Sunday, April 4, 2010

World Building, Part 1: Introduction

If you're asking yourself whether or not you need this mini-series, let me put your mind at rest. If you write paranormal, sci-fi, or fantasy romance, you absolutely do. Of course, you may not need it as much for a paranormal in a modern setting than you would for a fantasy romance, per say. In order to maintain consistency in your story, some degree of world building is necessary. Easy peasy, right?

Wrong. Many speculative fiction authors take years to build up their worlds from scratch. Of course, if your paranormal romance is set in modern day, it shouldn't take you nearly as long. A couple hours or a day at most, if you work at it.

I can hear those doubts bubbling to the surface of your thoughts. Why can't you just make it up while you go along? I'm not going to lie to you. You could. By doing so, you would lighten your workload and piece it together as you write. But you shouldn't. That's how holes are formed. It's easy to miss out on things, by taking it one step at a time. Then, somewhere down the road, one of your readers is going to scratch their head and think: Why are you adding this in here? It could have been mentioned in a previous book! Before you hyperventilate, that's what I'm here for. To make sure you know exactly where those holes might be, so you can plug them up as you go.

In the next couple weeks, we'll be exploring several facets of world building. In order:

-History

-Culture

-Government

-Religion

and

-Language

I look forward to taking the journey with you!

Clara.

3 comments:

  1. Great post! One of the things I hate are worlds full of holes everywhere, like in twilight where surely the vampires should have conquered the world long long ago?

    Getting at the very least the basic, I don't know, I'll say laws, of your world put down in stone before you start writing or at least very early on is definitely going to make the readers(or at least me as one of them) much happier since they aren't going through your book doing double takes looking at things thinking "Wait, what??"

    Thanks for this! Theres more than one even heavily published author out there that should be reading this post and taking notes!

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