In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the main characters live in a post-apocalyptic world covered in ash and largely devoid of life. When James Cameron wrote the movie Avatar, he created countless reference books on Pandora’s vegetation and climate and even botany. Which idea for this new world most excites you ? An other-worldly landscape? A new language? Strange creatures? Build on that to give you the momentum you need when the going gets tough. Once you’ve determined your genre, paint for your reader a world that transports them, allowing them to see, smell, hear, and touch their surroundings. If you’re an Outliner, draw a line in the sand and start writing as soon as you’re ready, even if you suspect you’ll have more spadework to do as you go. If you’re like me, you may have to spend more time planning than you’re used to.
World building must not come at the expense of your story. Many fantasy writers tell me they become so engrossed in world building that they find reasons not to write. However, over-planning can also be a problem. Though I’m a Pantser, I can tell you that discovering a new world is a whole lot harder than building it before you get too deep into the writing.īuild your world first, then you can better focus on your story. Pantsers (those who write by the seat of their pants) write as a process of discovery - or, as Stephen King puts it, they “put interesting characters in difficult situations and write to find out what happens.”
Outliners prefer to map out everything before they start writing. Your job is to take readers on a journey so compelling they can’t help but keep reading to the very end. (The Chronicles of Narnia and Alice in Wonderland are also examples of this. The Harry Potter series, for instance, is set in the world we live in but with rules and history foreign to us. Some novels combine the Real World and Second World Fantasy. You also invent a world rich in its own history, geography, and purpose. Here you create new lands, species, and government. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, he imagines a world in which Franklin Roosevelt was assassinated in the early 1930s. Here you set your story in the world we live in, but your plot is either based on a real event (as in Outlander) or is one in which historical events occur differently (for instance, had Germany won World War 2).
Like those who obsess over:Įach approaches world building in a different way: 1. Create a world in which readers can lose themselves.ĭo this well and they become not just fans, but also fanatics.
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