World-building is hard. I don’t mean physically and literally building a world, although I can only assume, not being an All-Powerful God Being, that such a task would also be extraordinarily difficult. The type of world-building I’m referring to involves developing an imaginary yet believable universe, with consistent and somewhat reasoned qualities, such as history, geography, culture and ecology. It’s playing make believe, on the largest scale ever. I guess that’s what writing is all about – pretending you’re still ten years old, sitting in the back of your parents’ car, staring out the window and fantasising about what could be.
World-building is a pretty vital task for anyone who is writing in a science fiction or fantasy genre, and wants their readers to experience that all important sense of believability. To try and make my life a little easier, I’ve based my Children of the Solstice world within our real one (like, say, Harry Potter, where wizards and witches interact with each other alongside the real world, but in secrecy). So while I don’t have to worry about geography and creating large and extensive Tolkien-style maps, I still need to integrate my fictional Elemental race, and their social, cultural and political history, into the real world, as best I can. I also need to have some kind of semi-believable, faux-science basis for how the Elementals existed, to keep those clever, logical readers content.
This task is simultaneously ridiculously fun, stupendously hard, and phenomenally time-consuming. Do you know how complex worlds are? How complex people are? Of course you do! You live in the world! I betcha you don’t even know about 1% of the information that’s out there, no matter how clever you are! The more I research and posture and ponder around my Elemental world, the more I realise that I know nothing. And I’ve always liked to think that I know at least an average amount. But here’s an off the top of my head list of things that I’ve thought about, and written thousands and thousands of words about, while world-building:
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Elemental slang and vocabulary and whether or not they have their own language
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The percentage of the world population who is Elemental, and how many of them go to the school in Sydney, in which my story is based
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How babies are made
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What happened in the 18th Century, whether the witch-hunts contributed to the spread of the Black Plague and how this might contribute to a decline in the Elemental population
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How the 1992 World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity was influenced and affected by Elementals and how long we have until the world collapses due to environmental disaster (FYI it is SO NOT LONG AND YOU SHOULD ALL BE TERRIFIED AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD RECYCLE MORE AND STOP HAVING BABIES OR JUST TAKE THE ADVICE OF SCIENTISTS WHO ARE INCREDIBLY INTELLIGENT AND MOSTLY IGNORED)
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How to hide a secret bunker in the Moskva River, in Russia, and whether or not the SVR would be likely to have sixteen-year-old spies with supernatural powers
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Burial customs of the different elements and whether they believe in life after death
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Astrology and its links to astronomy and all the different personalities you are meant to have depending on your star sign and how those might make you better suited to a particular job as say, an Obscurer, who hides a whole race of people from 7 billion other people, many of whom have pretty excellent access to Google
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The likelihood of being born on the exact second of the Solstice
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Whether Gaia and Yemonja having a fight would create Pangaea or not
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How Christians and Wiccans would feel about the Elemental race
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Whether mind control is possible
And to be honest… my world isn’t even very good yet! It’s not even a blip on the Tolkien or Star Wars radar! And maybe that’s because I don’t have fifty trillion Entish hours and/or light-years to think about this, and at some stage I’d like to get back to redrafting my novel proper. I think it’s also because I’m just getting started, and this sort of thing probably gets better with practice. Though, even just my experiences this week (seriously, I wrote a chronological history of Elementals that started with ‘4.6 Billion years ago the world was created’), have shown me that I could easily get lost in world-building for the rest of my life.
And that’s not all that practical. So, to finish, I thought I’d give you some practical tips, if you’re interested in world-building yourself.
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Go to the SFWA ‘Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions’ and treat them like your bible – these questions really help to provoke backstory and believable fantasy and sci-fi settings.
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Get a copy of J.R.R. Tolkein’s On Fairy Stories and pay attention to his comments on world-building – it’s always useful to do some genre-based, literary research, just as you would look at research papers if you were writing a non-fiction piece.
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If you’re basing your fantasy world in our real world, do some real world research. I’m brushing up on my knowledge of biology, ancient and modern history, world geography, and environmental issues. Sometimes I do this on a general ‘Google’ scale, but other times, once I get closer to what it is I’m deeply interested in, I focus on a particular book, such as David Suzuki’s The Sacred Balance, or Geoffrey Blainey’s A Short History of the World.
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Read good fantasy and sci-fi. This is absolutely key – watch how other, more experienced authors, have built their worlds. Incorporate what you like about them, and leave out what you don’t like.
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Set yourself a time limit and a goal – you can only spend so many hours in the day on world-building, before those hours begin to eat in to your time for actually writing the story. I’m a planner, so I would love to get all of the world-building out of the way before writing, but it’s just not practical. Do a little bit at a time, and try revising and revisiting your world-building once a week.
This is my very inexperienced advice – if you’ve got something that works much better for you, pass it on! Maybe we can be gods and goddesses who build worlds together. There could be clay involved and everything. Or maybe, I should just go back to drafting my novel, before my head gets too big and I begin to think that I’m genuinely some kind of all-powerful being.
Samantha Todd 