World Building

How do *you* world build?

There's nothing I love more than a fantasy world. I imagine most people would agree that a story's ability to transport you somewhere else is its greatest value. Personally, I like that somewhere else to be a place full of magic and adventure, so, naturally, I try to craft my worlds in a similar fashion.

In The Nephilim, Sophie and her cohorts exist in a modern world, much like ours, with layers of fantasy on other planes of existence. But those layers are largely based on Judeo-Christian and Zoroastrian mythologies that I've doctored a little (or a LOT) for my own purposes as opposed to creating an entirely brand new world from scratch. I suppose we never TRULY create any world from scratch--I firmly believe every thought has already been thought, that the bake an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe and so on--but there is a lesser degree of difference between the world of The Nephilim and our world than most others that I've written.  Despite that I've created their world, I don't consider it formal world building (that's probably dumb, but it's just a classification for my mind only). Of course, it's got its magic, its creatures, and most importantly its rules, but it felt a bit more natural to me. I knew how things worked on instinct. That's probably because I grew up largely without religion but surrounded by Catholics (What? How? Don't ask me, I don't know!), so I've had a vague idea my whole life that things like Heaven and Hell, angels, and some dude named Satan existed somewhere that I couldn't see, and I just wrote The Nephilim's world to be the place I came up with to process all of that incomplete information. (And then I sprinkled in vampires because, why not?)

Now I'm working on a more classic fantasy quest tale, taking place in a medieval-esque world with elemental magic, elves, knights, and all that fun stuff. I have been attracted to the genre my whole life, but always felt, I guess, "left out" of it because I was a girl, but I didn't want to be saved: I wanted to go on the adventure (more on that in a future blog post), so I took to writing my own. I've crafted a number of fantasy worlds, some purely for my imagination, some based heavily on existing ones that I tweaked for my own liking, and some I've even actually put down on paper (who would have thought?). But they all start the same way: with a character.

I don't initially build around a concept for magic, a creation myth, or a specific history, but a person. I like character-driven stories and I always felt strongly about focusing on relationships and internal struggles even before I knew what that was. A character presents herself to me through a dream, an overheard conversation, or even the face of someone at the grocery store, and I start in on her life. She gets a vague backstory to start with and then a purpose. The *thing* happens to her. I let her come alive through a scene, typing it up and putting in random details that sometime I don't even understand at that moment. At the end, I don't always use that scene or I rewrite it so completely that it's unrecognizable, and sometimes it's the beginning to my story, but that is almost always my base.

Then I take a step back. I ask myself what kind of world would she live in for these things I've just written to be true. I do a lot of social construction at this point because I like creating a world where my characters have to defy a norm to complete their objectives. Society is a good, passive antagonist, and I believe fantasy should always hold up a mirror to our world and make us stare at what we've done. I work on socio-economic classes, gender roles, and race relations, and that usually helps me form some supporting characters that either adhere to, enforce, or defy those roles. Then those characters get fleshed out in a similar way to my main character. They may not get a free-written scene, but I give them a patchy backstory, a purpose, detail their relationship with my main character, and give them a place of origin. Then I have to ask myself again: in what kind of world would these people exist?

Maybe that seems backwards? It sounds like cheating, but don't be fooled: if a character wants to do or be something, it has to fit within their world. There won't be any computer hackers in medieval Imaginaria, but if a character presents herself with the qualities of one she may be employed to, say, resolve a cryptogram. And when multiple characters start coming to life, so do the rules. And by "rules," I do not mean social expectations, but the natural laws of the world: things that cannot (for the most part) be broken or changed. Gravity. Weather. Childbirth. My rules usually first pertain to magic and its true origin. That origin may not be what some or any of the characters are taught or believe, it may never even be revealed, but it is vital to know because everything else must harmonize with it. Magic use may look like chaos, but once revealed its existence must harmonize with its genesis. Again, the characters must fit. Are you a sorcerer who can stop time? Sorry, buddy, you're actually not because no one can do that. Perhaps instead you can hypnotize others into thinking they've lost time, or your can paralyze them so that you can sneak about unnoticed, but I know the truth, mister!

From here I typically start filling in the plot of my story. My main character's purpose and goals give me a skeleton to start with, and the supporting characters make up a nervous system of meetings and partings and conflicts and love, but here I add on the muscular system of the plot. The thing that keeps the story moving. I still consider this world building because I learn a lot about my world from plotting the story. Oh, they run into mountain trolls? So, wait, mountain trolls exist here in Imaginaria? No, there aren't humanoid creatures like that here, but there are shapeshifters, so perhaps they'd be more likely to be accosted by a band of rogue stagmen. The plot also allows me to flesh out the map. Because, again, even if my character doesn't know where she is, the location of everything else in the world must be relative to her and makes sense if and when revealed.

I then go what you might call "a little crazy." This is the part where I step away from the computer on a day when I'm home alone and I cook or clean or do something that keeps my hands busy, and I talk to myself. A lot. Animatedly and loudly. Bonkers, I know, but I am most productive and imaginative when words are spewing out of my mouth and I'm hearing it back, like live-action editing. I talk through some of the ideas in the world, like how the most popular religion works, and ultimately try to explain it the way a certain character would to the main character as that's typically how my reader will learn new information. Sometimes I write this dialogue down, sometimes I don't, but it's a good way to wade through the shit ideas and get to the good ones.

At this point I have likely begun writing. I make myself a lot of notes as I go (GoogleDocs is awesome for this) so that I can remind myself that a certain place needs a name, or to ensure a magical occurrence follows the natural laws, or to give a character a name that has similar phonetic sounds to the place they're from, but since I know that ideas about my world will evolve as I write, there is no reason for me to put the story itself on hold until every detail of that known universe is carved in stone. I usually get too excited to hold back anyway, and I've actually learned a great lesson in editing by doing this: before I hated removing sections and rewriting plotlines because I would become way too attached to what was on the paper, but now I write with the expectation that things will change, and it's considerably easier to let go.

Of course, world building is exponentially more involved than all of this, but that is my basic method. So how do you world build?