Worldbuilding Part III: The Initial Map

I have been really getting into world building lately. Detailing out lands, races, and languages has brought me a level of enjoyment I didn't know I was missing. Between this book and planning out some fly tying sessions for my upcoming fishing trips, the past few weeks have been quite fun.

As seen above, I have worked out not only some additional continents and major island chains, but I have also placed them squarely on the globe. Using two programs, gProjector and Gplates, I have been able to put my designs together, building a sense of scale and perspective. All told, the major land masses make up approximately 35-38% of the surface area of the planet, centering around two major continents - as shows in my previous post - a smaller continent that has been ripped in two by tectonic forces, and a polar continent that is mostly barren glacier.

Dotting the map are several island chains, most created by tectonic forces, and two chains created by magma hot spots.

Looking at the center continent above, I have been working on the map, adding mountains, forests, rivers, etc., while also working out political boundaries for 7-10 nations. I also started the same on the continent to the right, though I'm stuck between 6 and 8 nations. Names haven't yet taken shape as I'm working out a balance between "easily remembered in English/to the reader" and "making sense within the common tongue of the world". For example, I've worked out that the common tongue doesn't include a /z/ sound, so a Romanized name with a 'z' in it wouldn't make sense.

The story itself is also taking shape. All of this world building certainly helps with that as motivations become more clear and actions have meaning and impact. Otherwise it's just a story with no purpose. 

One day, I would love to show off my in-universe timeline. But that day is not today.

Worldbuilding Part II: Initial Continents

It’s been a while since my last post where I discussed starting the worldbuilding for my book. I didn’t mean for there to be such a long break - I really was trying to stick to a once-per-week pace with my posts - but I got stuck. There’s a really cool tool called GPlates that is a program designed for geologists to simulate and study Earth’s plate tectonics. It’s naturally built by engineer-types for geologists who both understand all the geology concepts and have a focus on creating highly accurate mapping. All that is to say that the UI is not great.

I found a few online tutorials and got to work. The basics were pretty straightforward, but as things started getting complex - continents merging and splitting, and plates disappearing or beginning anew - it started to become unruly. Since I wasn’t trying to go for hyper realism, mostly just wanting the planet to seem realistic enough to not trigger my pet peeves in fantasy writing, I focused on just creating some realistic continent interactions and designs.

After working a few simulations in GPlates, I was able to come up with the basic outline of two continents and the various features that would occur naturally. I took those and sketched them out, scanned them into the computer, then “traced” over them in Photoshop to create my digitized outline.

I am not a digital artist, nor do I play one on TV, but I can follow YouTube tutorials. Doing that, I was able to create realistic looking continents that followed my general outlines. It was nice to be able to extrapolate some boundaries, while also simulating continental crust that had highs and lows - and see that translate into islands and squirrely-looking coastlines.

I have more to do, at least two more continents for sure and probably some other features resulting from tectonic activity such as island chains and microcontinents, but these two continents will certainly suffice for now while I work on the rest.

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.