AW Worldbuilders?

PenDragon · Jun 17, 2009

Any avid Worldbuilders in the house? On my blog I've started a weekly experiment in worldbuilding; something I've never done before. I'm calling it Wednesday Worldbuilding. Today's post is How the Hell do you Bulid a World Anyway. I'd apprecaite some input on the subject from AW's Fantasy (and Science Fiction) writers and Worldbuilders. If you're not into the whole blog thing feel free to answer in this thread.

So the question is . . . how do you worldbuild?

Dale Emery · Jun 17, 2009

I fumble around. I notice, as I'm pondering a plot idea or a character, that I have a question about the world.

For example, the community in my current fantasy novel was founded 100 years before the story begins. The settlers emigrated from their country of origin to be free of the religion that pervaded their society. So... what's the religion? My brain chugs away on that question wherever I go.

I was reading a novel that mentioned auroras in passing. Hey, I thought, I could weave a religion around auroras. So now I'm studying auroras in order to identify the key elements of the phenomenon. And my brain is chugging away on the question: What religious principle or practice might map to this fact about auroras? There will surely be colored curtains and flowing robes everywhere.

Another question arose: If the community in the story is areligious, how do they organize their morality? Answer (after months of pondering): Their rite of passage has to do with studying "one of the virtues" and developing some new insight about it. Now I have a zillion more questions: What virtues do they acknowledge, and what insights have they developed about them? How do they administer the rite? How are virtues assigned to adolescents for study? How do they record and promote the insights? What if someone can't think of an insight? I don't have answers to those questions yet.

At some point I needed some of the people in the community to have a deep secret. The secret I thought of was: The emigration was funded not by the anonymous benefactor who is enshrined in the community's legends, but by theft. A handful of guys stole a bunch of money from some rich guy. Who knows the secret? How do they pass it from generation to generation, and why? How do they keep the secret from leaking?

So that's how I proceed with worldbuilding: I notice a question that I have about the world, and I leave it to my unconscious to supply an answer.

Oh, that and theft. The layout of the community is suspiciously like that of the small town where I grew up.

Dale

Canotila · Jun 17, 2009

I let my characters give me tours. My subconscious tends to spit them at me fully formed. They know a lot more than I do, since they are native to their worlds. A couple of them, not MCs, but loud mouthed minor ones, like me to pay attention to them so they tend to look over my shoulder as I write and correct mistakes, or fill in gaps, or insert irrelevant details about themselves. Sometimes I run across something in real life (maybe a plant at the garden shop) and someone will pipe up and let me know if it or something similar is important to them in their world. There are characters that exist in their world who never make it into the story, but I spend quite a bit of time interacting with so that I can learn about what drives their economies, politics, etc.

It works the same way when main characters tell me things about themselves. I can ask them questions, why, what, how, etc. and in their answers I find a lot of details about the world the come from.

My favorite time that this happened was an accident. I wrote a scene where a necromancer character happened to be eating meat. He flipped out on me. It was wonderful, because normally he is very reserved and distrustful. I was having a hard time coaxing information out of him. He wouldn't explain to me how necromancy works, or why he did it, etc. He went off on a rant that began with how bones in food is disgusting, and that spiraled off into proper treatment of human and animal remains, that spiraled off into a lecture on religion and ancestor worship, which turned into a lesson on how necromancy works. I just shut up and took notes for a few hours.

sunandshadow · Jun 17, 2009

Here's a really old thing I wrote about Worldbuilding (should probably find time to re-do it eventually...)
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/mod/journal/journal.asp?jn=263649&reply_id=1647036

There have also been some great threads in this forum about race creation, monster creation, culture building, and recommended reading for worldbuilders.

Fokker Aeroplanbau · Jun 17, 2009

I think that the best way to World-Build is take some of those 'what political party suits you the best' tests. I especially use the Political Compass quiz but most of the quizzes out there on the internet aren't horribly biased. Then I merely answer the questions like I was my creation; sometimes the questions don't pertain yet unless your trying to create a mindless animal most are general enough that it works out. Then once you get the results, the description, so much deep material is already constructed that applying it to your story is literally so amazing it's a religious ephiphany.

From doing that alone you'll think up a million descriptions of why your creature would choose that answer choice and as I usually find out: your brain will gain another hundred from just thinking "If it chooses A, then what would it choose if..."

Paichka · Jun 17, 2009

I take a macro approach to worldbuilding, and start with continents.

After I have my continents, I add geographical features. Deserts, mountain ranges, big frakkin lakes, rivers, etc.

Then I determine where my city centers would be. I don't have countries yet, just ideas of where the people would congregate. I pirate shamelessly from the real world for that -- locations of actual cities (London, Paris, Madrid, etc) inspire where similar sized cities would be in my world. For example, one of my country's capitals is near the mouth of a large river as it feeds out into a bay.

After that, I determine what kind of cultures each of the countries would have, because that informs what sorts of things they find important, and THAT informs their religions. The country mentioned above has a lot of rivers and marshlands, so their religion is heavily water based.

Then I start making up their histories as I go -- wars, monarchies, transitions of power, traditions, heroes, folklore, etc etc. Maybe 1/10th of this makes it into the WIP, but it's important background for me.

mscelina · Jun 17, 2009

This is from the world building section of my website and interestingly enough, I just posted this in an author's chat I'm doing this afternoon with fans.

World Creation For the Beginner

1. Physical - maps, climate, topography(Is your main town in the mountains? A port city? On the plains? Is it warm? Cool? What are the borders?)

2. History-this means government, military background, currency, the biggest trade product, anything that would have an effect upon the characters (Democracy or dictatorship? Standing army? Navy? Agricultural or industrial nation? Gold-based currency or paper?)

3. Mythology-gods, worship practices, temples, magic( Is this a monotheistic society or is there a pantheon? What rituals are used in worship? Big white marble temples or humble outdoor shrines? How does magic work?)

4.Time - calendar, units of measurement (Solar year or lunar year? How long? How long is a month? Clocks? Sundials? Hours, minutes, or some other sort of measurement?)

5.The current situation. Every world has a here and now. What makes this time so unique? Is the change to come or is it already here? Who affects it and how?

and the most important....

6.How this world affects the protagonist--and how the protagonist reacts to it.

A caveat about magic...

Magic is hard to write. You have to make something that is inherently incredible into a believable action. Wouldn't it be nice if your protagonist could just wave his hand and change the world? Unfortunately, that makes for boring fantasy, even if your protagonist is a god. There have to be limits established from the beginning: who can work it, how they work it, when they work it, what they need to work it, and what the consequences of working it might be. Be careful when you're writing about magic, folks--poorly defined magic can ruin the credibility of your ENTIRE story.

Liosse de Velishaf · Jun 17, 2009

My process varies, depending on the inspiration. Usually I have a story, and a world develops around it. I approach a project from both macro and micro angles. The story provides the micro start, and the macro comes from the geography and physics side.

For fantasy, I generally begin with a micro model of the main region where the story takes place. I end up with the names of neighboring regions, which are developed from large to small scale.

I do a lot of fumbling, and spend a lot of time gathering influences and inspiration. I tend to write a lot of disconnected academic articles and papers. Order only comes after I've generated enough random material o start working out general patterns. I'd say it's as much a learning experience as planned development.

Sarpedon · Jun 17, 2009

I tend to try to think about what locales are important to the story, and build the world up around them:

For example, in one world I've got, I have a story that centers around a particular city. Now this city is an inland trading city, on a river. So I then had to figure what was upstream and what was downstream, and what was accross the river. Then I had to figure out where the wares they were trading came from, so I invented the countries as sources of the goods.

In another world, I had the idea of the main characters being washed up on a desert coast, as refugees. I imagined something like the deserts of Chile, which are rainshadow deserts. So naturally I needed a mountain range. And then I needed a wet, lush land on the other side of the mountains. As I developed these, I figured the characters would have to settle in one of these areas. Then I had to wonder why that land would be available. Then I had to wonder what their new neighbors would be like. And then I had to figure out what their neihbors did for a living. To heighten the effect of alienation on the main characters, I had to make the natives as odd as possible. so traditional governments and customs were the exception, rather than the rule.

geardrops · Jun 17, 2009

Hm. This makes me think I should blog about worldbuilding.

Except it's such a nonlinear process for me...

Well, some things I consider are... what's important for a society? How does that structure language and social interaction? How does language continue to shape society? Mating rituals? Political structure? Economic structure? Urbanization? Family structure? Transportation? Industry? Military? Borders and associated issues? Are they ethnocentric? How ethnocentric?

Ad nauseum.

Izz · Jun 17, 2009

Strangely, i find i need to be writing the story to build the world, and trying to build it before i tackle the story doesn't work well for me at all. So i build as i write and fill things in as i go, as needed. Then, often the mind will tangent off on a worldbuilding arc and i'll get a whole lot done.

In the pipeline to write sometime within the next twelve months--it's probably about three or four away on my list--is a novel that has a bit of worldbuilding done already, but that's because i've started this novel three or four times over the last ten years and left it each time because my skillz weren't where they needed to be to write it.

Mr Flibble · Jun 17, 2009

Strangely, i find i need to be writing the story to build the world, and trying to build it before i tackle the story doesn't work well for me at all.

Me too. Ok, so I had a rough idea of the landmass, where the big stuff like mountains was and roughly what race lived where.

But why X nation hates Y came out as I wrote. *invent ancient war* oooh, that helps the plot too! And then that means that they hate them other ones because of that too! That odd marriage thing one of the races has, oh and the ahem 'loyalty pledges'just dropped out of nowhere.

If I do it this way I find I'm also less inclined to put in stuff that's not needed by the plot ( although I know loads more than goes in the books) because I only think about that aspect as it arises in the story.

But then I've always been one for just writing and see what turns up

2Wheels · Jun 17, 2009

I had no preformed concepts of a world, or environment. I started with two characters in a particular situation and the world around them became clear as I examined their reactions to both it, and each other. Once they'd given me the basics as to setting, I began to throw in bits of my own - unashamedly pilfering parallels from real world history and environments and so forth. It was a bit like a snowball - the more you roll into it the bigger it gets. Trick is not to let it get too big and unwieldy, or roll out of control!

PenDragon · Jun 17, 2009

Hey, thanks for all the replies peeps.

Seems like there are two definite ways . . .

The Story First; world built out of the story organic method.
The World First; build a world to set a story in constructed method.

Of course, it's not that black and white, but that's the general trend. I wonder if there's a correlation between Story First and Pantster writers and World First & outliners?

Cyia · Jun 17, 2009

I started with a doodle. I did a rough outline of a human body and added lines until they took the shape of something that could be fleshed into clothes - at which point my MC turned out to be female. Who knew.

There was an odd piece of cloth on the clothes that looked like a mistake, but apparently I was wrong. It was, in fact, a length of cloth tucked into the woman's belt that could be pulled over her head in the event of a sand storm so she could breath without inhaling sand... OH! she's in a desert. Cool!

Then there were these odd lines on her arms, every few one of them was darker and thicker. They're culturally significant as each year, another band is added and every decade, a colored one is added, so their age and station are obvious at a glance.

She was wearing a hood, so I wondered if that was to block the sun. She says no, it's to hide her face so no one sees the scars there... I didn't know she had scars (so I guess the hood did its job). They're not just plain old scars, either. They're ritualistic scarification that show her lineage as part of a race separate from that of the city she was in.

Everything else piled on from there by asking questions about why the scars were hidden, where she came from if it wasn't that city, what was used to make the scars, and if the material used was sacred, etc.

Izz · Jun 17, 2009

PenDragon said:
I wonder if there's a correlation between Story First and Pantster writers and World First & outliners?

I'm a Story First and would probably fall under the Outliner category if one was to categorize (even though i have many different outlining methods and don't always, because different stories require different things, but my novels always have some form of outline to go with them before they're finished. Current novel (non SF) has three pages of plot progression, which is very, very basic and of course, not set in stone; last novel (SF) had 20 pages of outline, including what i happened to happen in each major scene period, and some scenes semi-written; next novel (SF interstitial-ish) has 7 pages of outline, mostly just plot progression with some dialogue possibilities for crucial points in the plot).

So, not quite sure what that'll do to your theory.

AMCrenshaw · Jun 17, 2009

I only got into world-building because of RPGs (Forgotten Realms and Warhammer in particular).

But when I began to write I noticed I had built the framework necessary for conflicts already. I already placed possible routes for journeys. I already populated those routes with rude people, brutes, sometimes monsters (more often in D&D than in fiction of course), sometimes lovely ladies or handsome men. I already had stories there. In the past I've used very few world maps, but a lot of locally-detailed ones. The cultures I build as I need them; I rarely begin there, though, with one dystopian piece I did.

With my best friend, who's also a writer, our world building is in asking what if about a million times and answering the questions. Sometimes we consider consistency. Sometimes we don't. The effect is innovation, first of all. When a fictional world's natural and sentient history seem to make sense, even briefly, we raise new questions.

Usually-- and this is my last point-- world-building doesn't exist in the map itself; it exists in the story I have in my head. The place is its container, its mood, and its flavor.

AMC

Nivarion · Jun 17, 2009

I love world building because it is something i can do towards the book when my think cells are all kaput.

Other than that, I'm a story first guy.

JLCwrites · Jun 17, 2009

I have a vague idea of the type of world I am working with. Then, as my characters develop and the story takes off, I make a separate document with some general notes on different cities, the planet, other species on the planet, types of spacecrafts, etc.... I also include sketches. It helps as a reference and with continuity.

geardrops · Jun 17, 2009

I'm a worldbuilder and a panster. Not sure what that means.

LOG · Jun 17, 2009

Worldbuilding is my hobby, I love it!

(Add how I do it later)

Faolmor · Jun 18, 2009

Dedicated world-builder here.

For me, it's feels like less of a process, and more of a natural evolution. I see the world as it is, and the science and sociologies just seem to happen to make it work. The moment I try to force it, it comes unglued. I guess my answer to your question, therefore, is: You don't consciously build a world. You let it build itself. The more a writer intrudes into the landscape of an unfamiliar world (rather than letting their character give them "the tour," the more forced and unnatural it tends to become.

When writing, I try to focus on story - but always bear in mind that the world shapes the character, and not the other way around. I think this is a problem in some fantasy writing. People forget that without culture, language, society, environment, there can be no personality, no characterisation. Characters must always be a product of their world. It irks me when characters are surprised by things in their world - it's an obvious symptom of the writer "discovering" something new, and mirroring their own surprise via their character.

The world must BE real to the writer. As soon as the writer starts winking at the audience, the whole point of fantasy is lost.

megan_d · Jun 18, 2009

I read your blog post and what really jumped out at me was your comment: verisimilitude over realism. That's exactly the approach I'm taking with my WIP, I just didn't realise it. I was vaguely troubled that I didn't know every single thing about every single thing my world,as though this would translate into the plot. But you're blog post calmed my nerves somewhat, so thanks!

AceTachyon · Jun 18, 2009

Like AMC, my worldbuilding came about due to RPGing since the dawn of time (not quite, but you get the idea). Since I was primarily DM/GM, I had to come up with the adventures, either from scratch or building on what was already available (e.g. the Forgotten Realms world).

For my current cyberpunk action-adventure serial, I stole my world from several sources. Since most of the action takes place in the fictional metropolis of Bay City, I used the CP2020 sourcebook for Night City and the Shadowrun sourcebook for New Seattle as my primary "jumping off" points. Then I retconned California history and geography and set my new city smack dab in the middle of the Central Coast, in what is currently the Pismo Beach area (north of Santa Barbara). Then drew up a rough streetmap of Bay City and marked off various "districts" and neighborhoods.

So far, not everything is fixed. I do have certain areas of the city mapped off with a key to what's there (stores, restaurants, etc).
And I'm still adding bits to the bigger world of the story.

dclary · Jun 18, 2009

From the last worldbuilding thread:

dclary said:
My process is a little detailed, and requires several tools, but I've been very satisfied with the results.

First, I use a good 3D Terrain generator and tell it to generate an early-life-stage planet-sized map. I may render a few different ones until I see just what i'm looking for.

Then, I'll grab some of the open source genetic DNA mappers that are out there, and I work up a "first level" biology, I call it. microbes, ameobas, whatever. I try to stay small, with the first complex life forms being more plantish than animalish.

At this point, I rerender the terrain mapper with an erosion/platelet-shift mod I found. This helps show the tectonic redistribution of matter, may cause some extinction level events. It's all very exciting.

Now I'm ready for level two life. There's a cool tool called 'iVolution' that will take my microbe and early-generation dna files, and evolve them through billions of mutations in a pretty quick amount of time. It's only available on iPhone for now, which is a pain, but it does the trick fantastically, so it's worth the annoyance factor. This gives me my first "animals" -- usually they look like snails, or little fish, sometimes by this point I have land-based plants, which are getting much more complex, and early insects.

The USGS has some fantastic climate modelers, and I have one of them I use now for modelling climate. most of teh data comes right from the planetary file, so I only have to fudge a number here and there to really get the results I'm looking for. I can model rain and wind patterns, days of sun, UV exposure, everything.

Time for level 3 life. This one's trickier. I have to decide what types of life will initially succeed, and then I make them more complex, and larger. The species-war-2000 simulator takes care of the iterations for me, which sure helps.

This is a good time for a universal cataclysmic event. With that utlility AutoDesk put out a few years ago that simulates asteroid collisions, I can similate a meteor hitting my planet. This causes some plate shifts, usually creates more ocean space, and sometimes kills off a ton of lifeforms.

At this point, I'm usually ready to introduce sentient species into my world.

I try to establish 2-3 base races, and let them evolve into one or more subspecies of each other. Sometimes I'll have as many as 16 races, but most of my simulations show more than half of them being eliminated before they can even establish a stone age presence, which is a pain, because without any archaeological presence, there's no alien/monster artifacts for the surviving races to seek.

I use microsoft's empire generator to iterate each of the races through 10,000 years (or so) of history -- I've got my own name templates, which you totally need with that tool, as you know. this does a great job of tracking wars, bloodlines, feuds, just some wonderful things you can do with it.

I'll use a random calamity generator during the iteration to decide which race will randomly be snuffed out, and when. This race's buildings and effects become ruins and artifacts for characters from the other races to plunder.

This entire process takes me maybe 2-3 years to go all the way through, but I can't tell you how satisfying it is to me to have the finished product.

Right now I'm researching a tool that will randomly generate my characters for me that is plug-and-playable with the data file I've established.

I've done like, 8 of these worlds, and someday I'm going to write a novel about one of them. I think it'll be awesome.

AW Worldbuilders?

Dragon with a Pen

is way off topic

Sever your leg please.

Impractical Fantasy Animal

The BIC-Believer

Teh doommobile, drivin' rite by you

Good thing I like my day job

Doing the Space Operatic

They've been very bad, Mr Flibble

Anachronista

Dragon with a Pen

Rewriting My Destiny

Doing the Space Operatic

...

Brony level >9000

Good thing I like my day job

Lagrangian

My eyes! It burns!

Falling in the milk

Odd person

Unabashed Mercenary