I have a world that I am creating and I feel certain that there are things I'm leaving out and points I'm not considering. Do all the names of characters/places have to follow a certain theme? What about language? Religion? When you have a character go from one place to another, how does that character get there? By what road? Over a mountain? How do you develop landscape and borders for your lands? Did you draw maps?
Just interested in how you came to a solid, believable world.
I'm not entirely sure I succeeded in coming to a solid, believable world. This is one of the problems with age and experience -- you learn more; you can't help it. When you revisit old work, you see the flaws that you hadn't considered the first time out.
Otoh, if you're crippled by the desire to be flawless -- and I use the word crippled in a very limited sense, which is synonymous with "not writing" -- you can labour a very long time without ever reaching a state in which you're satisfied.
My impetus for the process was this: I wanted to create as much background as possible -- including names -- because that background would seep into the foreground; it would become part of character knowledge, character interactions, in a way that creation-on-the-fly wouldn't.
satorias, aireon and sleigh all have different ways of approaching world-building, and at least the first two start with geography. My geography comes almost after the fact, which is exactly historically backward.
Having some sense of technology, or some sense of how magic has replaced it, having some sense of how distance is travelled, and how it was historically travelled, is added to geography. Languages, I assume are different, depending on geographical separation, and different cultures -- but I tend to use phrases and I tend to say "they switched", but to keep all dialogue in English. I like names to sound as if they're culturally based, but that's a me thing.
Religion is probably one of my weaknesses, in that it exists, but it's never dominant; because of this, I designed a world in which the gods are not held in quite the same esteem as they are in cultures here.
And yes, I drew maps. But they were blobs. No one with an eye for detail could possibly look at them and not think "wow, this is a series of connected blobs, with more blobs that look a bit pointier around the edges, and lots of words." They have meaning to me, in terms of scale -- but I wouldn't hand them to anyone else I didn't intend to amuse for days on end.
Economics is one of those things I think are often forgotten, and they're often dependent on terrain, geography, etc. I pull snippets of information from other sources as well; I create something that doesn't break the bounds of my own ability to believe in it, and I write from there.
I remember a discussion about a Guy Kay novel in which people were taking it apart because of its "lousy sense of geographical climate". I could probably make that same mistake, or would have, were it not for that.
Not sure if this is helpful at all -- you might want to wander over to sleigh's LJ, because I believe he posted a series about world-building.
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branchandroot
Re: Building a World
Date: 2004-12-07 11:07 pm (UTC)Just interested in how you came to a solid, believable world.
I'm not entirely sure I succeeded in coming to a solid, believable world. This is one of the problems with age and experience -- you learn more; you can't help it. When you revisit old work, you see the flaws that you hadn't considered the first time out.
Otoh, if you're crippled by the desire to be flawless -- and I use the word crippled in a very limited sense, which is synonymous with "not writing" -- you can labour a very long time without ever reaching a state in which you're satisfied.
My impetus for the process was this: I wanted to create as much background as possible -- including names -- because that background would seep into the foreground; it would become part of character knowledge, character interactions, in a way that creation-on-the-fly wouldn't.
Having some sense of technology, or some sense of how magic has replaced it, having some sense of how distance is travelled, and how it was historically travelled, is added to geography. Languages, I assume are different, depending on geographical separation, and different cultures -- but I tend to use phrases and I tend to say "they switched", but to keep all dialogue in English. I like names to sound as if they're culturally based, but that's a me thing.
Religion is probably one of my weaknesses, in that it exists, but it's never dominant; because of this, I designed a world in which the gods are not held in quite the same esteem as they are in cultures here.
And yes, I drew maps. But they were blobs. No one with an eye for detail could possibly look at them and not think "wow, this is a series of connected blobs, with more blobs that look a bit pointier around the edges, and lots of words." They have meaning to me, in terms of scale -- but I wouldn't hand them to anyone else I didn't intend to amuse for days on end.
Economics is one of those things I think are often forgotten, and they're often dependent on terrain, geography, etc. I pull snippets of information from other sources as well; I create something that doesn't break the bounds of my own ability to believe in it, and I write from there.
I remember a discussion about a Guy Kay novel in which people were taking it apart because of its "lousy sense of geographical climate". I could probably make that same mistake, or would have, were it not for that.
Not sure if this is helpful at all -- you might want to wander over to