I've done a lot of reading lately. No, not in the usual sense, where we as writers should find ourselves waist-deep in the worlds of other writers on a daily basis, but in the sense of what I call "Professional Soft Reading." You know, social media, tips and tricks from the professionals, novels on how to write novels. The usual mediums that writers use to notify other writers of their current status, and how to get to where they are. (You may note that this blog is one such medium, which I will freely admit. Whether it is worth the reader's time is something I leave to you, the reader).
During my latest round of perusing, I've come to notice a lot of questions arising, particularly amongst my friends in the world of NaNoWriMo, around the subject of world-building -- that ancient literary art of creating a setting in which we can weave our tales. Questions arise over how best to describe the world, and how much work should go into creating this world. Many complaints are voiced about the work involved, the planning that must be done, and whether it really is worth going through all that trouble. I never really understood the reticence toward this part of writing. For me, it is the one task of a writer I enjoy the most.
When I speak of world building, I speak of it from the point of view of someone who writes fantasy novels. And perhaps it is because I am a fantasy novelist that I love this part of my job so much. The typical fiction novelist has their own world building to do, to be certain. They have their settings to make, their cities to create, their houses to construct and their history to remember. But, for the most part their world is already built for them. It's like having a large coloring book. You know, the ones we had as kids, remember? Usually themed, but always they contained page after page of black and white images ripe for us to color and fill in as we saw fit. We would grab our Crayola crayons (Please tell me you never had to use Rose Art!) and make our tigers orange and our skies blue... but sometimes, our brains would go off on its own tangent and suddenly the tigers were green and the sky a pale purple. And that is what it is to be a writer. We get to color our world as we see fit with our literary crayons.
But with the fantasy writer, it becomes tougher still. We don't have nearly the outline of a world that others have. We have to create the tiger from scratch, so to speak. I think of this as both a blessing and a curse. The blessing comes from being able to really let our imaginations take over without having silly things like physics keep us from creating our world. It can be anything we want it to be! The curse comes along with responsibility. While the world can be anything we want, we must always remember that until it is fully described, it remains in our head, uncolored and undefined. We have to give rise to our world and all its weirdness, and we have to do it in such a way that the reader becomes entranced and lost in that world.
For me, it always helps to have a complete picture of the world before I begin writing about it. The imagination is a fluid thing, and ideas and thoughts remain watery and malleable until we get them out of our heads and onto paper. Even then they are changeable, but less so. It could just be me, but I've always felt that writing the ideas down helped to make me feel like I have something to put my back to as I sit down to write. With my current novel, Godzwar, I've taken that idea to the extreme. I have had the entire world in my head, with bits and pieces put in place while playing Dungeons and Dragons with several friends of mine. To keep my forgetful mind from forgetting the details of these bits and pieces, I've actually created a Wiki for the world. The wiki covers many aspects of my world -- religion, politics, geography, important historical events and people. I find in doing so that I'm able to use the wiki as an excellent reference while writing. It is, in effect, an encyclopedia of knowledge that I use, just as a non-fantasy fiction writer would use Encyclopedia Britannica (Or, the Internet in these modern days) to help fill in gaps in his knowledge for his book. If you are world building, I highly recommend doing the same with a Wiki site. If you'd like information on how to do this from a techie point of view, feel free to comment and I'll give you some tips.
As well as Wiki, there is also the classic ways of world building. For me, this including having bull sessions with friends of mine, players of my D&D game who have their own ideas about the world in which they played. They will get their due accolades in my acknowledgments, but I don't think they will really know how much they have helped. It is so useful, having a network of people who are willing to help you in such things. If you're not using your friends for this, why not? Pick people whose ideas and opinions you trust of course, but definitely use them. The conversations you have with them will help you expand your own ideas on your world, and that in turn will make your world ultimately more interesting for your readers. And that's what it's really about in the end, wouldn't you say?
One more thing, before I close this blog, and that is in how I (and you) should describe your world to your reader. Many, many time I'm sure you've heard how awful it when a new writer deluges his readers with so much description and useless information to describe their scenes. It makes your story, well, boring... and boring is the last thing we want our readers to feel! So I say, detail your world as much as you possibly can outside your book. Use that detail to help make your book fuller and richer, but only put to paper the important things about your world. In other words, don't describe for the sake of description. I won't go into too much more on that. If you want more, read On Writing, by Stephen King.
In the meantime, get those ideas on paper!
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