"Soft Canon" is Something More Writers Should Consider

There are a lot of writers out there who try to nail down every corner of their setting so that it's as solid and immovable as possible. There will be hard rules about what is and isn't possible, timelines of events and developments going back ages (and in some cases to the dawn of time itself), and everything from the level of technological development, to the specific customs of particular households will be drawn out in exhaustive detail.

Generally speaking, you can never know too much about your own world, and the stories you're telling in it. However, I think that a lot of us really underestimate the benefit of what I'm going to call the "soft canon" approach.

Because seriously, it can make your life a lot easier.

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Leave Yourself Some Wiggle Room

We're all familiar with settings and worlds that have hard canons... but what does a soft canon setting look like? Well, two of the most prominent examples I can think of are the grim darkness of the far future in Warhammer 40,000, and the sprawling public domain horror project that is the SCP Foundation.

You'd think for settings so focused on paperwork there would be harder edges.

For readers who aren't familiar with these two settings, I'll break them down for you, explain the nature of their soft canons, and talk about why you might want to consider this kind of approach.

Warhammer 40,000, as a setting, is a sprawling galaxy of a million inhabited worlds. There is no single protagonist, and the works range from the grand, sweeping scale of things like the galactic war that was the Horus Heresy, down to small-scale investigations from inquisitors just trying to get to the truth, or fire teams of soldiers attempting to survive an impossible situation. Not only that, but we see so little of the galaxy that there could be a thousand and one astonishing things that we never even hear about; especially since major themes of the setting is ignorance, the loss of past, fact becoming myth, superstition, and secrecy.

The SCP Foundation universe is set in the modern day, and it deals with anomalous creatures, entities, objects, and events. The conceit is that the Foundation, along with dozens of other organizations, movements, and factions pursue things that cannot be explained. Monsters, ghosts, magic, and worse all exist in this setting, but these incidents are experienced piecemeal through the reports and files recorded by researchers. And given that this setting covers multiple universes, and that anomalies are by their nature inexplicable, things may often seem contradictory. Themes of secrecy, hidden worlds, and things which simply cannot be understood run rife through this setting as well, making it difficult (at best) to establish any kind of complete view of events.

Both of these settings are expressly designed to allow for multiple creators to tell a wide variety of stories, and having a softer canon makes that significantly easier to do without every contributor needing to be intimately familiar with every other creator's work to make their own stories fit. Not only that, but leaving things more malleable gives you more freedom as a creator. It also stops you from writing yourself into a corner by putting too many details too firmly in place.

Mechanisms For Soft Canon

Okay, so we've established what soft canon is (a setting where there aren't as many hard details of what's possible, and what history is and isn't fact), and talked about a couple of settings that use it. But what methods can you use to embrace soft canon in your own work?

Well, there are two major methods it seems to boil down to.

Let's begin at the beginning.

First, and arguably the easiest, simply don't mention too many details on the page. This is not to say you shouldn't be descriptive, but rather that you should strive to have a small-picture view of your setting and story. So whether your protagonist is a fighter in the astro marines, a noble born knight on a quest, or a young priest on a journey to combat evil, try not to include things they shouldn't (or wouldn't) know. This can be a big ask for fantasy writers, who are prone to the, "let me tell you about my world," condition, but if you just don't tell your readers everything there are plenty of mysteries left for them to seek out and experience, in addition to extra blank space you can fill in later.

The second method is to use rumor, belief, and conjecture to tell a history that may or may not be accurate. Instead of an unreliable narrator, we have an unreliable setting where much of what was once known is lost, and much of what is known now may not be as accurate as people believe. Lord of The Rings, Dark Souls, and other settings use this method to let the reader know that while some things are still known, there are huge gaps in history that have been lost due to death, destruction of empires, etc. This is also more accurate to our own history, where commonly believed things are actually falsehoods that have just been accepted over the years, and things that were once common knowledge are mysteries lost to time.

The key with soft canon is that you leave a lot of things in the background, or up to conjecture. Did the myths of the gods really happen the way the priests say they did, or are those stories made up? Has the great war that happened several thousand years ago become a story told around modern campfires, the fact faded into fiction and belief? Do the practitioners of the arcane arts know where magic draws its power from, or are they merely content to wield it even if they don't understand it? Or was that knowledge known once, and has been lost after the witch purges, and the destruction of the great libraries?

While you should have some ideas as to the true timelines of your setting, what really goes on in the corners of the galaxy, etc., your readers don't need to know those things. Especially if they are outside the scope of the story you're currently telling. And a little uncertainty can go a long way in driving reader speculation, encouraging fan theories, and giving you as much latitude as possible when telling future tales.

And if you are designing an RPG setting, I would highly recommend taking this method under considerations. It's what I've been using for Sundara, and it's been a godsend. More on that in What is "Sundara: Dawn of a New Age"? for those who are curious, or check out the AMA I did a little while back instead!

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