Worldbuilding Wednesday

As I mentioned last week, Wednesday’s theme over the next several weeks is going to focus on the art of worldbuilding in your fantasy or science fiction story. A good source of questions to ask yourself when deciding elements within your created world can be found in Patricia Wrede’s Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions . This is an excellent guide to help you determine what factors you will need to consider.

Worldbuilding is a lot like character development in the sense that the more detailed you are in its development, the more you will learn about its history. For example, in character development many writers will build an entire back story for their characters or have a conversation with them to get to know them better. Often this process will bring out details we were originally unaware of that can explain some of the behaviors and personalities of our characters. With worldbuilding, the more detailed you are with the creation, the history behind this realm emerges. The writer then gets an understanding about how this will affect the emerging cultures of the beings that inhabit this realm. Learning the “whys” in your world will lead to a depth that you never expected and open additional potential story threads that will add dimension and credibility to the story.

Worldbuilding goes much further than drawing a map, naming the geographic locales (lakes, forests, towns and determining a geographic locale – it is building the personality of your world, deciding how everything is interconnected and how different elements will interface with each other. Knowing things like the geography of your world will help you determine things like the population of your world. Often the writer already has the main characters for a particular story in mind, but it may be prudent to wait until a little later in the process before creating your secondary characters. This way you can create beings that fit into not only the story but the world being created for them. You can then make certain you have laid out an appropriate route for your character to take on his quest making sure your characters will run into realistic obstacles to heighten the tension through the storyline.

One area that helps not only in defining your world, but in character development, is cultural differences. This is an area that can bring conflict into a story that happens in any world. Living in a world of diverse cultures that are appropriate to your plot can open horizons for rabble-rousers and malcontents inciting tension throughout your story. And in fiction, tension is a good thing.

What about other genres? What processes do you go through in determining your setting in the real world? Just a thought...



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