The Craft of Worldbuilding...
If you intend to write any kind of fantasy, you have to
become adept at worldbuilding. Even if your story takes place in a real world
setting (as is the case for most urban fantasy), there is still the matter of
what inhabits that world. The real world doesn’t include monsters, vampires,
werewolves, demons, angels, dragons, trolls, elves, faeries, and all matter of
other supernatural creatures, meaning it is up to the author to establish the rules
for their existence. You need to be clear about how and why they populate your
world. Are they shadow beings existing on the fringes of an otherwise normal society,
or are they common knowledge? And if their existence is accepted in the real
world, how did that come to be? Was it always so, or did a specific event
reveal their existence to the masses? These are matters the author must decide before
writing one word of the story if it’s going to be taken seriously by readers.
You can ask a lot of a reader, but you won’t be forgiven if you continuously break
your own rules or fail to establish them in the first place. Even fantasy has
structure.
If your fantasy includes a physical location that doesn’t exist
in the real world (a country, a world, a city), your worldbuilding becomes even more important. Many
fantasy writers swear by maps (and some even include them in their books) to
give them the lay of the land so they can write to that world. I know in my
Sacrifice series, my characters live in the fantasy city of Erebus. I have a
rough map I use to describe areas of the city and I’ve written an extensive
description of it for my own use, so I know where the characters are going and
what they might find when they get there. After five books, the city has become
as familiar to me as if it was real, which helps me make it believable to the reader.
And that’s just urban fantasy, which by its very definition is supposed to be
fantastical events in a real world urban setting.
For an epic fantasy writer, the task is even greater
because nearly every aspect of the story involves a world unlike our own. You
have to establish the where, when, and how of the tale, along with the
parameters of that society, the geographical details of the land or city, and
what type of creatures inhabit that world. Maybe your main characters aren’t even
human, so what are they? And what are the rules of their existence? You have to
set those rules for everything if you’re going to be taken seriously. Unless
you’re writing absurdist comedy, you can’t have a bustling modern city suddenly
overrun with dragons if they’ve never been established as existing in that
world previously just because you think it would be a cool plot twist. Your
willing suspension of disbelief will go right out the window, and that’s what
ultimately all writers strive for. We writers want to take the reader for a
ride, to make them forget their world for a while and delve into ours.
How adept you are at building out your world will go a long
way toward your goal of writing a successful fantasy story. Taking the reader
for that ride is the definition of willing suspension of disbelief. For a little
while they become engaged in the worlds we create, and the more convincing your
worldbuilding is, the more willing they are to escape to it. The minute you
jerk them out of that world by blatantly ignoring your own rules, or failing to
establish them in the first place, you’ve lost their trust and failed in your
goal.
But when it works, when you as a writer can create a rich
and plausible world so unlike that in which we live but still believable enough
to transport the reader beyond his or her everyday life, that is the ultimate reward
for all your hard work.
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