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Several months ago I came up with the bones of an idea for creating my own fantasy world. Over time, I developed it briefly, but after reading some posts about worldbuilding I began to work on it in depth…and it is hard work. Every time I think “Maybe this is enough” something else pops up for me to try and figure out. I read somewhere that worldbuilding goes over and above even characters and plot if you want the reader to be fully immersed in this new world, but how much is enough? Do I have to create new foods, new festivals, new animals? Talk about how a wedding is performed in each of the kingdoms? Courting practices? Do I have to know exactly how many towns, cities, and villages there are and have a name for every one, not to mention the forests, rivers, and mountains? I’m afraid that the worldbuilding will be so much work that when it’s done I’ll be sick of the world I’ve created and not write anything for it, or that I’ll write too little and get stuck halfway through because I haven’t worked out the mechanics behind one thing or another. If anyone has any advice, it would really be appreciated!
Tagging @anyone
*whispers aggressively* "The HONOUR!"
@Joy excellent question. Someday I want to write a book on worldbuilding, but I’ll try to refrain from dumping the entire tome off on you right here. XD
The first thing, I think, is to realize that worldbuilding is not so much a list of facts about where your story takes place as it is a key— like the key on a map— to discovering why your story took place where it did.
I know. Extremely confusing.
But worldbuilding is just like any other writing technique. If it doesn’t tie into the story, it’s useless and distracting. We have to care. And we’ll only care if our understanding of your world is essential to our understanding of the story— and not just geographically.
For instance, if the traditions for courtship in different cultures don’t align, and the MC tries to court a woman from a different culture and ends up unwittingly insulting her entire family, then we care. If the MC is trying to get someone to guide him over a stretch of mountainous wilderness and can’t, because the people of that region worship the mountains and hold them sacred, then it matters to us.
It’s not enough for us to simply know where the MC is, like a speck of dust floating in a bowl of colored water. We have to know that where he is, and the flavor of the world around him, will directly affect his future— like a germ floating in the middle of a vat of soap and cleaning chemicals.
You can build your world in every last detail before you start writing, yes. But you don’t have to, because honestly, the reader doesn’t want a list of random facts. They become immersed in the perils and questions the world poses for the MC, not the depth and complexity of the world itself.
I have one world. I’ve had it since I was fourteen, and I still don’t know half of what there is to know about it. I take time to narrow in on one thing at a time, once I actually need to know something about the world to weave it in with the story.
Does that answer a few of your questions?
Fantasy, more than any other genre, is about the past, so the most important thing to nail down is the past history of your story world. Allegorical aspects are good to nail down early too if you want to have them. If you’re going to have magic, nail that down early. Oh, and nail down a map of all the lands included in your story, so you know where things are.
Other than that, you don’t have to do any worldbuilding before you start writing. The only worldbuilding that matters is the worldbuilding that fits with the story. Either it impacts the plot directly or it speaks about important characters/cultures or it affects the mood of the scene. You can get lost in a sea of details, but readers are there to read a story.
Personally, I do most of my worldbuilding on the fly and it’s working just fine. For instance, I know I’m going to have a desert culture in book 3, but I don’t know much about them and that’s fine. I will when I get there. This doesn’t mean I don’t think ahead or worldbuild whenever I’m able, but I don’t have to have everything worked out before I pick up my pen.
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Oh, drat. Kate just stole my secret fire. 🙁
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@Daeus I’ll have you know I was racing to get that typed out before you posted and said all my stuff for me. XD
No, good points though. Maps are important… I have them… in my head… XD Allegorical and historical elements too. Oooh ooh, in fact @Joy, I actually have a cool thing for you. Four ‘pillars’ for you to figure out, that’ll give you the basics of every separate culture and a good starting point.
History
Religion
Geography
Economy
Those are the four pillars of every culture. If you can give at least a basic summary of each of them for every culture, you can pretty much leave that culture alone until you actually need to dig deeper. At least in my experience. 😉
@joy Yeah, worldbuilding can get tough sometimes for me. It’s easy to fluctaute between way too much and not enough.
Umm… @kate-flournoy, whenever you get around to writing that book about worldbuilding, be sure to send me a link and I’ll probably buy a copy to keep in each room of my house… 😀 I need to know what you know.
@joy besides what Kate said, there’s one more thing I would add: when worldbuilding, go deeper, not wider. Some worldbuilders try to make sure to make everything super epic, and so they make a thousand planets for thier sci-fi novel, ten thousand cultures for their fantasy world, along with one million kinds of magic… but it’s all a bit boring, because it doesn’t have substance. Thus, explore your fantasical elements more deeply, rather than tacking on more shllow ones (wider).Do just a few things really well, fully explore and develop them, and they will be really fun to read about. Kind of like what Kate said, make sure it matters to your story. Figure out the effects of things you make up- ‘if this happens in such a world, how would that change the culture?’
And to try to answer your question, no, you don’t have to make up all the things you mentioned. You only have to mention things that are relevant to the story- so if a wedding takes place for an MC, you’d want to have invented how weddings take place in your world. But if your MC never does any cooking, you don’t need to explore how the cooks in your world make dragon eggs by carefully heating the eggs for seven days, then dipping them in a special sauce that drips through the shell and seasons the insides, then bakes them in a mound of coals for a day… unless, of course, your MC is a cook and does that.
Does that make any sense?
*Giarstanornarak tries to melt chair*
Also, Daeus has 22 turtles in his signature.@Sam-Kowal ha! Well, remind me, and I will. ;P
And YES. Depth is everything. If you can boil your entire world down to a single deep, resonant core story/concept, so much the better for you. Hard to stress enough how important that is. Focus on what you have and make it so magical you don’t have to go look for other things to distract you.
@kate-flournoy I literally screenshotted that mini-essay of yours, it was so helpful xD
@joy I’m actually wondering about some of these things, too, so I’m afraid I don’t have anything for you. I’ll just hang around and see what other people have to say. 🙂It's g-h, 2-4-6-8 twice, three 9's
literatureforthelight.wordpress.com@joy I think that maps are the most important thing. You should at least map the direct areas where your story takes place, because you need to have consistent distances – we don’t want it to take a month to go somewhere and a week to get back. Also, if you have traveling in your story, you want to let your map shape the travel, so that the obstacles are consistent – in other words, maps are the key to consistency.
I can’t tell you how much world building to do exactly, but I do know you should know more about your world than you need to. You should not heap information in your book about courtship rituals and silverware and what dragons’ scales are made out of, but knowing some of these things without even mentioning them in your book will still affect the atmosphere.
Hope I’ve added something helpful to this discussion… 😀
Silence! Silence everyone, for the king's speech!
I think I’ve pretty much got those four pillars worked out, so yay!
Thanks, guys! This is my first time ever doing an in-depth worldbuild so I just wanted to get some direction. You all have been a great help 🙂
That’s quite some url you have, Grace 😀 I hope the answers on this post helped you as much as they have me!
*whispers aggressively* "The HONOUR!"
@Joy perfect! So glad it was helpful. 😀
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