I’ve always been kind of fascinated by world building and I get to explore it in-depth in one of my projects. In many cases the setting you develop is just as important as the characters, and can, in fact, be MORE important. The setting that you choose can affect your characters in many ways. It affects how and where they live, what level of technology they have, their beliefs and religions, their lifestyle, clothing, food, just about anything you can think of. It makes sense, all those things would change if you lived in ancient Egypt compared to 1950’s America.
I find history and cultures really interesting, which works well for me when I’m trying to create brand new ones from scratch. In my version of world building I have to figure out where I want my main characters to come from, what I want them to be like and then I build their societies around them, build their geography around them that would lend itself to their customs and skills. I have to look at where I want those characters to go, what parts of the world need to be developed in order to allow them to get there.
People don’t necessarily need to see or be aware of everything you create, but it can help to have the basis laid out, to create yourself a map of the world, otherwise it can be easy to get lost in the many details.
Don’t panic though, because everything can be changed if it needs to be changed. Creating your own world allows you to liberal and do what you want with it. You still need to keep in mind that a fantasy world should react in a similar fashion that the actual world does. Are there treaties, what happens if a storm wipes out a food source in a specific place, what if there’s economic collapse or war? It sounds complicated, and it is to some extent, but these are things that you need to think about. If you don’t know and understand the world you’re making then you can’t really share it with readers.
That’s it for now, I didn’t want to make this too complex or long and I’m eager to get back to it.
Thanks for stopping by!
-Erin