Story when broken down into its very essence is escapism. We use story to leave our own circumstances, our own plane of reality so that we might visit another. Even if it is just for a fleeting moment, story takes us to places not our own. For some writers, the reality around them is a backdrop, a canvas upon which they place their characters. They can take America of the present, or the not too distant past, and craft a narrative upon it. I tell stories of a different, more expansive nature. The Fantasy genre offers its writers the option to craft worlds of their very own. Fantasy and Science Fiction writers imagine their own jewel worlds and they have to try and make them feel as grounded and real as our own. It is a task that can make or break even the best narrative, because it only take s a moment, a sloppy bit of paint here, or a careless breaking of the rules there, to show the reader the façade we build up to give our worlds the illusion of permanence.
How do we create worlds that feel well thought out, grounded, and real? Well, you treat it like a character! Think about it. If our characters are shaped by the world around them, then the world stands in direct opposition to something the character wants. It is a force that plays out beside the narrative you are weaving, creating the backstories of the characters, the histories, the conflict at the heart of the narrative. I have long proposed that the world is just as much a character as the protagonist and antagonist of your story. Everything the characters experience results in some way from the world around those characters.
I am guessing that many are tempted to write long histories stretching into the very foundations of the world. I was once, and while this seems like a logical starting point, I would urge you to stop and deal with the immediate setting of the story first. Is your story taking place in a single room? You probably won’t need anything from prehistory. Is it a train traveling across a continent? You might not need to define every single geopolitical relationship on the other continents. Deal with your setting first. Say a medium-sized city to the north, around ten thousand people. Good. Now define that city, why is it there, what is its primary drive (i.e. is it a trading hub)? Is it isolationist, self-sustaining? What level of technology does it have? What is the climate? What relationships does it have with neighbors? Defining your general setting can take up a lot of time and it is the most relevant to your story, so it is important to nail that, but you can go as far as you want with this!
Now, in the course of building your characters you probably also have developed a few tidbits of world-building that you may not have realized. Where the character grew up, how they interact with the world, and why, are all parts of the world-building process. Think of it as a web, the parts must fit together, forming a larger picture of the world as a whole. This helps with consistency since you are approaching the world from different perspectives. There is nothing that breaks a story harder than a world that is incompatible with itself. If your character grew up riding dinosaurs and shooting space lasers, then the rest of the world had better do the same or at least be very shocked that the main character is a raving lunatic. Having a world that is consistent is really what grounds it in the minds of the reader. They might not know all of the rules that govern this foreign land, but they need to know that the rules they do know won’t change at the behest of the author.
Shaping a world that feels real can be difficult, personally I think it is harder than creating characters most of the time. It takes longer to do right, and if done wrong it can be tough to root out. My most successful WriMo project went by the working title of Desert Mage, the idea of which I formed a few weeks before WriMo started in 2012. I had to make up most of the world on the fly and even one of the main protagonists had to be formed midstream. Some background first, Desert Mage was my second WriMo and the first one I did officially through the website. Since I came up with the story idea almost on top of the start date for WriMo, I didn’t have the time to flesh out my world before I started writing. You can clearly see this when looking at the writing stats for the book. WriMo keeps track of our daily word counts to help writers stay on track with their goals. My stats started lagging from the very first day as I struggled to shape my characters and world while also forming an intelligible story out of nothing. Ten days into WriMo of 2012 I was 11,000 words behind the target and did not catch up to the word count until Nov 24th of that year. Writing a story is work. Writing it as fast as you can is doubly hard. Doing it without a world or characters is herculean but not impossible. I finished that story in January of 2013 at almost 150,000 words and got great feedback on it, but the problems were already baked into the pie. The opening setting required some hefty reality checks about how a town could even exist where it did. The bandit city where the second half of the book takes place needed so much work that I have lost count the number of times I have rewritten it. I am not saying that the story did not work because of these flaws, it very much succeeded in spite of them, but problems with world building weakened the overall structure. Having inconsistencies or leaps of logic in the background can focus the readers attention towards something that is not the plot, and momentarily removes them from your literary world. Having a world that is consistent and grounded will keep your readers engaged and help tell a larger story without having to stop and give long bouts of exposition about how the setting functions.
Now, we have our characters in place, and we have created a world for them to play in. Now its time for the meat and potatoes of this whole thing. How do we weave our characters and our world together into a narrative story? That’s for next week!