You have tons of options when world-building – both as a pantser and as a planner.
My primary love in writing is sci-fi and fantasy.
With that comes a need for world-building.
This can take any number of forms – and can be incredible on lots of different levels. And of course, my tagline is writer/editor/voice artist/world-builder.
There is tremendous power in building worlds. In many respects, you are creating life and playing god when you do so. You are forming a world of your imagination. Sometimes the detail is impressive – while other times it’s necessarily vague.
I know that for many writers this is intimidating. So many nuances and details can overwhelm. But it’s part of the story-telling process – whether you are a pantser, planner, or other style of writer.
The beauty of world-building comes from the potential and possibility it represents. Which is the approach I suggest taking to alleviate the overwhelm it might cause.
You can do as much or little world-building as you desire.
World-building as a pantser
Before I began this whole planning approach to my writing – I wrote exclusively as a pantser.
Just to refamiliarize you with the term – a pantser is someone who writes by the seat of their pants. Little to no plan, they sit down and write.
When I began to write The Source Chronicles fantasy series in 1998, I had a vague notion of the world I was building. I knew I had in mind a world like Earth with a medieval/renaissance vibe and practitioners of sorcery.
My inspiration came from other authors I read like JRR Tolkien, David Eddings, Anne McCaffrey, Robert Jordan, and so on. This vibe is visible to everyone in the likes of Game of Thrones and the Lord of the Rings in TV and movies.
Initially, beyond the basics, I didn’t build my world too thoroughly. Until I hired my first editor. She taught me to relish in building the world, and before I knew it, I had laid out the names for the days of the week, months of the year, and even planets in my fantasy world’s solar system.
When I envisioned the idea for the Steampunk world of The Vapor Rogues, I found a need to perform major world-building. It wasn’t just because of how magic/sorcery worked in that world – but the why of airships and biplanes and the Victorian Steampunk/cyberpunk/dieselpunk world I had in mind. To write about a world where everyone lives in cities floating above perpetual clouds, you need to know the world as it is.
Unlike the Source Chronicles, where world-building came in editing, world-building for Vapor Rogues took place before I started to write the stories.
World-building takes a whole other life in writing as a planner.
Planning, details, plot
When I began the process of putting together Forgotten Fodder, I had a vision in my head. A future where a war was fought with clones – who were subsequently abandoned at its conclusion.
This time, I took a planner approach from the start. First, there was necessary world-building. How did we get to the place where human clones had been created to do battle across multiple worlds?
This presented two interesting challenges to my world-building process. First – since this story was sci-fi, and specifically set 550 years in the future – the characters and worlds had to be plausible. Unlike fantasy and sci-fantasy, there needs to be a sense of potential possibility and reality – even within fiction.
Second – given this was a story based in reality, I needed to do a bunch of research. I looked into known exoplanets, theories of faster-than-light travel and potential power sources, and a few basics of genetics, physics, virology, and other sciences.
I wasn’t just building worlds purely of my imagination. My world-building was with a foot (okay, arguably a toe sometimes) holding to reality.
I have discovered over the years I LOVE research. Not in the same way – or the same topics – as my wife and her extensive research projects. But more of the is that plausible? – let me Google it types of research.
This was like the pre-internet days when I had a thesaurus on my desk. I needed a different word – so I looked up synonyms. Now, between thesaurus.com and Google, the physical thesaurus is just a paperweight. But the idea of using it – and other research – for world-building is the key.
The primary difference, for me, of world-building as a planner vs a pantser is a matter of clarity of the plot.
Either way, how you view the process matters.
Finding the beauty of world-building
For me, world-building has become the canvas on which I paint my art. A lot of what goes into it might never be publicly seen – or covered by the story – but it’s still there.
If you find the idea of world-building tedious – you can largely skip it. At least at first. There is something to be said for sitting down and writing even with an incomplete notion. Part of the process of editing is adding color and detail where it might lack.
And sometimes removing it when there is too much exposition.
The options available to you in world-building are near-literal god-like powers. For Void Incursion, I have created races of aliens across many worlds that – outside of my imagination – probably don’t exist. But in my head, these aliens have colorful scales, furs, and odd shapes. They occupy worlds where the light is different and the waters are pink instead of blue, or air to them is more methane than oxygen.
The point to this is that the potential and possibilities represented by world-building are not something to fear. They might seem overwhelming – but they are, in truth, empowering. Look at what you, writer, artist, world-builder, can find and/or create. And – subsequently – share with the world at large.
World-building is a cornerstone of the creative process. You can do as much or as little as suits you and the work you do.
You have tons of options when world-building. When you approach that with excitement and joy instead of trepidation and fear you can create amazing things. The power is yours.
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