 Fantasy: October 23, 2019 Issue [#9826] |
This week: Keeping Track of It All Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
-Iris Murdoch
We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality. We create it to be able to stay.
-Lynda Barry
If you're building a fantasy world that exists outside of the rules of our real world, why would you write it to conform to the rules and binaries that we have today? Why still limit yourself?
-Lachlan Watson |
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With NaNoWriMo coming up fast, I thought I'd touch on that aspect of fantasy (and science fiction) writing that separates us from those who use our boring, everyday world as a template: worldbuilding.
There are plenty of worldbuilding resources on the internet if you look for them. Here's one:
https://kennethjorgensen.com/worldbuilding/resources
So I'm not going to add to that milieu; rather, I'm going to touch on how to use them.
First, why to use them: because they help eliminate contradictions. One of my favorite novels has a glaring flaw that I only caught on the fifth or sixth reading, because I tend to skip descriptions: On one page, a certain character is described as having long, curly hair, while on the next page he's got shoulder-length, straight hair. Or maybe it's the other way around; it's been a while. Point is, that's why you need a separate place for character descriptions: you don't want to get to the middle of your novel and need a character's height; you know you described her in Chapter 2 or something, so you end up rereading the first few pages of your chapter, whereupon you realize that you've got other character, and possibly plot, issues to deal with. Those issues are properly handled on an edit, after you're entirely done; thus, it's a distraction.
On the other hand, if you've got a separate sheet with character vitals listed explicitly, you can just refer to that.
The same thing applies to entire worlds. Are those mountains snow-peaked, or are they covered in pines? Is summer sweltering hot, or pleasantly warm, where the novel's action takes place?
Another reason to use these worldbuilding templates is it gets you thinking about aspects that you might not otherwise have contemplated. We here on Earth have internalized things like the 24-hour day and 7-day week, and we tend to forget that those things are hardly universal.
If you're a competitive form-filler-outer, like me, there's a tendency to want to get all this done first, to completely "fill out the form" on whatever aspect of worldbuilding you're working on.
From experience, I can tell you I don't think it works for everybody. Including me. I've tried it that way, and I always go back and change things as plot issues arise in my writing.
Another tack is to just write down the stuff you already know, and then go back and fill in the blanks as you write. For example, you may want the "day" on your world to be 36 hours long, for whatever reason, but you haven't given much thought to years or seasons. That's okay. As you write, as it comes up, switch back to the worldbuilding worksheet to note it.
Try different ways, but always remember to review the worldbuilding exercises from time to time to keep things fresh in your mind. Then you can really just concentrate on writing. |
Some fantasy for your reading enjoyment:
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Last time, in "Preparing a Novel" , I talked about preparing for NaNoWriMo.
No feedback from last time 
So that's it for me for October! See you next month, and until then,
DREAM ON!!! |
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