An Introduction to World Building (And this Blog)

 What is World Building?

 The term "World Building" is a metaphor. There are no hammers involved. Clay is how out of the question and God forbid you end up with something you can hold afterward. Unfortunately, it's not even a very good metaphor.  

Because, you see, if your world was a building, then you aren't even metaphorically the guy pounding with the hammer, nor the guy welding the girder; you're not even the guy sitting on the hill looking at plans and shouting directions. 

Writers leave the building to someone else. The technical nitty-gritty details are something that no writer can take time for without boring the reader to death. Do we care that the building across the street is blue? No, we care that the mysterious man with the green bowler hat is parked out front, watching. So, maybe I thought the building was blue when I wrote about it, but it's been all sorts of different colors, different for everyone who reads about it. Nothing we ever write will come out picture perfect. Writing is not like art. If you paint a picture, and you asked everyone what it looks like, you would (Hopefully) get very similar answers. Every "building" that comes out of your story will be a little different, personalized to people the people who read the book. No, we don't really build anything. So what do we do?

Writers use words to paint pictures, feel out areas, create schematics--that each reader uses in their own head to build the world, by our instructions. You may not know what color the building is, but the man with the green bowler hat is parked out front, and he is watching. In every world, there is a street and a building across that street, and cars, and bowler hats. The layout of every world is the same. 

Writers are architects. And our work is World Design. 

Fine. Semantics. So, what is "World Design"?

Don't be silly. Everyone calls it world building--I'm not going to create some sort of Insistant Terminology in my first post. That would be ridiculous!

...Really?

But, oh, yes, definitions. 

World building is the designing of a setting--any setting--for a work of fiction. Setting includes time, place, and cultural context. When people talk about world building in conversation, they generally refer to the large-scale set design that goes on for making alternate cultures, especially in science fiction and fantasy works, but smaller scale world building happens in almost all fictional works.

But....why?

World building can include anything from deciding a character's ethnicity to drawing a basic layout of their house. People do it all the time while they write.

It is a method of making details consistent. If you don't know where things are, you might find the bathroom across the hall in chapter 3, and yet Julia has to run all the way downstairs to wash off the alien artifact in chapter 8. Or, your elven soldier might refuse to eat at a banquet on the grounds that he's vegetarian, even though you met him eating rabbit stew at a pub three chapters ago. These sorts of details are part of world building.  When you go back through the book, you remember which choices you make and then refer back to the "world" when things get inconsistent. 

But these sorts of little details are so trivial that doing world building as a separate exercise is hardly necessary. And the truth is that a lot of stories can be told without world building separately at all.

Why would you go out of your way to world build? Well, for starters, a lot of people prefer actual buildings to painted facades in their stories. A place that could actually exist. If you can mention details offhand that show you've done the work, readers will believe, well, that there's a whole world out there and your tale is only a tiny sliver of everything that's happening. 

And some stories don't work in a standard setting.  If The Hunger Games had starred "Katherine" and "Peter" as the American Government pulled random people from each of the 50 states to duke it out in Yellowstone, the plot would make no sense. You can't even describe Harry Potter and the Philosopher Stone without invoking magic or wizards. If the Pevensies had gone through a wardrobe into a world which was exactly the same, it just wouldn't be as much fun, would it?

Which brings me to my last point: World building outside of writing is a really fun!

All right. I'm sold. 

So why are we talking about this?

 My fantasy WIP The Book of Worlds began as a setting. In 7th grade, I was allowed to participate in a project from another class-- the "Create a World" Project, an analysis of Watership Down. Now, I've still never read Watership Down, but no project has ever affected my life as much this one I did for no credit on a lark. I learned about building languages, drawing maps, making food webs--And the result was the land of Narvu, still under construction.

The World Architect is my world building project. It's a place for me to talk about what I've learned in my 5-6 years working on my own world. Tips and articles and How to's for writers who are just beginning down their journey --and also posts about my active work on building Narvu, a land of death and decay and hope. 

So grab your pencils and meet me at the drafting table, there's a new world to explore.