Conceptualization: Building a World

Whether you’re taking the old and turning it into something new or you’re creating an entire planet from scratch, your characters need a place to stand! Some readers aren’t particular over the specifics of the world as long as they understand it… and others long to escape to new realms and lose themselves in the magic of discovery.

This post will be broken up into two basic subjects: revamping Earth to be something new and creating a whole fantasy world unlike Earth.

No matter what variant of world building you are interested in, they share one thing in common: every change you make from the real world has to be sold to the reader. For the most part, as long as you are consistent in what the rules of the world are, readers are happy to follow along. If you have neon green oceans because there is a toxic form of algae that turns the water that color, and you have all the characters treat those oceans like the potential death it is, your readers will buy what you’re selling.

If you have neon green toxic water, but every character is immune to the algae, that is when readers, at least in my experience, tend to get rather crabby with the world ‘building.’

In short, when something in your world building has a consequence, follow through. This is a huge part of what makes a new world real to a reader.

Expanding on the Earth we Know and Love.

Honestly, I often find changing our familiar Earth and making it new and interesting to be quite a bit more challenging than creating a whole new world. Sure, the new world needs everything built… but readers will often jump on issues with world building changing the “real” world with startling ferocity. How you change the world doesn’t really matter. In my experience, I’ve found if I follow a few simple rules, I can do almost whatever I want with Earth.

Rule 1: be consistent.

I am going to use my Seeking the Zodiacs by R.J. Blain series to illustrate the following points, as this is one of my more extensive world changes. In this version of Earth, World War II summons magic into the world through the release of radioactive material. In short, nukes create magic. So, Japan was nuked during World War II as normal, but people quickly learned that rather than defeat Japan, many supernatural entities were brought to life.

This is where I had to be careful with my consistency; because radiation causes magic, I had to be careful with how radiation exits in our world while writing the book.

Then I needed to rewrite history. World War II did not end as it had in our timeline. Nuclear warfare changed everything.

And then World War III happened.

Hypnos takes place after World War III, and the lead character is a survivor of that war, which leads me to a very important rule I have to follow…

Rule 2: Understand How History Changes.

I like using Hypnos as an example for world building because so much has been changed. From the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, everything changed. Everything changed significantly.

I have eighty pages of notes on how history changed and led to World War III, all of which I needed to do to remain consistent with the one critical alteration I made to Earth. Many urban fantasy and paranormal authors either skim over the how magic came to be… or they pick an event “closer” to the lives of the lead characters.

Because I didn’t do that with this story, I needed to learn how the world had changed, why it had changed in the fashion it had, and figure out how society was altered due to the changes in the world’s history.

There was a great deal of studying involved to make this happen.

World building is hard, y’all.

Rule 3: Understand how Society Functions… and changes with the changes.

A critical part of selling a changed Earth to readers is being aware of how society changes. Readers love trying to piece together societal changes in an altered Earth scenario. Well, my readers do. They enjoy picking apart the society and seeing the overlaps and parallels. (Once again, remaining consistent with your changes is really important for making this happen successfully.)

Rule 3 is genuinely one of the hardest for me. There are so many scenarios and so many possibilities in how society can change. And twisting society to be just close enough to what we have now but is clearly different can be, frankly, terrifying.

In Booked for Murder (R.J. Blain) I took most of the world building changes and applied them to the corrupted government ruling over the United States. The plot is centered around this corrupted government, which takes our current politics, spins it, and takes every terrifying extremist result (on both sides of the fence), smashes them together, and villainizes the whole shebang.

Writing that series often gives me the heebeegeebies, and as the writer, all I can do is hope that none of my twisted schemings ever come to pass.

Nobody wins in this scenario. Nobody.

Rule 4: Decide how your technology changes or doesn’t change!

I love people with magic having access to cell phones. This sort of thing amuses me. I love how tech and magic can meld together, so I usually work with my tech ranging from “1980s level” to “current level” when world building my changed Earth. For example, in Whatever for Hire (R.J. Blain), burner phones, 5G, and all the other cool tech toys are present. But in A Chip on Her Shoulder, the society, world and technology changed to better match the time period. (Note: A Chip on Her Shoulder happens when the lead character of Whatever for Hire is an infant. This is a bit of a spoiler.)

If your series covers a long period of time, you want your world (and world building) to change with the times. This sort of thing helps the changed Earth feel more real.

Beyond that, I try to have fun and stretch my creative legs to see just how far I can push altering Earth. I find it to be a rather enjoyable endeavor.

Creating a New World

I love breathing life into entire worlds. The whole process appeals to me. What sort of people will live on this world? How many moons? Does their sun(s) work the same way? Am I trying to do one of those dual sun worlds ultimately doomed for inevitable destruction but can sustain human life for a short period? What calendar will they use? What type of plants and animals will live on the planet?

Will I use things like horses? (Yes, always.)

There are so many questions I need to answer, and chasing the answers makes me happy.

I am going to use a work in progress as the example for this discussion.

The Starter Questions

I wanted to write a fantasy romance with low to moderate magic… and dragons. but the dragons are in hiding. Which means all the other critters that are magical are also hiding. (Clearly, there must be magical horses if there are dragons.) So, knowing these things, I began to think.

I decided I wanted to write a world that smells faintly of the Roman Empire. So, I’m doing an empire. I have decided what the emperor is about and how he plays a key role in the world. (He’s a protag-antagonist. He’s both protagonist and antagonist.) I love to hate him! And I love to love him. I love how complicated this character is.

All right. So, I have a fantasy romance world with low to moderate magic, dragons, a frienemy Emperor, and an empire.

That’s a good start.

The empire has a Roman vibe.

This is enough for me to get started.

But what about the story?

Now, what character is going to be the heroine? Why is she here? Who is she romancing? Why is she romancing him?

I need to answer these questions in order to build the world she is from.

I decided that she is a trainer of horses, and she gets drawn into the Emperor’s world by being Very Good at her job in addition to being pretty.

Game on.

The Passage of Time is Quite Important!

I then decided on a long calendar system; one calendar year is actually four sets of four seasons in this world. It’s complicated. I have an entire calendar set up and ready to use. It has holidays, holy days, significant days, the moon is tracked. I have invested tens upon tens of hours on this calendar.

I loved every moment figuring out the solar and lunar calendars.

As the book in question needs a viable calendar, I will be actually drawing the solar and lunar calendar and hiring an artist to make it pretty once I have a functional design.

After the calendar, I needed a map of the empire. I needed to know the terrain. Where might the dragons live? Where might the heroine go? Where is the empire based? Who are the empire’s neighbors?

Then I needed to know what relationship the neighbors have with the empire.

Unlike the “altered Earth” world building, creating an entire planet is a lot of work.

The rules from the “altered Earth” scenario also apply to building a new world. However, I need to answer many more questions.

I don’t mind this. I find this process to be highly enjoyable.

But unless you have a reason to delve into this level of complexity, you don’t have to. You just need to answer the pertinent questions… and when a new question is asked, you need to find an answer that fits what you’ve already created.

Here are my basic questions when building a new world:

• What sort of world do I need?
• How do people survive? (Food, Shelter, Water!)
• How civilized is society?
• Do the characters live in hamlets, villages, towns, or cities? What is the regional population?
• What cultural influences and/or religion drives the society? (Most fantasy worlds have this.)
• What sort of world is required for your characters and the conflict they must overcome?

In the case of the work-in-progress, my list of questions is massive. I am hoping to turn it into a series that follows the calendar year of a single character’s life in each book. And that takes a great deal of work in the backend.

Much like an iceberg, the readers will only see the tip, and they’ll have no idea just how much work went into the actual world the characters live within.

For me, at least 80% of the world building never makes it directly onto the page. But I know the things that make the world work, and that helps me remain consistent when writing.

The takeaway:

No matter how you decide to create your world, be consistent and true to the world you built. If you change something, you need to justify the change within the written world. If you can’t do this, skip the change.

Just because you had a new idea doesn’t make it a good one and doesn’t mean it will fit in the world you initially built.

And readers absolutely do care about the world building. it is often what helps them escape from the real life and deeper into the pages of the book they are reading.

Do as little or as much as needed to bring your world to life, but once you decide on how something works, stick with it.

Consistency matters.

I am sure I will be revisiting this subject time and time again, as I could write an entire novel about creating a new world for a novel.

“It’s complicated” truly applies.