World Building: Welcome to Evelyn

In 2020, just like everyone else, I was out of work, and locked down in my home. I had been toying with story ideas for a while, but nothing that I was able to latch onto as a writer. It was at that point that I determined that I needed to build a world for my characters to inhabit. Thus the first lines on the map were drawn.

Every writer will tell you about the trepidation of facing the blank page of their story. Building a world takes that fear to another level.

Seeking Inspiration

I drew inspiration from stories, games, movies, and many other places. It was not enough for me to create a map of land masses with cities and landmarks. If you think about it, a world is so much more than that. Just like your characters should be, your world is the culmination of it's experiences. The histories, legends, religions, peoples, and languages are just as much of a living, breathing thing in your story as the characters are.

As I faced the blank page, I determined that I needed to fill the world with different peoples, their religions, beliefs, and history. This allowed me to ask "Why" a lot. Why would this race migrate from one place to the other, why do they not have a word in there language for this, etc.

I also read a lot of history and drew inspiration from historical peoples. Over the course of a year I brushed up on my Roman history, Greek History, Japanese History, and the histories of fallen empires and kingdoms. I felt it was equally important to think about and create countries and kingdoms that rose to prominence and fell into ruin. These touches help to make the world feel alive and allows me to tell stories whose histories span thousands of years in a fantastical setting.

Laying the Foundations

In my office, not only will you find print outs of my first drafts, printers, and of course my computer, but you'll also find mountains of notebooks where I scribe out histories, character profiles, demographic information on fictional races, and even short stories of historical events that have taken place in my world.

I use these scribbles as reference guides when I am smithing the words of a story. It is the constant asking of "Why." Things I consider when creating a world are why does magick function the way it does for one person and differently for another, why is this person the last of her kind, why is this city located here and why do they call it what they do? As I continue on the quest for answers, I discover things about peoples and places that I may not have readily thought of if I were to just write the story. It is an important step for me to create a world that equally effects the characters that live within it as opposed to just having a place where everything just happens.

Maps

Initially I used an online program to help me create the first map of my world. As I completed the initial places and settings on the map, I quickly realized that this world would end up being much larger than I initially anticipated. However, I resolved to focusing on just the corner that I had readily created. As I began to write stories, though, one of them in particular took us right off the map of the known world. At first, I was skeptical about letting that happen, however, I as I learned more about the world my characters were inhabiting, I found that the unknown is just as important to storytelling as the known is.

I embraced the notion of having places that were both unknown to me and unknown to the characters. The Unknown lands where all the maps stop, the unexplored bowels of the underworld, and the inhospitable north of constant winter where the bear-like Bejorn peoples have lived for hundreds of generations. It added a sense of wonder for me that I love about my writing process and kept me interested in discovering more. I even started to find it difficult to leave my world at times.

How to start World Building

World building is only as effective as the characters that live within the world. In equal temper, however, the world that surrounds your characters should influence the way they navigate their quest and the relationships that they forge. If you do not have a story concept floating around in your brain, what I found easiest, was to begin with fictional histories, some of which you can even base on real history. George R.R. Martin has been very vocal about how his fictional world of Westeros and the events that take place in his series, "A Song of Ice and Fire" aka Game of Thrones, is heavily based on the War of the Roses. This real life history helped to influence how the histories, houses, and lust for power shaped the world his characters live in.

For me, I started with Greek and Roman history, and created the fictional histories which I will eventually post right here on my website. These histories tell of the Time of Darkness and the war against the first dark champion, the many rises and falls of the Magi Orders over the millennia until their final stand against the Tristan Lords, and then the expulsion of the Tristan Lords in the Lowborn Rebellions.

Religion is another force that greatly influences how peoples react to the world around them. Once I had sufficiently explained many things historically, I began to fashion the religions of my world. I researched modern and ancient religions, as well as dead religions and denominations. Like most religious and mythical texts, I began with the creation myths, then moved to the pantheons of gods, and finally the rituals and ways of worship. I take a lot of care to not show preference to one religion or another. I wish for religion to be an abstract commentary piece in my world that mirrors much of what it is in our world.

Finally, language was the third pillar I established. I wanted to have stories in my world where characters didn't always known how to readily communicate and struggled with that along the way. Though I confess that I have not fully thought out entire languages or dialects, it was enough for me to decide that one people were heavily inspired by ancient Scandinavian culture, so their language should have that same tempo and feeling. Another, was inspired by east Asian cultures and those individual provincial dialects should have their own rhythm and rules. On the continent of Mizrah, where Project 1 takes place, there is an established common tongue, but only because the majority of that continent has been under the rule of one Empire for centuries. Their language comes from the Tristans but it can start to get muddled the further south one goes. Different accents, and the rules of grammar are also important staples. Language influences why places are named certain names and how and why those names can evolve and change over time. Here is a great video by Hello Future Me on Youtube which I personally used as reference when thinking about how people, places, and things get their names.

Conclusion

World building in a meaningful way is extremely hard. There are sometimes when I don't feel that I will ever actually get to explore the entire world that I have created, and that the unknown parts of the world may never be fully fleshed out. However, it is my summation that leaving something to be explored is perhaps a good thing. Even long after I leave this world, maybe there will be someone who still has the ability to enjoy that sense of wonder about my world and think of all the wonderful people, places, and things that I may never get to write about. There is a sense of legacy that I would bequeath to the reader for their imagination and wonder to always find something new in my world. In a way, I think that is what is most important in building my world.

In our Next Blog Post, I will be deep diving on Magic Systems. What my views are and why there is no right or wrong answer for how magic works in your world.