The Art of Worldbuilding- An Amateur’s Experience
How I created a fictional world
Worldbuilding — the art of creating new, fictional worlds, is an amazing skill. It requires an active imagination as well as a well curated vision to guide you and remind you what you want to actually achieve.
Now, I am an amateur when it comes to worldbuilding. I write a lot of stories, but up till now they have been individual ones or short stories. Then, I suddenly had an amazing idea to go create a fictional world. Here is what I did, how I fared and what I learnt in the making of my own fictional world.
Now, by no means I am an expert in this aspect of writing. So, I don’t know if my set of experiences can be considered as guidelines or steps or tips to create fictional worlds. But I guess it’s still a great foreshadowing to what you are going to deal with if you ever get interested with creating your own imaginative lands or even better — universes.
So, here are the steps I took.
Step 1: A time-frame
First, I started out by deciding when my story would take place. It is one of the most crucial steps, in my accord.
What is so important about this one is that now you get to choose your environment and setting. If you are building a world which is still stuck in the medieval ages of yore and ere, then now you know, or at lest have an idea, of how your world will look like: castles, mountains, hills. You also get a grasp about possible characters: a prince, maybe dragons, wizards etc.
Our world changes with time, and each period of time has it’s own environments, it’s own problems and conflicts, it’s own set of colorful characters. That is why deciding on a time frame is a very of step in choosing the setup of your story.
Now, I chose a story which takes place 50 billion years after now. This gives me a basic setup of how my world should look and behave. But, there is one problem with the time frame I chose: the sun will expand and ‘blast off’ 5 billion years later, probably incinerating the Earth along with it. So, how do I escape that? This thread of thought leads us to —
Intermediate Step: Keep in mind your genre
So, my worldbuilding process had an apparent hole in it. Now, my story is a sci-fi one, so I chose the best possible excuse in sci-fi: futuristic technology. I decided that humans can build a huge magnetic field, somehow cope with it and survive. The technical details are very deep, and not of relavence here.
If instead I chose to write my story as part of the fantasy genre, I would have had an eternal being who saves the Earth with his fist or something like that — the important point here is that you have to keep your genre in mind to build and explain how your word came to being.
Step 2: Sort your physics out (broadly speaking, that is)
Now, this applies not only to sci-fi, but to any fictional world irrespective of genre. You see, not every world has to be Earth. Maybe you are basing your story on Mars, or a floating asteroid. In those cases, you have to decide how physics works there.
Sorting out physics includes deciding how much gravity your world has, how big it is, how much light it gets, how stable it is. Does magnetism work in your world? Do the people have electricity there?
Coming back to our medieval world, does the sun shine all day long? Is it winter year-round? How do the knights walk? Do they float around? How do two distant people communicate? Email? Knight-mail? Bat-mail? How do they travel? Horses? These may not all seem like physics, but it’s tough to put a name on it. Does the wizard have an particle gun for a staff? These are general properties you should be considering.
For my story, I decided that the sun ‘blasting off’ would reduce the mass of the Earth, so the gravity goes down. This leads to taller people and faster walking. But, there is no need for walking, since here we have teleportation and magnetic cars.
Step 3: Consider the folk
In J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle-earth, there are Hobbit-folk, wizard-folk, elven-folk, and of course, human-folk.
It is necessary to decide who lives on your world? Book-humans? Cat-humans? It is your choice. But, not only that, you have to consider how these people live: you have to consider the lifestyle of these people, the routines, the history, the evolution (optional) etc.
Basically, you need to have a comprehensive or at least sufficiently comprehensive understanding of the people who inhabit your land. Keep in mind, the world itself is just a place and environment; the people who live in it are the real players in your story. These people make your story alive, instead of confining it to just scenery and geology. They create heroes, villains, conflicts, tools, machines, wands, everything that contributes the most in making your story wonderful.
In my case, I decided future humans who are taller, and can teleport. Yeah, there is a lot more than that, but that is irrelavent here.
Step 4: Most Important — Sorting your geography out or Map Making
Yep. I made an literal map. It does not have to really formal and neat. Just a few squiggles and loops describing your boundary, then a few rivers, few mountains, few cities, just a little deal. Of course, you expand your world as you go on, but it is good to have a little rough idea of how your world looks from a bird’s eye view.
I decided to make a single continent, thousands of kilometers in diameter. Then I just made two cities, Sapienpeak and Skripes. I threw in a few mountain here and there, scattered a few rivers, named every single one of them, and now have my thoughts on paper, before I have even started the story.
Step 5: Flesh out some memorable features
You need to expand on your world after all. Give some features to your world. Think up some monuments, some cities. Keep on naming them. Construct legends, histories. because when you put your world into words, people must get a feeling as if it is real, as if it is really out there somewhere. Give your world something memorial that gets imprinted in the minds of people who read them.
You see this in many fictional worlds. In Fellowship of the Ring, the place of Moria and Lothlorien got imprinted in my mind the first time I read them. Star Wars has the infamous lightsaber, now part of pop-culture. Harry Potter has the majestic castle of Hogwarts and the Hogwarts Express.
I decided to have a large bridge (or should I say, space bridge) that connects the Earth and the Moon. It is the most majestic creation of humans, and everybody is proud and cherishes it.
Now, if you have a something which is glorious enough to be ingrained in the mind of the reader, something important must happen with it too. So, I planned to have the final battle of the story take place on the bridge. Which brings us to —
Step 6: Write it all up
Unfortunately, this is something I have not done yet. I had an idea to write this article right after the worldbuilding process was over. now, the story part. Yeah. That is what I need to do.
But, in general you now have an initial world to work on. These are the steps I followed, and my collective learnings from a new thing I did this summer. I don’t consider it to be an exact recipe or step-by-step tutorial, but I hope this gave you an idea of you can set up doing this wonderful task.
Don’t abandon your wold: even after your story is done. It becomes very special to you, and you can try and expand the fictional universe now and then. Maybe write new stories taking place in the same world.
So, that was an amateur’s experiences and thoughts on worldbuilding. See you next time.
