World Building

Living in an ice world

World building can be a particularly wonderful part of writing. It is often associated in the main with fantasy and science fiction where you have an opportunity to create everything. Good world building adds credibility to your story. It makes it believable and draws the reader in.

It is important to understand what the difference between setting and world building is? Setting is all about describing the basic needs in a story but the world you build is all about adding layers of details. The light and shade, bringing you story to life.

World building can come in a variety of forms, from worlds that are created totally by the writer to those that take a nation or culture out of history and use it as the primary inspiration for a fantasy world. There is historical fantasy which is a story based in a real historical period but introducing the fantastical, particularly technologically based if you are thinking about steam punk. Of course there is the worlds created for sci fi which includes science and/or technology. These again can be truly fantastical or they can be embedded within an element of truth. Whatever aspects need to be included they have to be plausible and as a writer you need to understand the rules of your world totally. It is not just about what your world looks like and its geography but also how the culture works, the politics, the science, the nature including the flora and fauna. What is the racial distribution of your population? Are they even all human? The reader wants to believe that the impossible is possible. They need to believe in the world.

World building is not just about fantasy and science fiction or even dystopian fiction as even in realist books you have to have an understanding of your world. For example, you need to know your geography. Is the journey you are sending your characters on feasible and consistent? Can you describe it? Google maps, tourist guides, historical artifacts etc are great resources for this if you haven''t been able to visit the place.

Remember readers will put the book down if they can no longer believe what is happening. Your world has to ring true in whatever format you are writing. It doesn't matter who you are writing for - children, young adults, adults - you still need a plausible world that the reader can get lost in. But most importantly don't spend so long building your world that you forget to write the story. World building can inform your writing but don't let it take over there still needs to be a great story and strong characters.

So go on, enjoy playing 'god' as you build your world.

And here is a bit of Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles for all the lonely people in their own worlds...just because really.

Writing what you know...or not

We are often told as writers to write what we know but sometimes it is just as important to write what we don't know. J K Rowling had a great success doing precisely that as did Philip Pullman with The Dark Materials. JK can't have known Hogwarts or Diagon Alley as actual places but I bet they are based on things she had seen or read about elsewhere. What J K does do so successfully is to create a world we all believe in. As did Pullman, though obviously using Oxford he highlights the difference in the setting by spelling the country as Brytain. It is the same yet different. If I was going to go all academic on you I could relate it to Freud's uncanny or Bakhtin's carnivalesque. But today I am not.

Our writing cannot help but be based on some part of our autobiographical background. It might be something that we have read, seen or had life experience of. When you write you have a web of identities. For me, mine are as a writer, a mother, a woman and an academic. Each intricate layer informs my narrative and my understanding behind the decisions I make. They make me the writer I am. I write fiction for young adults yet it is a long time since I have been one. My children are no longer teenagers, they have moved on but my writing is still embedded within teenage-dom. For me the important thing is not to restrict myself to one cultural moment. Unless of course the aim is relevant to the story - thinking of Dave Massey's Torn for example. My writing needs to be contingent and fluid reflecting the ever moving world around me while I create a fictional world that is familiar and recognisable, particularly as I write realist novels.

The important thing is not to be afraid. Believe in the world you create and your readers will too. It doesn't matter whether you are creating a realist world, a dystopian one or fantasy world, you need to understand exactly how it works. This means undertaking world building exercises alongside your character building ones. You need to understand not just what your world looks like but how the culture works within it for example.

If we only wrote about what we knew a lot of books would not be written. If you have a story that you love that is a based in a world that you believe in then get down and write it. Just make sure you do all the pre-writing work. If your idea is in an area you have no experience of, research it. Also do not be concerned about using autobiographical instances as the starting point for a story. It is what writers do. (Just a word of caution make sure you are not going to offend anyone if it is going to be obvious it is a story based on a certain person).

Here's a bit of Joni for a Saturday afternoon when all the work and words are not falling right.