Hey everyone! We finally made it to the final post in this series. I am super excited to write this short quick wrap up for the series before we start into the stand-alone posts before my hiatus. So, without further ado…
Worldbuilding: Final Notes
There are so many parts of worldbuilding! It was really hard trying to decide which parts to write about in this series. Just because these are the aspects that I chose to write about doesn’t mean that you have to write about all of these or even any of these. And this doesn’t mean that you have to completely ignore the other aspects of world building that I didn’t cover. There are so many interesting and cool parts of world building that I felt were too specific for a short series of world building.
One of the difficult parts of world building is choosing which aspects of world building to focus on. If you focus on everything it might take you several months at best, several years at worst, to get all of your world building done. One of the difficult parts of world building is really trying to decide which aspects you are going to focus on and develop for your story without leaving out parts that might make your story seem underdeveloped.
At a recent writers conference I attended I actually attended a presentation where this difficult question of world building was addressed. It was discussed at the beginning how different writers use different methods but no one in the room could really give a solid answer so then the presenter went into his presentation. He showed one of the best methods I have ever seen for world building in a shorter amount of time.
He started with 14 categories, but you could choose any categories based off of your own imagination or off of this series. His 14 categories were geography, religion, customs, fauna, history, language, races, sound, astronomy, government, resources, flora, and seasons. You can change any of these get rid of some, add others to make your own list of categories. After you have your list of categories you make a matrix table – all categories across the dop and then all categories down the side.
He then said to add check boxes in areas where you think the story might be interesting to have different aspects cross over. For example, maybe you check the box where flora and religion cross. Perhaps there is some sort of conflict going on between two groups of worshipers who worship different types of plants. Perhaps this is a minor world conflict your character can come across later on or perhaps it is the starting point of a major conflict for your story. Once you start to use this matrix method however, it’s much easier to read other amazingly well-built worlds and see the matrix of their own stories.
For example, the Magic of Recluse series is very strongly magic and government world building, and the historical aspect of world building is the actual stories of the series. The wheel of time fills a couple of interesting boxes such as religion and government when considering the Aes Sedai and the Children of the Light or Magic and history when considering the whole origin of the idea of men not being able to use magic which is an important and continuous part of the world building. Eventually, if you get used to this method you can begin to do it in your head and maybe add 3 or four categories together rather than just two.
Worldbuilding is fun and hard. But world building should not be so time consuming as to fill all of our writing time and never leave us time to write. We are writers not world builders. We want to write stories set in the worlds we build. We need them to feel real and make sense, but we don’t need them to have a long, convoluted history textbook or ten pages of infodump in the middle of our book for context. Worldbuilding is a writing tool – not an endgame.
I hope this series was useful and interesting. Starting from next week we will have a few stand-alone posts and in the last stand-alone post at the end of July there will be an announcement of the new series. So, stay tuned for that. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, become a blog page member, share, and follow me on social media at the links below. And remember,
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!