or natural discourse is free game. if it made it in to my story it would be eye-crossingly boring. but then it's there, and i can set it aside and focus on allowing the story to unfold without feeling like i have to force a character to ask a conveniently-placed question in order to toss out a bunch of information that doesn't matter.
I skip nothing, because even in a lull there could be something important. Hate to find a continuity error due to lack of interest on the part of the author. You would be surprised what gets neglected in low points of a story that can later come back to bite one in the ass where such is concerned. Being vague for the sake of suspense is one thing to build tension is one thing. Deliberate lack of info is another. By the end it should be understood to the reader of what you are establishing in your monsters. Otherwise it may be construed in many directions that might detract from the overall effect that you were aiming to achieve.
I read monster races as racing with monsters and for a moment I was really confused. I feel like you, as the writer, should know the hows and whys of your own creations. Not every single unnecessary detail (it's easy to go overboard), but enough to be able to answer things in a satisfying way. What if your book gets wildly popular and all the readers wants to know more about those almost-humans? Or maybe there'll be an series and they will play a big part later? Wouldn't it be good to have a "file" on them now so that things will get cohesive later on? I don't know, I'm of the kind who is more likely to write a bit too much than to little, but that doesn't mean that everything should be in the book. Aside from that - it's probably good that the people in the book (and the readers) don't know everything, since it's usually quite hard to learn about "monsters" which you either get killed or enchanted by. The only problem I'd see is if the reader get the feeling of that you don't tell because you don't know.
Intrigue! It's something so much fantasy lacks! Too many fantasy writers creature beautiful, amazing worlds and creatures, then ruin it all by telling us too much. Leaving the reader wondering is great, it lets us fill in the gaps. Just like when you hear a sound late at night, you're imagination starts to think of the worst and most creative possibilities.
