Project Updates: World-building

Here’s what you need to know about my thoughts on world-building:
WORLD-BUILDING IS AWESOME.

Let me stop myself before I go off into a tirade about the glorious tradition of world-building and the history of great world-builders who’ve come before us. I will do my utmost to concentrate on how I’m concerned with world-building today, though later this week, you may be getting a fatty post about the great world-builders.

After finding the problems in our project, we took a step back and tried to lay down a more solid base. As we started to discuss what we were working with, we started to get more and more detailed about how this story would manifest, and the world that was being created around it. Before I knew it, we were full-tilt world-building, and speaking in purely theoretical terms about who inhabited this world and what everything looked like and the mechanics of the whole place. I belong to that school of creators that believe that a good solid world is fundamental to a good genre story, (and yes there are some who don’t think it’s all that important), and can help the story self-manifest instead of having to constantly search for it. A world that is fully formed becomes a character itself. I think what we’ve come up with is absolutely marvelous. I’m definitely in love with it.

We had laid out a sort of a prologue and had these ephemeral ideas about where we wanted this story to go, but the execution was evading us a little bit. When we really nailed down what we wanted the story to do, and what we thought was the essence of that story, then we were able to define the world as we needed it to be. And then it’s sort of a vicious cycle, where the story is defining the world and the world is defining the story and it’s gorgeous. It’s much easier to see where that story is going and what the first few stories will be.

But the best part is that after a session of just pure mind-spew creation, we were able to come up with a concept that tickles my mind, and there’s probably nothing better than that.

Posted by novellyderivative on June 5, 2012

https://novellyderivative.wordpress.com/2012/06/05/project-updates-world-building/