Some Thoughts on Worldbuilding · 9:58pm Feb 8th, 2017
His brow creased with concentration, Lofting set the ruler across the map, made a few fine adjustments, and traced a line from East to West. This done, he studied his handiwork a moment, laid his tools aside, and stabbed a fingertip upon where the pencil marks crossed. "That is where we must go," he said.
The rest of us crowded about him and looked to where he pointed. It was a good modern map, with more details and fewer blank spaces than my own. But it was to one of these blanks that Lofting pointed, and the pencil lines met in the space between two words: Unknown Territory.
Holy smoke--I wrote that.
The first chapter of my original novel is done, and the first step is taken. The bad news is, this has been the case since the week before last, and writer's block has promptly made its comeback. I think I know why: Starting with short stories is a good method to a point, but it gets one into the habit of completing a block of writing, then putting it down. Novel-writing is another thing altogether, with new skills to be learned.
Another new skill, as previously mentioned, is that of worldbuilding. I know a few would-be writers who are so enamored with it that they spend all of their time on it, and never write any actual stories. I have the opposite problem, as I find it an annoying chore, its only redeeming quality being the sense of relief when it is done. (Recently, Bookish Delight mentioned to me that he had a similar issue, having been in the habits of a fan fiction writer for years.) There is no easy answer, but so far it seems the solution must depend upon the writer's influences and real-world knowledge. Therefore, I can only give my own example.
Fans of my pony fiction will have noticed several recurring elements: Shipwrecks, isolated places, and messages from the past. These are not so much the influences of Poe and Lovecraft, but of H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Robert L. Stevenson, and James Hilton--the great adventure writers of yesteryear. I cannot resist a tale of a harrowing journey to Terra Incognita, in search of the Lost Treasure of Whoever. They don't make them like that anymore, but I suspect there is an untapped market out there.
Of course, there are no more blank spaces left on maps in real life, so we must go beyond our own world. But here we run into another problem: If one uses a fantasy setting, what is there to differentiate it from any other fantasy? My solution: make up a world made entirely of Ruritanias. In other words, there is no magic and no fantasy creatures, but this world's geography, history, culture, et cetera are all different from our own.
I confess there may also be some influence from the Civilization series of games. This fits with the old-time adventure story's themes of "civilization versus savagery"--people from a world of universities, telegraphs, and steam engines discovering, for example, medieval cultures on distant continents. As the "world map" of the story is revealed, I make things up.
What about the names of characters and places? Here, I cheat a little. Several characters are named after authors I happen to have on my shelf, and if that doesn't work, I skim through a phone book and look for something fitting. Place names are trickier, but there are a few ways to go about them. Here, I have the nation of Tarnland, and have tentatively named its capitol Lippincott. A "tarn" is a mountain lake, which is fitting because the nation in question is temperate in climate and (at least for now) politically peaceful. "Lippincott" is an homage to J.B. Lippincott & Co., a now-defunct publisher of several authors I admire.
These are my methods, and I know more will be forthcoming. Now I want to read about your methods. If you have done your own worldbuilding, (or, unlike me, found ways to keep going past one chapter) please share them below!
Cheers,
HV
I usually cruise Wikipedia for interesting things and references. Makes it easier.
I am one of those that build to much and never writes . But I love world building
It is so much fun for me. I take inspiration from real world periods, systems, events, people and mix them up in a way that works. Inspiration from others work also works. The most fun part for me is to make the history. Why are things the way they are? Once again the real world and/or some fictional work is good inspiration. I ask myself: what do I want from the story? what needs to be there to make it work?
I don't really have a method for world-building. I just look at the current form of my story and ask questions until I could paint you a picturesque map of their history.
I used to troll RPG sites for generators - give it a few letters and it generates an X. Names of all types, usually. And fractal 'world' generators. But these lack a definite je ne se quoi that handmade things have. Tolkien didn't have a fractal generated map for Middle Earth. Ann McCaffrey didn't have a name generator when she started Pern (and it kinda shows with the size of that dwarf planet). Something I used to do for hours in high school was try to make as realistic a map as I could when I could. That visualization can help greatly.
Subtlety goes a long way too, don't spend endless words explaining, imply. Your paragraph there is great at it, you learn this is an unexplored world, but quickly being revealed by adventurous types. An era of exploration, filled with some math and technology.
I know you are a master of that, tho
There was a blog by Ursula Vernon aka. T. Kingfisher (one of my favorite authors) about worldbuilding that I wish I could find, where she talks about having sort of metaphorical "cardboard quagga butts on sticks way off in the brush" or something like that. That she doesn't build full worlds, she has realized foregrounds but everything further back is just hints and bits and if examined closely would be cardboard, nothing actually there. The idea is that you don't need Tolkien's "ten thousand words about the world for every thousand words of story" approach to worldbuilding to make compelling worlds, you just need to put in enough little flavor pieces that it looks like a full world is back there somewhere, but the audience never actually sees it.
I tend to take that approach. I have a few settings I enjoy fleshing out slightly more fully (ask me about my Frozen Equestria sometime. I have put waaaaay more thought into the setting there, though I've finally started writing actual story for it lately) but in general setting for me simply serves story and I see no point in drawing maps unless I need to keep track of something that I might forget as I write.
I used to do more of the other sort, I have lots of maps and sketches and such for some of my childhood/early college stuff, but these days I'm more interested in getting to the storytelling, and less interested in making up fantasy languages.
I generally start with a core idea, and then start extrapolating from it. This is, I think, the source of the blank page problem - if I don't have a core, I don't have anything to extrapolate from.
One of my worlds came from me looking at an old gas mask and thinking about the killing fogs of London. I decided that I loved the aesthetic of people toting around turn-of-the-century weapons while wearing gas masks. Why would people need to wear gas masks? Because the world had become so heavily polluted with magical smog, the world was coated with the stuff - the only places with breathable air are the mountaintops, where civilization has retreated to. The world below is a world of machines and of terrible glowing smog. How are the machines still running? Well, clearly they're powered by whatever produces the smog - some sort of magical coal. But how could they produce automatons with turn-of-the-century technology? Well, this world clearly has magic, and it is necromancy - there are almost no animals left in this world, they put their spirits into their machines so they could keep the world running. And if you can do that, who wouldn't then experiment with people?
I just sort of built outwards from there.
I find a lot of my worldbuilding works in this way - I have some core idea or aesthetic, and then I work outwards from there so everything makes sense.
I don't have any real structured plan for worldbuilding. I just ask myself questions and let my muse pipe up until I have a sense of the place. Names, though, names are a killer. I've heard and forgotten the phone book thing several times now. It doesn't help that most of my work is in a setting where a descriptive noun phrase is a perfectly acceptable appellation.
I tend to make my worldbuilding as minimally invasive as possible. Just little references here to something beyond the current story being told—little quirks of people due to their culture/race, weather patterns that seem off compared to what the narrator is used to, a 1-2 sentence zoom-in on an animal of some such or an architectural structure in the scene all hint toward the wider world, which itself never needs to be directly built upon. This is why Dark Souls is so popular, and I've worked toward using this technique in my stuff.
My worldbuilding often goes like, "30k words ago, one character told a legend. Well, now it's very significant."