World-building is serious business. I write across different genres, including historical, fantasy and science fiction, and world-building is one of my favorite things to do. Which is a good thing, because it’s an extremely important thing to do!
Before I throw this term around any more, let’s take a look at what it means. When writing fiction, an author creates her own rules about the universe her characters inhabit. Is it our universe? Great, that’s nice and simple. Is it our universe but different (like a lot of my stories)? Then it’s time to get creating!
The Foll Stones takes place here in our world and in Terratalam, a land of my own creation. When I started this story, I mostly had images in my mind. I knew what people looked like in this new world, I knew how the characters dressed and how they spoke. But as the story became more complex, I felt the need to clarify and focus on the world I created.
I started by creating a map, a copy of which you will be able to see in the published book! As I kept writing, I added more details to the map. Glance at the map and you can see Terratalam is similar to our world, with mountains, marshes, oceans, and valleys. The differences lie in subtle things that live beyond the map. Things like the types of animals you might see, or people you might talk with. It’s important to know how magic works here, who fights for which causes, and what friend and foe look like.
With each layer the world becomes more detailed and complex. For example, people of different regions dress differently. They eat different foods and use different tools. For The Foll Stones, the majority of the world-building was about the people themselves. Who were they? What was their family history? What were their personal experiences? I sketched all this out in my notebook while writing, noting down who was married to whom, and how many children they had and when. I also wrote out important experiences, even if they do not appear in the novel.
The more detail I put into my thoughts behind the story, the more real the story becomes to me. I can see all my characters in my mind. I can watch them move through the story of the book, as if I were watching real people on a screen. I created their world, and yet I feel as if they are just letting me in so I might watch their adventures.
Brigid Huey 