On Writing: World Building

Hey everyone, how is it going?

So I recently mentioned that I might do some posts about writing and I got a very positive response, so first of all thank you for that, and secondly I guess this means you’re about to see several of these posts on my blog. Don’t worry, book blog readers, I promise I won’t be changing the theme of this blog– I’ll just be talking about writing alongside my book reviews and articles. In the coming days, I’ll also be hopefully posting up videos for youtube which cover the same topics, so if you’d prefer to listen to me bumble about writing instead, then you should go check those out when I’ve posted them.

Quick disclaimer: Everything I talk about in these posts is my own thoughts and feelings and what works for me. I can’t stand writers who preach to other people about their techniques or suggest that someone is doing something wrong because they don’t do things in the same way. Writing is incredibly subjective and it’s a very individual process. What works for me might not work for you. These posts are, essentially, just me rambling about my own process. Weirdly enough, in the three years it has taken me to write The Heir of Ink and Magic, I have sort of forgotten a lot of the things that tripped me up or that worked for me. So it helps me a bit to be able to track my process with my new WIP and figure out what I should implement or refine the next time I sit down to write a book.

Anyhow, that’s quite enough of that. Let’s get on to the actual topic of discussion for today: worldbuilding. According to the Twitter poll I ran the other day, this was the topic most people wanted to see me discuss, and since worldbuilding tends to come before anything else in writing a fantasy novel, it seems like a perfect place to start. FYI, I say fantasy novel because again, this post is based a lot on my own experiences. Some of these tips and bits of advice will work for writing sci-fi etc, but I’m also going to talk about magic systems and things, so this post is probably most helpful to people wanting to write fantasy novels.

Why start with worldbuilding?

Personally, I like to start with worldbuilding before character and plot because I think it influences both of those things a lot. I tend to find that my plot is very character driven, and in turn my characters are formed from their own experiences and upbringing and the world around them. Starting with worldbuilding is a really good way at figuring out some of the flaws in your plot, or figuring out a character’s motivations. So I’d usually say start with worldbuilding.

Should I do ALL of my worldbuilding before starting to write?

Goodness, no. I say this for two main reasons: firstly, as much as worldbuilding is an essential part of writing and definitely counts as being productive, there can come a point where you procrastinate the actual writing of the book [AKA THE THING THAT YOU NEED TO DO] by doing all the fun worldbuilding stuff. Secondly, I actually get very anxious that, if I sit and come up with all the tiny details of my world, like the fact that there’s 300 gods or whatever, then I will feel the urge to figure out a way to shove that information into the story somewhere. Worldbuilding is very much like an iceberg, most of it is underwater and invisible. Readers shouldn’t be able to see it. When it’s done really well, we still learn a lot about that world. For example, in Jay Kristoff’s Nevernight series, we know that magic exists, and we know that there’s a group of assassins and a pretty corrupt government, and that everything has Italian or Latin based names and things, but we don’t know too much about the world. We don’t need to know how often the bookworm sleeps, or the exact science behind the magic, or how good the exchange rate is for the currency in their world. Because we don’t need to know those things. And if we did, Kristoff would disclose this information at the right time. Maybe he knows the answers to those questions and maybe he doesn’t.

Generally, as a rule of thumb, I find it helps to know a fair bit about your world before you start. If you already know a bit about your plot, you probably know which grounds you need to cover. For instance, I am currently working on a book about a magical university set in a fantasy world. I knew, going from there that I would have to know before writing how the magic system worked, how the university and education in this world works, and how the government in the magic world works. Things like trade would be less important in the immediate future, so I put them to one side to return to later.

In case you’re wondering, here is the list of worldbuilding categories I came up with:

Magic System

Religion

Government

Food

Culture

Education

Policing

Animals and Nature

Magical Objects

History

Climate

Cities

Commerce

Leisure

Transport

Class Systems

Currency

Health

Fashion

Housing and Architecture

Supernatural things

Some of these things will be very important right at the start of your book, and some of them might become important later on. You can always spend some time after finishing your first draft to figure out what else you might need to know and do a bit of research on this area so you can find a way to slot in the things that will bring your world to life.

On Magic Systems:

One of the most important things you’ll need to address is how magic works in your world. Is this going to be a world where magic is everywhere? Is it a world where only a few people can do magic? Is there a secret group of people who can do it? Do people use magical objects to focus their magic, such as wands or staffs or books? Or maybe a set of words or symbols? Does it require a sacrifice, such as energy or even blood? Or is it a very naturalistic world where magic is in nature and people can influence things like the elements?

This all probably sounds like a very exhausting set of questions, but I promise you they’re all important. Figuring out your magic system is really the first step to fantasy worldbuilding. To break it down, there are essentially two different types of magic systems you can create: soft magic systems, where the magic is a little unexplained and people don’t always know how to use it, and hard magic systems where there are very specific rules and explanations for how magic works.

Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings are both examples of soft magic systems. While Rowling’s world has wands and things to help perform magic, there are also a lot of vague things that come into play such as wandless magic, magical objects and house elf magic, all of which do not necessarily require a wand. Rowling gets around this by keeping things nice and vague, which is great because it allows the readers to enjoy the books and learn alongside Harry. There aren’t huge infodumps or moments where we get really confused about what is going on. And in moments where it seems almost as if Rowling has broken her own rules about her magic system, these instances can be explained by the fact that magic in this world is not entirely known. There are still mysteries and oddities left to uncover. This is the same in Lord of the Rings. Everyone knows Gandalf is a powerful wizard who can perform magic, but we don’t really know a lot about the limitations of his powers or how it really works.

Hard magic systems have a much more defined set of rules and explanations. This isn’t really something I’ve encountered much of in my own writing experience so if you want to learn more about how hard magic systems work and how to create them, a really great video to watch is by Hello Future Me over on YouTube. You can find the link for that here.

Whatever system you use, the best way to get started in figuring out how your magic system works is to decide how much you want to explain your magic. Maybe you’d prefer to leave things a little vague, or maybe you’ve chosen to incorporate a load of scientific research on chemistry to help you? Once you know what you want to go for, the next thing to do is figure out a set of rules and restrictions for your magic. Perhaps magic is limited to certain groups of people, eg. through genes or through picking up a certain illness. Maybe characters can only do magic if they use objects to channel their power eg. wands or tarot cards. Maybe there’s a magical language and in order to use magic, you need to know the right word or phrase in that language? Or there are limitations such as only having one type of magic power like in Children of Blood and Bone or the Grisha series. Another useful thing is to think of rules: perhaps there are rules against bringing someone back from the dead? If this is the case, is this because the magic will simply not be able to achieve it [like in Harry Potter] or is it because that type of magic is considered dark and forbidden?

It also helps to revisit this concept of magic systems once you have characters in mind. Remember that your reader won’t want to read through thirty pages of you explaining how magic works. This can usually be circumvented by your protagonist. Often, soft magic system books will have a main character who doesn’t know anything about magic. In Harry Potter, Harry is new to magic and Hogwarts, and so Rowling is able to explain a lot of the things in her world through people explaining things to Harry. For instance, we learn about Hogwarts, the wizarding school, and the importance of Dumbledore, through Hagrid, when he shows to give Harry his letter. We learn about parseltongue through Ron and Hermione, who explain it to Harry after he is criticised for talking to a snake during a wizard’s duel. Hard magic systems are sometimes harder to write because there’s a lot of research and a lot of important knowledge that the reader needs to know to understand the world.

Creating your world:

The next thing that I find helps in the worldbuilding process is to figure out what kind of world I want it to be. A lot of fantasy can be broken down into three categories, or a mixture of them:

Urban fantasy or fantasy based in our world with secret pockets to it. Good examples of this are again, Harry Potter as well as Shadowhunters and The Raven Cycle. These can also be historical. Good examples of this can be found in The Dark Days Club and Passenger.

Culture or real-place based fantasy. This is where the world or countries in the world are inspired by real places in our own world. Good examples of this are in Six of Crows [based in Amsterdam], Red London in A Darker Shade of Magic [based on London, obviously], and Children of Blood and Bone [which is based on West Africa]. An interesting way to do this is to blend bits of cultures and geography together. For example, in my current WIP, I set most of my world in a place inspired by Amsterdam, but I also have dashes of Vancouver inspired geography.

Finally, a last and very popular option for fantasy worlds is just to create one that is utterly unique. Sometimes these are based off tiny bits of real-world places that people might not notice in the books. Full fantasy settings can be seen in books such as Lord of the Rings, Throne of Glass and Ash Princess. Arguable, the popular series A Game of Thrones also falls into this category. Although the map is clearly inspired by the U.K. and Europe, it also has a lot of fantasy elements to its geography and things which make it not so easily recognizable.

Using visual aids:

One of the things that really helps me is seeing things that I can incorporate into my world. I like to spend a fair amount of time sketching not only my characters, but magical objects they encounter, and clothes they’d likely wear. Lots of people also enjoy creating maps with place names so that they know roughly where their characters are during points of the story and have a better sense of the location. I know using Pinterest and Deviantart can be like going down a rabbit hole, and I’d strongly urge setting yourself time limits for using them so you don’t create a 7000 pin board rather than writing your book, but I also find they can be super-helpful tools for gathering aesthetic research. For instance, I recently created a board specifically for the magical university and the city it belongs in. This is filled with pictures of buildings that look similar to the image I have in my head, as well as pictures of Eton’s wall game. This is so that when I come to writing later, I will remember to do research on old university and private school traditions and incorporate them into my novel. I’ve also created boards in the past with the kinds of dresses and weapons my main character would wear.

Pick something you want to focus on:

I recently watched a V.E. Schwab video on worldbuilding where she gave some really great advice I’m about to repost here: pick something that you want to make central to your world. This might be food, or fashion or language. She noted that a lot of her own worldbuilding looks at words, including how people interact with each other, place names, swear words, and names for characters. A lot of the time, how a person swears can tell you a lot about them and the world they live in eg. if they are religious or not, if they’re prone to cussing. Fashion and food can work just as well. Food is such a huge part of our day to day lives– if you’ve ever been on holiday somewhere, what were the country’s famous dishes? For example, a recent trip to Amsterdam got me to try these caramel waffle things that you put on top of tea cups to melt, as well as gouda cheese, bitterballen. I also know that there were several stalls dotted around the city that sold raw herring [though I wasn’t brave enough to try it]. It can say a lot about a place: for example, do people eat with utensils? Do people eat together, and if so how is the food put out on the table [individual plates, buffet style?] What about who is served first, or how easily available meat and spices are? Is everyone in your world vegetarian? Fashion can also say a lot about a culture or world. For instance, what kinds of fabric are available and to whom? Are there certain colours only certain people can wear [for instance, in some countries, red or purple were considered royal colours and were only allowed to be worn by the king/emperor]. How about the fit of clothes? If your country is very conservative, it might be that women wear long sleeves, or that people cover their ankles or even their faces. Perhaps the style of clothing also reflects the climate: a cold country means lots of layers and bundling and fur/wool, while warmer temperatures might mean people opt for silk and looser fabrics, and that they keep their arms or midriffs bare. Magical creatures can be another interesting one to work with. Look at how they’re dealt with and treated in Fantastic Beasts and what this says about the American wizard system.

Pick something that you want to be your focus and stick to it. Try and think of all the things this might say about your fantasy world or culture without you having to spell it out for the reader.

Finally, remember to have fun with it:

Some writers love doing world building. Some loathe or even fear it. Keep an open mind and remember that you can always come back to it and tweak it if you’re struggling to figure out a snag in your plot, or once you’ve finished your first draft, or even once you’ve had a few people read your work.

Wow, that was a lot to get through. Is this at all helpful? If you’ve got questions about this post and worldbuilding, or if you feel like I haven’t covered everything or if you enjoyed this and want to recommend another writing topic, please leave a comment in the comment section below and I’ll get back to you A.S.A.P. <3