What comes first, the chicken or the egg?

[timtim]

Do you have a world in your head before you begin to write your stories or does your world evolve as you write and finally coalesce at the completion of your story?

I personally create my world complete with beings and languages etc...before I begin the story and in this way, I have substance to work with. My continents are in place as are my mountain ranges and oceans, rivers and lakes and more so I can maneuver freely without trying to think up names and where or how to go from scratch as I try to plot out my stories.

So, how does everyone else proceed?

 

[MineOwnKing]

I think games like Dungeons and Dragons have influenced fantasy writers under the age of 50.

Some people are used to having an outline for an adventure and then creating characters and they transfer their role playing skills into writing craft.

Seems like a good and organized way to do it.

I imagine a world in my head, envision the goal, then create a character driven pantser.

My way is not for the feint of heart nor for those that crave structure in their life.

Personally I find it hard to create without the freedom provided by chaos.

Every writer is different, you have to do what works for you.

 

[CupofJoe]

I used to be [and still am at heart] a world builder.
But I found that I rarely got around to writing the stories that were in my head. Eve when I did, the stories often took me in to places I hadn't thought about and I had to do more world building.
Now I try to Pants it a little more and only work out enough to get the story going. I usually work out a few things like:
How magical/fantastical is my new world?
What sort of technologies and organisation do they have?
How is it really different/the same as Earth?
Things like that and then I discover the rest of what I need along the way.

 

[Ban]

The egg was laid by the predecessor of the chicken. Somewhere in the evolution of the chicken there must be a breaking point when the chicken's predecessor becomes fully chicken. Don't ask me when though that's like Sorites Paradox.

Onto the question, I create my worlds as rich as i can before the story even begins to be written.

 

[Velka]

I take a different path; I always start with the characters. The story emerges from them and as I write it, I build a world that supports the story and characters.

 

[WooHooMan]

You're asking if people on this worldbuilding forum begin with worldbuilding?

I tend to start with themes or tone and build the story and setting to coincide with each other. Very few (if any) elements of the setting are totally ignored in the story but without a story, I wouldn't care enough about the setting to build it.

It's like a feedback loop: the setting informs the story which informs the setting.

 

[Nimue]

I take a different path; I always start with the characters. The story emerges from them and as I write it, I build a world that supports the story and characters.

I follow a similar route. The characters and their emotional arcs are always the key to the story, the inspiration. Of course, setting and atmosphere come along with that initial inspiration, but the details of magic, religion, geography, etc, always coalesce around the character drama. I can't get immersed in a world unless I'm pursuing a person, or persons, and their story.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

In the Beginning, the Story was the World, and the World the Story. This is such a back and forth proposition for me I have no idea where it began.

Writing now, the world already exists as a setting. The histories are in flux, to a point, its an entire planet and very diverse, so no limit to stories that can be told. When historic events strike me, I then find the interesting Characters important to those histories (or potentially important) and use them to figure out how that history managed to take place. If a great story hits me, then I try to alter history to make it work. My current work is the former process.

 

[Heliotrope]

My exact same post, and thoughts....

http://mythicscribes.com/forums/writing-questions/15494-chicken-egg.html

Mine was more about backstory, but it is sort of the same. I don't do any world building previous to my story because I don't like being limited to it. I like to make it up as I go along. I like to create the characters and story plot first, and fill in the world as needed.

 

[FifthView]

It's like a feedback loop: the setting informs the story which informs the setting.

This, pretty much.

I'm in a good spot with my current project, because I already created major features of the same world for a previous project which has stalled.

With that previous project, I'd come up with a character first, who would have some particular conflicts, and began to do worldbuilding in order to accommodate that character and his conflicts and the story I wanted to tell.

But when that project stalled, I set it to the side and started a new project in the same world but with a different character who would have a different set of conflicts. I think that a large reason for the stalling in the previous project was that I'd not quite developed the world well enough; with this new project and character, I wanted to explore those features of the world. But that means I've had to do more worldbuilding as I've developed this new project. The map, geography, general political structures, magic system, and so forth are basically what I'd developed before, but I'm being required to go into a little more depth on the political system in this new book (rather than leaving it as a sort of backdrop, as I had in the first project.) I'm also needing to explore in more detail the commerce and the religion for this new project.

Eventually, the world might be complete. But think of it as our own world. You could write a novel set in Kansas and really build up the features of Kansas. But then you could decide to write a story set in China. And then, in Peru. Each new story would require a little more worldbuilding. So who knows if a fantasy world is ever completely built. A world can be a complex thing.

 

[Devor]

Usually I start with a "thing." It could be any thing - a character, an event, a type of fantasy, a piece of the setting, a few words inspired by a prompt. Anything. It's a "thing."

And then I figure out what I have. Because any "thing" needs some stuff to support it. If what I have is a talking mouse, then it's going to need someone to talk to, and a reason for talking, and a family who can or cannot talk, and so on. There's a whole realm of stuff that's implied by this "thing" that I have, and I need to flush out what that includes.

Then the last step is to figure out what's missing, based on what a story is supposed to look like. Do I have an MC? Does the MC have an arc? Does the conflict push that arc into developing? What about my setting - how does it look in terms of the magic, the warfare, the governments, the ecology, and the culture? Does everything come together?

That whole process can take twenty minutes or six months, at the extremes. That depends on you and what you're doing. I like to use a lot of placeholders so I can get through more ideas faster and figure out the work when the time comes. But it's a process.

It's not about what you start with, just that you start.

 

[Caged Maiden]

I find a lot of my writing begins with a concept. "A group of characters journeying to open a magical gate that holds back a demon and his evil", and then it progresses to the characters. "Why do they want to open the gate?" Well, the MC and his brother are trying to free the soul of their father, who is one of eight priests who were tricked into giving their immortal souls to protect the world from evil. Okay, let's go with that. So then I begin thinking about the immediate situation, and let the world sort of follow.

I find that my worlds are better if I'm thinking about how the details all fall into place. Not to mention, the story is better (more immediate) if I'm not dwelling on the coolness of the past things I made up to give context and backstory. If I focus too much on backstory, it's all too tempting to make it part of the current story, and I feel like it flows more naturally if I can bring it out in conversation, rather than have it all spelled out so it feels familiar to me (and not a reader).

So as I need details about the past or the surroundings, I put those in, and though it means some things will be absent on first drafting, it ensures a certain amount of discovery for a potential reader as I discover when things become important to the MC.

I would, however, say that this is a more advanced technique, because I imagine all my stories draw on the pile of work I've already written. As in, I've already gotten too wordy in other works, so I know how to cut the fat right from the get-go in a new short, or get to the inciting incident as I failed to do in previous novels.

It all takes time to learn, and I think any writer goes through not only a different process as they get their toolboxes full of great writing tools, but they adapt their style, research, and planning for each particular work. The story I mentioned above is a short, so it couldn't benefit from piles and pages of research and backstory. It was best served by getting in there and doing the heavy lifting right from the first sentence.

 

[ChasingSuns]

For me, it can vary from story to story. Sometimes it'll start with a character. Sometimes it starts with the setting. Sometimes it even just starts with some random story detail or scene. It all depends. I do lean more towards the worldbuilding side when I write, although I try to keep it to what is necessary for the story. There are times when I'll take a break to do more worldbuilding though, depending on what's going on in the story at that time.

 

[ThinkerX]

I think games like Dungeons and Dragons have influenced fantasy writers under the age of 50.

Some people are used to having an outline for an adventure and then creating characters and they transfer their role playing skills into writing craft.

Seems like a good and organized way to do it.

I imagine a world in my head, envision the goal, then create a character driven pantser.

My way is not for the feint of heart nor for those that crave structure in their life.

Personally I find it hard to create without the freedom provided by chaos.

Every writer is different, you have to do what works for you.

I'm past fifty and admit to heavy AD&D influences way back when. Did way too much worldbuilding back in those days, but I was thinking gaming, not story telling. Most of what I wrote in those days were fragments that stuck so close to AD&D you could almost hear the dice rolling.

These days, a lot of that world building serves as the backdrop to my stories. The worlds are reasonably well mapped out, enough history to justify things, magic system defined well enough to work with, and so on. The stories themselves begin with ideas from any number of sources. I then bounce these ideas against this or that world until something coherent emerges. Usually, that results in a lot of more specific worldbuilding. Each new story adds to the world.

 

[MineOwnKing]

I'm past fifty and admit to heavy AD&D influences way back when. Did way too much worldbuilding back in those days, but I was thinking gaming, not story telling. Most of what I wrote in those days were fragments that stuck so close to AD&D you could almost hear the dice rolling.

These days, a lot of that world building serves as the backdrop to my stories. The worlds are reasonably well mapped out, enough history to justify things, magic system defined well enough to work with, and so on. The stories themselves begin with ideas from any number of sources. I then bounce these ideas against this or that world until something coherent emerges. Usually, that results in a lot of more specific worldbuilding. Each new story adds to the world.

Yeah,

I think it can really provide a solid background.

My friends and I started to play it around 1983, so I would have been 11 years old. Initially I was really excited to learn because I loved the art work and we fiddled around with painting lead figures.

Trying to digest the rules was too much for me and my buddy that was DM, was only just learning too.

It was painfully slow.

I just lost interest.

I bought the basic D&D a couple weeks ago to get my 8 year old son interested. Reading the rules now doesn't seem any easier than when I was 11.

 

[tbgg]

I'm new to the forums, but I generally have to start with a character that interests me. Then when I have a pretty high level sense of what their journey is going to be about and some sense of their starting place and a few of the places they're going to need to go, I start working on the world.

But who knows, I might one day get an idea for a world and start that way. I like what WooHooMan said about it being a feedback loop. Think of it like this: If you imagine some store that's about 20 minutes away from where you live, there are probably multiple roads you can take to get there if you live in a city. Same idea here. On some days there might be road construction going on on your normal route (if you have one) that's blocking or limiting traffic, so you take a different one. It's less important how you get there and more important that you just DO get there.