World Building Part I: Getting Started

I’m still working on my rough outline, but I have been having a blast with all the world building that goes along with creating a fantasy story.

It really has been giving me something to nerd out over for the past few weeks. Everything from the physical world itself, to the solar system, and even the languages the different species will use for writing and speaking. The amount of detail you can pour into this was astounding to me. Digging into all of these things really gave me some better insight to the books I’ve read previously. It gave me a better sense for authors that spent more time doing this or maybe only focused on the physical word and just let the language take a backseat. None of that is inherently good or bad, just a fun new thing to learn.

One of the cool things about writing fantasy is that you can really determine what is realistic vs. what is just going to be cool for your story. For example, general scientific consensus is that there is a very narrow size window for a sun that could maintain a planet within its habitable zone long enough for intelligent life to develop. Some suns/stars just burn out and die too quickly. But with magic, interstellar travel, and other means, a story could easily work on a planet in one of those systems.

For now, I’ve started dabbling in a little bit of every aspect of world building. Using some tools written by bigger nerds than me, I’ve laid out a general solar system that should create some cool skies. I’ve also put some rough land mass alignments on my planet to create some interesting story dynamics (hopefully). I’ve even started working on some constructed languages. I have no intention of going full Tolkien and creating an entire spoken and written language, but I’m looking to create enough to fit into a plot point where an outsider is seen using “foreign words.”

I plan to go into further, non-spoiler, details in future posts, each covering one aspect of my world building.

Did I Speak Too Soon?

In my last post I wrote how I took my story idea and as I mapped everything out it looked like I had 2-3 extra stories. Well, to put it bluntly, after spending more time looking at everything, I ended up with story summaries for 11 unique stories. Of these, based on how they fit in the timeline I see 4 as smaller short stories/novellas and 7 main novels. 1 of the short stories is likely completely bonus material, and even the 3 more important ones are easily supplementary to the main storyline.

Let’s now take a look at what I’ve deemed the main storyline. Here I have 7 stories which include my original story split as a duology and then 5 stories that provide all of the backstory. I could probably combine stories 1 and 2 into a single book with some creative flashbacks and organization which would leave me with a nice trilogy for the early days of my timeline. That still leaves me with a fairly important standalone 4th book and then my original duology at 5 and 6.

Obviously as I get further into the outlining and writing, things may change. I may be able to cover some of the historic material in flashbacks which could help condense things further. And of course this also implies that I’m able to even get the first book published and successful.

To that end, I think my plan right now is to start on my original story - currently designed as a duology - and go from there. If I can manage to get that story out, and there’s interest, then I can go back and write the rest of the series.

At the Helm of My Journey

It started with a simple idea. As I mentioned in my first post, I decided to start down this road as I watch my kids become enthralled with the fantasy worlds of video games, on TV, and in movies. I had a brief concept of a story I wanted to write and I started doing a mind map of some general ideas and shaping the world around them. Then I got distracted.

What started as a simple mind map of organizing story concepts turned into geography research as I mapped out continents across the planet which led to doing research on the lifecycle of stars and designing the entire planetary system.

The engineer in me looked at what I laid out and said, but where did they all come from? How is there so much intelligent life here? And then inspiration hit me.

I did some more mind mapping, but soon realized this wasn’t going to be enough. I started writing out detailed descriptions of things I thought would be important, but I still wasn’t satisfied with what I had.

Looking into websites or applications that would help me build a timeline of everything, I ended up settling on a simple spreadsheet project timeline template.  Fast forward about a week and I now have a fairly well detailed 5000 years of history leading up to where my initial story idea takes place. I’m also pretty sure I have storylines for 2-3 stories that aren’t anywhere close in history to what I initially set out to write that are more detailed than my initial story idea.

Collectively I have a few thousand words written down, unedited, and not necessarily in any cohesive layout.  It’s a start, I suppose.

Blogs Are Better With Pictures

After my last post I realized, blog posts, especially long posts, look terrible without a picture or two to break things up. But this is a fantasy blog and I’m not an artist. Should I start paying someone to draw pictures that aren’t likely to accomplish anything other than breaking up my post text? Should I just start adding random photos? Neither of those seem particularly useful, so I opted for the latest - if not most controversial - tool on the market, AI.

I won’t dig into the ethics of using AI, this isn’t the place for that, but I can assure you, no writer or artist was put out of a job by me using AI. Instead, I’m using this as a thought exercise to help tease out some ideas and thoughts based on what’s in my head for several of these stories.

So what I plan to do, for every post that doesn’t have an obvious accompanying image, I’m going to add a random, AI generated image that is something in some way related to something I intend to write about in some form of fashion.

For now, sit back and enjoy.