3 Rules for World Building

NOTE: I might have over complicated things, so these rules will be further broke down in future posts. Also “rules” are not set in stone, merely guides.

Worldbuilding: Beginnings.

The second part in my continuing series where I try to formulate all of my world-building skills/advice into a cohesive whole. Part one is HERE. I will now freely admit that I have never actually stepped back and put this advice into writing before. So, I might meander a bit.

But hopefully you’re willing to follow along in the journey as I reveal my thought processes. And here we can make an important point, these are MY processes. This is how I do it but it is not the only way to do things. Some of my ideas are just ingrained, I don’t even think about them, I just do it “this way” because I have been hard-wired to do “this” way.

Putting it all in writing should prove beneficial to you my reader, and to myself.

Best Practices:

I reserve the right to come back to this and change or edit them later. But I have been wracking my brain for the most basic steps to get someone started in crafting their world. And then I kept changing the order in which I ranked them:

1. READ More.
2. Don’t be afraid to Cut and Paste.
3. UNDERSTAND Geography impacts EVERY part of world building: Race/ Culture/ Values/ lifestyle/ etc.

These are the three building blocks of crafting a world in which to have “living” characters. Let’s look at each of them in turn.

Read More:

Reading is fundamental to writing. You can learn a lot by seeing how another writer uses his characters, and how they interact with their environments. And we will talk more on that aspect in a later post.

But, for THIS post, what I am referring to is “cross-learning” and not just “reading” books but actually watching movies; fiction and documentary. If you’re creating fantasy worlds or near-Earth worlds you need a strong foundation. Reading history books, studying warfare, learning how ships are built, how trade and banking started, how people hunted or made clothing, etc. The list is endless. Now you don’t need to be an expert in any of these, nor do you need to spend years studying before you can start to create a world of your own.

ABR: Always be Reading

You just need, in general, to always be looking for new things to learn. This is the first rule because it’s the constant rule. You will be forever reading as long as you are forever writing. Now, to ease any tension that I might have just created in you dear Reader, you do not need to be reading college level books in history. Matter of fact you’re sometimes better off trying your hand at reading children’s history books to get the simplistic basics down and then venturing into harder material for the nitty gritty.

There is a BBC show and books called Horrible Histories that are really good about getting the details right.

Don’t be Afraid to Cut and Paste:

This is the rule where I give you permission to literally take cultures from history or other books and borrow them, adapt them for your own use.

Obviously, we are not talking plagiarism, we are talking about adaption. Matter of fact when I’m creating stuff, I often use real-world shorthand when I am writing my notes or doing my world-building. My current WIP takes place in a world that in the last few decades has discovered a second continent in the West. This obviously has a corollary to America and in my notes, I often just call it the “New World”. The old world has areas that correspond nicely to parts of Europe and a southern continent that fits for Africa.

In my previous post in this series, I talked about the various iterations of the world and how I was writing in the 5^th version of the world. The genesis of which was me literally taking maps and notes from various games I ran, in various Paper and Dice RPGs, and cutting them all apart and adding them into the world I have been working on for near-30 years. So literally I cut and paste parts of the map apart and created a new version.

An Exercise in Cutting and Pasting

Now, that example might not work for anyone who doesn’t have a long background involved in gaming. But anyone with a decent amount of history knowledge and widely read in the genre could instead do this:

Ok, Roman Empire in the South, Saxon or 15^th century England in the north, both being invaded by Mongols/ Huns from the East, then to add in an ancient evil awakening during this war, Mordor in the far south east… to be honest that sounds pretty interesting and I might just have to put that in the to do folder.

Geography:

I can’t stress how important this is to the overall effectiveness of breathing life into your setting, and thus life into your character/ culture. I’m going to try to break it down to just a few key points as this could probably be an entire post on its own and it just might become one.

“How can geography be so important?” You ask.

Let me answer with another question, “What does your character Value?”

Is it a good question to have in mind, and if your character comes from a place with poor soil and no water, perhaps water is the most precious of things? But if he lives by the ocean and there is plenty of rain, perhaps nearby salt mines are more important, or trade goods for their fish.

What are the professions and childhoods of these characters like? The person in the desert probably works late afternoon into the night. Is probably thin and nomadic. While the one who was raised by the ocean might be a fisher, a sailor, a merchant. If the fishing is really good, they might be a trade port, a well built up and thriving city. That changes education and options for the character.

Geography creates culture. In the desert one is afraid of Djinn and evil wind spirits that blow the sand, and creatures that take the moisture from you. In the north the dark forest and the creatures in the deep woods hold terror.

Going back to our rule number 1 if you start to read about the migration patterns of tribes and peoples, you’ll see how myths and legends get changed based on the geography the tribe inhabited when they first told the story.

Putting it all together:

We are only just starting to get these rules worked out. I’ll have to go into greater details as we continue with this series of posts.

But I’ll leave you with this thought… there are a lot of people who hate on things like fanfic, but I came across a few staunch defenders, and what they said kind of resonated. When you are starting out with writing sometimes creating the characters and the worlds can be scary. By using fanfic, you are basically getting your practice in, you are working on your plot, dialogue, and the other blocks of good writing that you will need. Eventually the goal is to move on and create your own thing.

World-building can be approached from a similar, less scary, angle. By cutting and pasting a bunch of ideas and maybe even literal maps together. One can at the least form the basis of a world where they can then practice their story telling. So, once you cut and paste your Frankenstein world together, that is where you push your art through education and reading. You look up the skills needed to create your main character, you look up how they might have been raised in the setting you just pasted into your work.

You take the time to craft reality into the character and to make you creation work as a whole. As a learning tool and an exercise this is a fundamental building block. Also, you can do your research by reading more of the books/ watching more of the TV series from which you’re taking these parts.

Mash-ups:

These are another good method. Instead of the out-right “fanfic” model you can always do the mash-up where you take base concepts (or parts of shows) and mash them together to create a new thing. You know… I’ll take the heist movie Ocean’s 11, add in Renaissance Italy with ancient alien magic, and the hardcore revenge plot of Monte Cristo… mix together and welcome to Scott Lynch’s Lies of Locke Lamora. (I might be doing him an injustice with some of those parts, but the book and the world is WONDERFUL.)

Have a lot to think about, we’ll tackle more in the Next Post.