Everything About World Building
World building is more than just a guide in building the world of your story. As a matter of fact, this is the very essence and at the same time, foundation of a good science fiction or fantasy story as well as other genres. A good world building leads to richness in your writing while giving your readers valuable information that they have to know and understand about your characters and the plot lines. How writers must proceed on the world building to their fiction then? Well to learn more about this subject, we will be breaking this idea into 3 main categories which is, imaginary worlds, alternate reality and actual locations.
With the imaginary worlds, the construction of the whole fictional universes is found mainly in fantasy genres wherein alternate reality, it is re-imagining the details of our present world which is actually popular to writers whose focus is mostly in science fiction and last but not the least, actual locations or the invocation of real place of our world that’s used in novels without adding any fantasy elements.
Believe you don’t, among the different types of world-building for authors are being able to create an imaginary world. It is oftentimes used in science fiction and fantasy to which the writer conjures every detail of his/her world from scratch which includes geography, lore, language, history, characters, politics, religion and social customs.
It does makes sense that creating these said elements to build the fictional world can be hard and challenging as well and being able to decide where it should start is sometimes impossible. If you want some inspiration, you can look at some of the universes built by famous authors such as J.R.R Tolkien, J.K. Rowling and many other great writers/authors.
We all know that not all writers are as imaginative, talented and creative as those two above and will be able to create a functional language but at least, this gives them a head start. One great place to start in building your world is by pinpointing one aspect of your imaginary world to which you are most interested in. It is best that you focus on this element as it will help you in building your story and world from there.
Sooner or later, you’ll get the hang of it and it would help in convincing people of everything you worked for; you just need to be consistent in your world. By objectively looking at the elements of your world and asking few questions based from it, you can get this done. Think of it like you sharing info on a person who doesn’t know anything about your country or home and you explain it to them in a way they will have vision of it.