WORLD-BUILDING: The Fun
Today's post continues my series on world-building with my husband and world-designer: Derek Schmidt. In this post, he will talk about what aspects of world-building are the most fun.
What is the most fun part about creating a world?
The most fun part of creating a world is the map. Now, that is mostly due to an old love of mine. I really enjoy drawing. I’m not really any good at it, and frankly I’ve never professed to be anything more than a sketcher. But as a kid I drew all sorts of things on the blank spaces of the church bulletin, the desk in school, even the soles of my shoes. Yeah, give me a pen or pencil and I’ll get into trouble with it.
With a new world, you get to draw a long squiggly line to start out an entire adventure and the edge of the paper doesn’t even have to be a border. You can draw islands, tape sheets of paper together to make large continents and before you know it, you’ve got a map that takes shape and is waiting for some fun. If you have read fantasy or sci-fi one of the staples for any story is the map in the front of the book. I find myself often going back to the front of the book just to get a feel for where the events are taking place. Otherwise, I lose the context.
As you finish outlining your land mass, you begin to ponder how everything is divided. You can start with political borders, but I prefer mountains. Start dividing up areas into regions depending on what sounds fun. I had an odd idea once of inverting a mountain range. So I drew a gorge on the paper and started sketching out what it might look like for a world or realm to live beneath the surface of the plains. Think of it if you were to reverse every point of the Rocky Mountains so that the plains of the midwest were at the top of the ridge and you just sort of fell off the edge into a huge chasm wide enough to be an ocean, but not filled with water. Kind of different and no clue where it might go. That’s the fun, you’ve got the place, now find the story.
Next up are the forests, the plains and maybe rivers. Add in some large lakes if needed or deserts and barren regions. Maybe a frozen wasteland is needed in the middle or polar regions. My maps have all had varying degrees of details, but the point of map making for me is getting the place down on paper for a context of adventures. After that, you can have all sorts of fun wrestling with politics, races, nations, economies, trade, science, magic. But, without the maps who knows how any of those things might work together, or how the world in which they live might look.