WORLD-BUILDING IDEAS

Last week I took you through a bit of my world-building process. In the next couple of weeks I'm going to be sharing a series of posts by my husband on some of the more technical details of creating a fictional world. I'll start each post with a question that Derek answered. Hope you enjoy!

When you first started thinking about world-building, what part of the idea came first? Was it a history, a map, a character, or something else?

I would have to say it started out mostly with a character, or rather a set of characters. I first started world building shortly after a Lord of the Rings video game came out. Battle for Middle Earth 2 was announced and I thought it had one of the best looking elves on the game box artwork I had ever seen. That got me thinking about a fantasy world for a character just like that, only … NOT Middle Earth.

So, pulling from a few different fantasy worlds in my past: Final Fantasy, Diablo 1&2, Lord of the Rings, and a few others, I started mashing items together. It focused heavily on a set of characters and what made them interesting. Initially I tried to even write out some story, but after about half a chapter I realized my writing skills were nowhere near what would be necessary to come up with a compelling plot worth reading. So, I abandoned the story part, but not the world.

I pulled a sheet of paper out of my printer, grabbed a pencil and started sketching out a map. Within a short period of time, a coast line for an island continent appeared. Cities and roads dotted the landscape. A few mountain ranges, and forests divided the areas and viola, a map for my world was born. The characters had homes, and nations to call their own. But I still had no story, or more specifically a plot. That was when I realized, a plot is something I am not good at, but history doesn’t need to polished per se. History can be a snippet of information here, a brief explanation there. Mostly an unvarnished telling of events that lead up to “present day” whatever that meant.

Writing down a few ideas, adjusting some names, adding a bit more detail to the characters themselves and before I knew it, I had some history. Finally the world was done. It had history, geography, politics, and even a little bit of magic. I discovered through this process with my first world, that in the end, World-Building for Jenelle was little more than giving her the frame work she needed to write the plots and stories that are worth reading.