krunchee
Scribe
I think I might start planning ahead a little more, I have a couple of WIP's that are 30,000 words or more and due to a lack of forethought I have realized the story is heading nowhere. Rookie mistake I guess.
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Do you plan ahead what your world will be or does it unfold in your writing?
- Thread starter KimFrei
- Start date
Nihilium 7th
Sage
I like to plan out some of the areas of importance first build a little history around them (climate, type of civilizations, affects on its surroundings, etc) then I start building my world around them first then I develop my world as I go along, things usually fall into place.
TermiteWriter
Scribe
I write a hybrid between SF and fantasy, so I start with a plot and the characters. Creating a world without plot or characters can be fun, but to me it's essentially meaningless because I want to write stories, not settings. My SF is laid in the 30th century and one of my purposes was writing future history, so I had to construct the basic events of the future from the present day to the 30th century. By that time, there is interstellar travel, so then I had to have a planet. It makes a difference whether you're writing a pure fantasy world, which (I take it) most people here are, or a world on another planet. That latter requires a lot of research, because certain rules of physics and perhaps genetics still apply. My characters are giant intelligent termites - bring on the entomology websites! Then I worked out the geography of the planet and ultimately drew several maps to match an epic journey that the big bugs took. But that was pretty much at the end.
The main thing with a pure fantasy world is that it be consistent. If magic produces an effect once, it should always do the same. You have to set the rules of the world and then abide by them. Not as easy as it sounds! What laws of our own physics still apply? Do things still fall down and not up? If a character is a shape-shifter, do his buttons burst when he suddenly becomes too large for his clothes or do his clothes enlarge with him? All kinds of problems!
The main thing with a pure fantasy world is that it be consistent. If magic produces an effect once, it should always do the same. You have to set the rules of the world and then abide by them. Not as easy as it sounds! What laws of our own physics still apply? Do things still fall down and not up? If a character is a shape-shifter, do his buttons burst when he suddenly becomes too large for his clothes or do his clothes enlarge with him? All kinds of problems!
