Essentially, it's the part of the book where you construct your character's world. I sort of just dismissed it as like, a given - it comes with the territory of the book, right? Right? Right? The world just builds itself, right?
RIGHT?
I have recently learned how very wrong I was. I'm in the middle of writing my first novel and I have recognized the need for some serious work on the world building side of things.
The temptation when creating a fantasy world is to start everything from scratch. Currency? Make it up! Government? Make it up! Amount of limbs per person? Make it up! Language? Make it up! Color of the sky? Make it up! How many moons? Make it up! Primary mode of transportation? Make it up! Months in a year? Make it up! Names of days of the week? Make it up! Animals? Make it up! Babies? Make it up! Religion? MAKE IT UP!
They warned me about this, these wise published authors. I sort of listened with one ear, while the other was off in my fantasy world, making things up.
Oh, I wish I could remember which author wrote about this (if you recognize the metaphor please tell me so I can give that author credit!) but I read a wise piece of advice that said world building basically has a currency. You only have a certain amount to spend before the world you're building becomes totally unrelatable to the reader. It's kind of like a weirdness quota. Once you hit the cap on the quota of different elements you've made up in the building of your world, you can go no farther because you'll have weirded all your readers out past the point of no return.
I ran into this temptation today as I was attempting to hammer out some necessary world-building elements in my story. I don't like writing structural stuff as much because the way my process goes is - I envision a scene, I write the scene, and plan on coming back to find ways to fix things and connect them together later. But I know I need some basis for the world my characters live in, so I'm attempting to work on things on that end.
So I realized I had sort of off-handedly thrown in there somewhere that there was a year in which there were like, double the amount of months because of the phases of the month. Why did I do that? I don't know, I'm sure it sounded cool to me at the time. But I realized it doesn't really service the story or the plot at all. My world doesn't need a year with twenty months in it. Also, that does not make any sense. If the movements of the moon were extremely crucial to the various components of my story, then maybe it would make sense to have it in there. But the moon has yet to feature prominently in my plot points (as in, not at all. This story really has nothing to do with the moon.), so therefore, I'm cutting out the weirdness to restore some currency to my world-building budget.
Right now I'm really struggling with the central concept of my novel - magick (it's spelled that way on purpose. Why? Because I can. and I don't have an editor to insist I change it. Yet. OPTIMISM!). I'm sort of wandering through the mess of how magick works and trying not to make it like every other magical book but to make it unique to my world but what's happening is this sort of messy puddle of tangled elements on the floor and I have no idea how to make it work.
Magic in writing, ironically, is what started the entire idea of this novel. Namely, in that I was sick of reading all books describing the use of magic in the same exact way. Now my problem is that I can't describe the use of magic in the same way as everyone else! You see my dilemma? My imagination is only so big.
Well, I'm up against the wall on the magic issue, but my point here is that I'm realizing just how important it is to be intentional with my world building, whereas before I sort of didn't pay any attention to it. My thought process was more like, This is such a great idea, ooo I love my characters, yay now it will all fall into place! How could it not?!?
Writing is hard work. And world building is too. But it's such fun.
From the depths of banging my head against the wall,
- Fire
Magic elements are definitely my most difficult for me, too (since I also write fantasy). I still haven't really hammered out how it works in my current series, and I'm a novel and a half in. :P *siggghhh* Pain. :P
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