A NaNoCRATE

#3 • WORLD BUILDING - A DOOR TO NEW CHOICES

World building is a very powerful element that can be rendered as the pillar of your plot and defines the way in which your story would succeed.

World building comes to play in writing almost every genre, especially Fantasy and Science Fiction, where it's your imagination for the world you want and the key factors that you induce in it that decide how your story would morph itself into.

Following are a few steps, through which you can incarnate a world of your choice, an act indeed crucial to your novel writing~

1. What's important in this place?

At its heart, a story is about conflict. Without that, there's really little to tell. This could be two people or two nations, or even one person or group of people against society or the environment or nature. It might even be one person in conflict with themselves: that's up to you: but once you've worked out what it is, you need a world for that conflict to inhabit:

What sort of place best showcases this conflict?Who are the protagonists in the conflict and where do they reside in respect of each other?How do they differ from the everyday people we all know, or do they differ at all?What role can the environment play in that conflict, both directly and symbolically?

Once you've done this, you're ready to think about the protagonists in the conflict, and how the landscape might impact on them. Drawing a picture showing these groups, and even a proto-map, is often useful now, as we populate our story.

2. Put the pieces on the board

If you think about what you've just done as setting up the game board, the next step is to lay out the pieces. Societies are not amorphous blobs: they are made up of people who are all trying to do their best to survive and perpetuate themselves and those they care about. Start with the basics:

How do people live here? Where does the food come? What about cloth, timber, metal? What flora and fauna are present and integrated into the society? How technologically advanced are the people here?What is their history and how might this have shaped them as a people, their beliefs, attitudes and identity?What races are present? How much migration is there from other places? How integrated are the migrants? How do the locals regard the migrants and vice versa? What languages are spoken, and by whom?What social classes are present, and how do they interact? What creates and sustains their division (e.g. if there are a few very wealthy and many poor, how do the wealthy preserve that wealth and prevent insurrection)? How do the leaders gain, preserve and relinquish power? How do other potential leaders view the current leaders?

This is where you have the opportunity to impart your own worldview: the things you hold to be true in the nature of the society you are creating. How is the society organized, what do they emphasize, what is their relationship with the environment and each other.

3. The Past

You don't want to give the impression that your story world winked into existence just before Chapter One. How long has it been here? How did it get here? What are the big events that shape people's behavior today? What are people's beliefs about their creation, their purpose, their past and their futures? What divergent interpretations of these real or imagined events are present in society?

The more credible these things are, the more real your world will feel. But you have to build rationally, even in a fantasy setting.

4. Do the detail

Having created the big stuff, now you've got to think about the small stuff. It's often the little details that make the world you've created real: tiny customs of dress or behavior that make a group of people come alive. I found inspiration in my observations of our world, partly because I wanted Urte to resemble Earth, but also because we have so much variety, so many fascinating people and places that it I think they're worth celebrating.

So do some research into other cultures and think about how you might use variants of what you learn in your creation - always taking care to fit it all together seamlessly so that it feels right. Create cultures with their own speech patterns, dress codes and belief systems. How do the people relax? How do they express themselves creatively? To what do they aspire?

The thing to remember is that all of this needs to serve the story, not the other way round. Don't lose sight of your central premise. If something looks like it is taking over, you need to pare back its importance, but still have it make sense.

5. The People Factor

Now, having set up the board and laid out the pieces, you need to personalize it. Each grouping will have opinion leaders and powerful people with needs and desires. They need to be fully rounded people, with positive points as well as flaws - people are always flawed, even someone who's apparently perfect. And even if they're almost ideal, you can bet their family or friends won't be. Use them to move the conflicts along. And you need to keep in mind that if they've achieved a degree of success, despite their flaws, they must also have strengths: they must be worthy of the role or at least capable of gaining it and holding it, and they must fulfil it to the satisfaction of a powerful portion of those they lead (or have intimidated those they lead into letting them keep the role), or their time at the top will be short-lived. Give them a back-story, and think about their goals, in particular, what they think about the big issues, especially the conflict that is the heart of your story.

As the events of your story unfold, you will find that the reactions of these opinion leaders to the latest events in your story will help to drive it forward, so stay on top of what they are thinking and doing, even if it is off-screen.

Next, having built your house of cards, prepare the wrecking ball . . .

6. The Chaos Factor

So far, our goal has been to create a dynamic but mostly stable society. The important factor in that last sentence is 'stable'. Society is always changing as it adapts to new things, but most of the time it does so in an incremental way.

But conflicts are inherently destabilizing, and that new factor could throw everything into chaos. This 'chaos factor' might be ultimately beneficial for most (like a revolt against a tyrant), or not (like a plague virus), but that's up to you. The important thing for the story is that your world and the people in it react in a credible way to the disruption. Work toward a resolution:

• either the change leaves the world altered, or
• the change is averted and your society continues (relatively) unchanged.

As you can see, you can slice and dice your imaginary society in lots of ways, and what you get is COMPLEXITY. This is good: a complex world is believable, while a simplistic one isn't. As a storyteller, you need think about how much complexity you want to show; never forget that all of this is to support the story, not be the story. You need to know all this stuff, but you don't need to show it all. Often just making reference to your world-building (local jargon and customs, oblique references to past events, etc.) can be enough in the early chapters to let the action hook the reader; you can let the back-story seep out bit by bit as the plot develops.

Never forget the world-building is the backdrop and the props; the story close-ups should always be on your characters.

And if you do so, you might really be successful in your way to being the inventor of new worlds.

HAVE SOME TIPS ON WORLD BUILDING? LET US KNOW IN THE COMMENTS!