• Welcome to the Fantasy Writing Forums. Register Now to join us!

Fantasy worldbuilding frustrates me

Jared

Scribe
While you are probably right that I spend too much time on perfecting my worldbuilding, I believe that I need to know at the very least the basics of my settings before I start writing. Setting does dictate the range of possibilities for stories or scenes; for instance, if I wanted to write about the Roman Empire, I couldn't exactly write about election fraud without taking a lot of creative liberties with Roman culture. Now to be sure, certain details can be researched on the fly during the writing process, but a little beforehand knowledge of the setting's general mechanics is necessary before plotting.

As a matter of fact, although drawing maps can be fun, the researching part of worldbuilding is not my favorite part of the process. I want to start the actual writing as soon as possible, but there is often so much I need to know about my subjects before putting pen to paper. It can overwhelm me.

Are you writing in the real world? Historical fantasy, as it were?

If not, if you're generating your own world, then I would suggest only worldbuilding enough to get you going, then worldbuild as you write. Figure out the basics (gender roles, class structure, clothing, basic area map), then let yourself just write and think up the rest as the need arises. You will be editing your novel anyways, so you can always make notes of what you worldbuilt as you wrote, then add it back in later.

I would suggest that you do that first. Writing historical fantasy in cultures significantly removed from your own has many pitfalls. Researching that takes longer.
 

Lorna

Inkling
You're being way too rigid. So long as you can imagine an explanation for the way your world's set up and it remains coherent and you write a good story, readers should be way too involved in the story to question the 'science' (or lack of it) of your world.

Take for instance the sexy dinosaur huntresses I described in my opening paragraph; even if humans and dinosaurs could co-evolve in the same ecosystems, in most pre-industrial cultures women have the burden of producing and nursing children from the moment they reach fecundity at ages 13-16, so most can't really afford to hunt big and dangerous game. The only way I could get around this is to give my tribal chicks implausibly modern attitudes about gender roles or distort their biology to the point where they don't resemble humans any more.

In bronze and iron age societies in ancient Britain many of the leaders were female warriors. Northern Britain was ruled by a warrior queen called Cartimandua until the arrival of the Romans. Presuming this set-up shows continuity it can be conjectured stone age cultures also had women warriors, many of them rulers. And therefore there were many women warriors and rulers in pre-historic times too.
 

Saigonnus

Auror
I think this discussion goes to show just how people approach the idea of world building. I personally try to keep it balanced, detailing just enough that the story can flourish within the construct but not do much that it limits the story in some way. I think of the basics that make a society work (as I have commented on many world building threads) and it leaves plenty of room for expanding the idea and letting the story thrive.

Using the example given above about the dinosaur huntress; I would personally think that while it would limit the huntress to bear children; she'd only be "out of action" on hunting the big game for perhaps the last trimester, probably gathering the smaller game like birds, squirrels etc... Like through history, the villagers would care for any children born, freeing her up once the baby is weaned to going back to the hunt. A society like that would have to be fluid to accommodate birth/death, so the hunters remaining would have to work a bit harder.

Also take into account that man has raised domesticated animals and planted crops for the last 10,000 years at least, it wouldn't be that big of a stretch that they raise chickens/rabbits or whatever right in the village beyond the crops grown. It would be perfectly reasonable that the village could produce much of their own food and only use hunting to give them variety. Depending on population; there would need to be only something like 10-15% of the population as full time hunter; which would do double duty in protecting the village.
 
I hope this hasn't been addressed yet, but I had to reply to this after reading the original post without catching up.
Unfortunately, as an atheist and a metaphysical naturalist, I tend to take a highly scientific approach to world-building. I want my worlds' physics, geology, and other mechanics to resemble the real world's as much as possible, because I believe that a world with completely different mechanics would end up incomprehensibly alien to us. I could never write a disc-shaped world balanced atop giant elephants for instance. Everything in my worlds must make sense from a scientific and mechanical point of view. For that reason I usually don't like to have magical, supernatural, or any other scientifically implausible elements in my world-building.

I'm not sure what science you are referring to, but it seems like you are also assuming that your characters have circumnavigated the globe or have satellites or something similar. Science means accepting things as far as we can test them and theorize about what else we might be able to someday test/observe. There were long periods of time in real life Earth where scientists used SCIENCE to prove that the planet was flat and that everything revolved around us. We even talked about wandering planets that would sometimes rotate backwards and then forwards again because our model had perfect circle orbits.

So just because the world is actually round, doesn't mean that your characters don't think it is balanced on a bunch of elephants or bunnies or whatever and it doesn't mean that you have to worry about whether it is balanced on those bunnies or not. Let the world develop--if characters believe something, you don't have to make sure that your readers know that they are wrong.

For instance, I have a character in my first book remark that half-elf/half-hume creatures are called "halflings." He's totally wrong, but I don't tell anyone that until like Book 5 when I have other half-elf/half-hume characters. Although it might work its way into Book 2 maybe.

Anyway, it just seems like although you're worried about characters having modern views on gender (which you can argue aren't modern at all), you have them have super modern views on (and knowledge of) science.

I believe that everyone else already addressed how to overcome your other difficulties just off what I saw on the first page.
 

Penpilot

Staff
Article Team
As others have stated above, just build enough for you to get going and fill in the rest later. Chances are while you're writing the story you're probably going to want change stuff anyway. Sometimes the structure of a world has to be adjusted to make it fit in line with the story.

If you need to go into great detail fine, but realize that a lot of well thought of stories ignore a lot of sensible science for the sake of the story. Take Starwars for example. They have Hoth, the ice planet, Dagoba the Jungle planet, Tattoonie the Desert planet. To my understanding, no planet has only one environment/ecosystem like those planets, but why did they do it in Star Wars? Because it's cool and it's fun. Cut yourself a slack to BS some stuff. Most readers will accept it as long as your consistent with your own rules.

Like someone mentioned above, The scientific problems with Dragons flying. Also think about comic book characters, no way in real life could any of them exist, not even Batman. He'd probably be dead as soon as the first criminal decided to run him over with their get away truck.

It's all about creating a semi-plausable mumbojumbo hand waving explained world with semi-arbitrary rules that make sense enough for the reader to suspend disbelief.
 

Saigonnus

Auror
Take Starwars for example. They have Hoth, the ice planet, Dagoba the Jungle planet, Tattoonie the Desert planet. To my understanding, no planet has only one environment/ecosystem like those planets, but why did they do it in Star Wars?

While technically this is true by everything we know; it would be plausible that a planet could be MOSTLY one ecosystem; especially with the extreme temperatures. Imagine the planet earth as a few degrees hotter; likely there would still be life here in the form of trees/plants, but probably in isolated pockets. The same could be true of a planet like Tatooine; it is just never mentioned in anything I have ever read or seen about Star Wars.

On the opposite end of the scale, a planet like hoth, if it is still in that "sweet spot" for life within it's solar system (likely it would be on the fringe of being too cold for life) there could be temperate zones in isolated pockets or even tundra where there is no snow; but again it isn't mentioned; so maybe that was George Lucas's way of not dealing with the scientific aspects.

I think fantasy though requires a certain suspention of belief and you shouldn't try to explain things scientifically. :p
 

Shockley

Maester
You're applying distinctly real concerns (concerns, I might add, that developed through our own cultural concerns and structures) to define a world that is distinctly unreal.

I'm not a fan of philosophical post-modernism, but I'm thinking your world (and your struggles with creating it) could benefit from a healthy dose of it.
 

Jabrosky

Banned
Good news, everyone: I've put the worldbuilding aside and started actually writing a story about my huntresses (500 words into it as of this post, but I have a mental outline of the whole plot). However, their prey has changed from dinosaurs to dragons, mainly so I don't have to confine myself to paleontological accuracy.
 

Saigonnus

Auror
I would think you can have them hunt dinosaurs... I don't think for a moment that the paleontologists of the world will mind one way or another for scientific accuracy of a single book by a relatively unknown (for now) author, especially considering it's a fantasy novel. The readers will have to suspend their disbelief anyway so I wouldn't see any big deal if you created a new type of dinosaur for them to hunt or even used preexisting ones since just putting humans together with dinosaurs could never happen. I would think literary license would work just as well on dinosaurs as on any other mundane creature; which have been around for a long time. Whether based on something that possibly existed once or just stories or legends, many of the common fantasy creatures are simply a different take on normal animals. Why should dinosaurs be off-limits for changes when regular creatures, or ones that once existed aren't?

Pegasus: Horse with wings
Unicorn: Horse with a horn and magical powers
Cerberus: Dog with three heads
Minotaur: Half man/ Half bull
Faun: Half man/ Half goat
Harpy: Half human/ half bird
Phoenix/Roc: Birds with magic
Hippogriff: Half horse/half eagle.

Why not a Velociraptor that can change colors like a chameleon and lives in the jungle?
 

Jabrosky

Banned
I would think you can have them hunt dinosaurs... I don't think for a moment that the paleontologists of the world will mind one way or another for scientific accuracy of a single book by a relatively unknown (for now) author, especially considering it's a fantasy novel. The readers will have to suspend their disbelief anyway so I wouldn't see any big deal if you created a new type of dinosaur for them to hunt or even used preexisting ones since just putting humans together with dinosaurs could never happen. I would think literary license would work just as well on dinosaurs as on any other mundane creature; which have been around for a long time. Whether based on something that possibly existed once or just stories or legends, many of the common fantasy creatures are simply a different take on normal animals. Why should dinosaurs be off-limits for changes when regular creatures, or ones that once existed aren't?

Pegasus: Horse with wings
Unicorn: Horse with a horn and magical powers
Cerberus: Dog with three heads
Minotaur: Half man/ Half bull
Faun: Half man/ Half goat
Harpy: Half human/ half bird
Phoenix/Roc: Birds with magic
Hippogriff: Half horse/half eagle.

Why not a Velociraptor that can change colors like a chameleon and lives in the jungle?

The problem with dinosaurs in particular is that many laypeople accept any portrayal of dinosaurs, no matter how fantastical, as rooted in paleontological knowledge. For example, the reason certain Jurassic Park fans get upset over real Velociraptors having feathers is because that contradicts the scaly JP raptors they grew up with. Needless to say, widespread media perpetuations of such misconceptions frustrate paleontologists and paleo-enthusiasts (or at least the ones I've corresponded with on the Web) to no end.

You do raise a valid point about how people normally accept distortions of living animals in fantasy as obviously fantastical, but the difference is that very few people seriously believe that cats can talk or that dogs can fly or whatever. I guess the mysterious and unfamiliar nature of dinosaurs makes people more likely to take fantastical portrayals of these creatures as paleontological fact.
 

Saigonnus

Auror
I guess the mysterious and unfamiliar nature of dinosaurs makes people more likely to take fantastical portrayals of these creatures as paleontological fact.

It's possible, but I personally don't base Jurassic Park on it's accuracy of the dinosaurs since I know that what we do know about them changes day to day. The dinosaurs I grew up with aren't the same ones we have now; why should they be arrogant to that degree, thinking that what we know about dinosaurs is the end all be all of scientific study. Why even worry about whether your depiction is based in fact?

I guess I just have a sense of detachment from what people will think when I am writing since I know with 100% certainty that whatever I write will likely be criticized by someone. You can't please everyone, so I just don't try. I just think about whether a creature fits within the framework I made for the story and in the depiction I used for said creature. If it works for the story, who cares what those "narrow-minded literature fundamentalists" think.

Bottom line... I write my story for ME and if I like it, forget what anyone else thinks.

EDITED: Also, I would think that people who believe that movies or books have to be grounded in fact; especially where dinosaurs are concerned are just deluding themselves and deserve to be disappointed when they google actual scientific articles about dinosaurs and find what they thought they knew was wrong.
 
Last edited:

Mindfire

Istar
Well as far as Jurassic Park goes, their inaccuracies can be handwaved by saying the scientists filled in the genetic gaps with frog code or whatever. Similarly, any inaccuracies in your world could easily be explained by saying that those dinosaurs/dragons/thunder lizards evolved (seeing as your world doesn't have a creator) independently from earth's. As long as your creature fits reasonably with your environment, no one will be put off. Even paleontologists. Just don't make a really obvious error like making Triceratops a carnivore or something.
 
Just don't make a really obvious error like making Triceratops a carnivore or something.

How about evolving into an omnivorous race that can freely mate with all non-protoceratops ceratopsians?

I call them, wait for it......ceratops! :D

Super-original, I know. ;)
 

Jabrosky

Banned
Actually some dinosaur enthusiasts have speculated that ceratopsians were generally omnivorous like pigs rather than total vegetarians. If I recall correctly, this notion stems from finding carrion bones inside a Psittacosaurus skeleton. Of course Psittacosaurus is a much more evolutionarily basal ceratopsian than Triceratops, so I don't find this particular argument very persuasive, but it has been thrown out there.
 

SeverinR

Vala
OP:
You can build a world totally different then ours, or almost the same with a different society or changed in some small way.

You are in control, you can change the world to your way or keep it almost the same. You don't even have to explain why the dinosaurs didn't die off.

You are setting limits on yourself that aren't needed.

I think the extremely religious or the opposite have trouble creating because their beliefs limit them, but you don't have to make "gods" or create glorious magical forces that go against your idea of the world. (Not trying to make light of your beliefs with being vague, but trying to use words that fit both thiest and a-theist.)
 

SeverinR

Vala
There was a short time when I wondered if I as a Christian could create a fantasy world without God in it, and not break a comandment or commit a sin.
I decided that God gave us imagination to build things, improve things, and to entertain ourselves. Just because I write about dragons, unicorns and mention gods that the created beings worship does not distract from the real God.
I will not pretend to know the train of thought of a person that does not believe in a god, but I know there are things in your belief that guide your beliefs and your understanding of the world, so work within your limits, but know they are your limitations and that readers do not feel the same restrictions you do, so straying outside your comfort zone will probably bother you more then your readers.
That said, go out and make the world of your dreams, and populate it with the beings you want. It might be some mirror image to the world we live in, or one so different we sit amazed at the splendor(like the world of Avatar).
 
There was a short time when I wondered if I as a Christian could create a fantasy world without God in it, and not break a comandment or commit a sin.

I actually go a step farther because a lot of my fantasy worlds coincide with our world (just a long time ago or a long time ahead). But I rationalize this with just saying the people screwed up, not God. If people stop being Christian in a world, that doesn't mean they should have done that. Just that they did.

In my one world, people stop believing in God and (all other world religions) because of an apocalyptic event that did not result in "the Second Coming" or "Salvation" or whatever, but people that later evolve from animals have a racial memory of God.

I avoid any value judgement though. People can make up their own minds as to whether things are correct or wrong or whatever. I just want to tell good stories.
 

Ireth

Myth Weaver
I actually go a step farther because a lot of my fantasy worlds coincide with our world (just a long time ago or a long time ahead).

My vampire novel takes place during the medieval era. Historical differences, vampires and Fae notwithstanding, it is blatantly obvious that the world is our own. However I, as a Christian, knowingly made Celtic paganism the working religion of the story, with a goddess being the catalyst behind the creation of vampires, and manifesting as such to the vampire protagonist (as well as every other vampire at the point of his/her turning). I don't have qualms about this, since it is purely fantasy, and I don't preach about either paganism or Christianity being the "right" religion. It's just there, and that's the way things are. It was a means to explore a different facet of vampire lore beyond the heavily Christian crosses-and-garlic set of weaknesses, and it turned into a story I loved to develop.
 

Mindfire

Istar
In some works, people make pagan gods out to be angels/demons/lesser spirits that people worship simply because they don't know any better. I think C.S. Lewis implied something to that effect in his Space Trilogy.
 

Vinegar Tom

Acolyte
This entire thread is a great illustration of how people who may be perfectly good writers go slightly off the rails when they try to write fantasy. Michael Moorcock once said that the only unbreakable rule that good fantasy absolutely must follow is that it must be internally consistent. So if the basic point of the story is "sexy African warrior chicks fighting dinosaurs in the jungle", which obviously isn't a very plausible real-world scenario, all you need to ask yourself is "In what kind of world would this not be totally absurd?"

Well, first off, the dinosaurs were wiped out by a catastrophe 65 million years ago, so in your world obviously that didn't happen. Unfortunately, if it hadn't, mammals wouldn't have had the opportunity to take over that ecological niche, and therefore wouldn't have evolved the way they did, meaning that there wouldn't be any humans. So presumably, unless time travel or cloning or aliens are involved, humans and dinosaurs evolved at the same time. So that's a pretty major difference between reality and this world, and we might not be looking at precisely the same human race.

Then there's the question of the sexually attractive young women requiring implausibly "modern" attitudes to free them up for dinosaur-hunting purposes as opposed to staying home and having babies. Actually, a more important problem is why African women would be hunting incredibly dangerous animals at all. There's a reason why, in primitive societies, men and not women do the hunting, which is that men are physically much stronger than women, and if you're using stone age weapons, how hard you can throw a spear matters a great deal. Particularly if the animal you're hunting is capable of killing you if you don't kill it first.

But never mind, it's fantasy - and this world has dinosaurs and humans at the same time, which, unless you're a Creationist or your surname is Flintstone, is a lot less implausible than a bit of women's lib amoung primitive tribal chicks living in the middle of a jungle. So let's decide that in this world, it's perfectly normal for women to be hunters. Why? Well, there are plenty of species where the female is considerably bigger than the male, often because she needs to be because she's the one who sits on the nest or whatever and has to protect her little ones. So humans who've evolved in direct competition with the most terrifying predators the world has ever known would have adapted to that if they survived at all.

Maybe human males are quite small, and survive by being stealthy and quick, and not trying to compete with those monsters at the top of the food-chain for the big game. So their instinctive reaction to dinosaurs is to hide if possible, and run away very quickly if not. Women, on the other hand, might have a straight choice between trying to run with a young but fairly heavy child, possibly several, weighing them down, leaving their children to be eaten, or going into such a berserk defensive fury that the velociraptor or whatever decides that this small mad creature that doesn't know how to give up and be eaten just isn't worth the trouble.

In some of the more warlike African tribes, men were raised apart from women, and had to prove themselves true men by killing an enemy warrior (in some tribes, murdering him by stealth and bringing back his head was acceptable) before they were allowed any wives. Which was a great way of ensuring that only men who were good at killing other men ever get to breed. In the situation I suggested above, women, who are bigger, stronger, and more aggressive than men, and who instinctively hate dinosaurs more than they fear them, might spend their early teens in an isolated girls' camp learning dinosaur-slaying techniques. And they wouldn't get to have babies until they'd proved what a dutiful mother they could be by slaying a dino all by themselves (presumably a small one would do - if you somehow killed a T Rex with a pointed stick, they'd probably make you a goddess). Indeed, if some women were such dedicated dino-slayers that they voluntarily decided not to settle down and become mothers for a certain number of years - perhaps even the rest of their lives - it would be useful to the community, because they'd be an élite band of protectors who never got out of peak sauropod-slaying condition until old age caught up with them. Or a T Rex.

See? Just off the top of my head, from somebody else's idea, I've got an internally consistent world where the "sexy warrior chicks" are not behaving in an implausibly "modern" way. They're behaving exactly like normal women do in the primitive society in which they live, It just so happens to be a society I made up, and if I say they can do that, of course they can. And since men would be much more inclined to plan ahead and weigh up the options instead of doing something impulsive, they'd probably make much wiser leaders, so it wouldn't simply be a case of straight gender rôle-reversal. Male characters, especially nasty ones, could be very dangerous, but in a sly, furtive way, and since female aggression would be tied into their maternal instincts, they could be extremely feminine and ultra-violent at the same time.

See? If you start by saying "I have a ludicrous fantasy premise - in what kind of world would it not be ludicrous?" instead of "How can I somehow fit this concept into something very close to the real world without it being absurd?", it all goes so much easier! And yes, I did notice that dinosaurs have been replaced by dragons (which doesn't make the whole scenario any more realistic, by the way!). but the basic situation is still precisely the same, just slightly more mythical.

Oh, by the way, atheists are allowed to invent gods, so long as they don't go all L. Ron Hubbard and pretend they're real. H. P. Lovecraft was an atheist, and he invented loads of gods. Mind you, they were all horrible. And he had a sly dig at Christianity along the way. Religion is never in any way helpful to his usually doomed protagonists, churches repeatedly turn out to secretly harbor some hideous cult, and "The Dunwich Horror" is a deliberate parody of the Crucifixion, with a vampire octopus from another dimension standing in for Jesus Christ.
 
Top