They have to react to it accordingly – and their expectations about how that world will react also have to be met.
You have to remember that while the world may seem fantastical to your readers, it has to be normal for your characters.
And that world needs to press on them in turn. Your characters need to have weight in that world. It might sound contradictory, but it’s also fundamentally important.
Fantasy world magic engine how to#
You need to consider how to create a realistic fantasy world. You don’t want them complaining that things don’t make sense. You don’t want to leave your readers thinking that everything in your book is arbitrary. When you’re thinking about how to build a fantasy world, you need to think about how to make it feel real as well as how to make it feel extraordinary. You can set the limitations – but those limitations do need to be there. Because while fantasy writing lets you play God in creative and exciting ways, there are still rules to those games. I must pause here to re-emphasise that previous “just about”. You can, in short, do just about anything. Or, you can just make it interestingly different. You can build a world that is better than the one we are living in. You can – if you dare – entirely ignore contemporary morality. You can control geography, lore, technology, economics, language, politics. You can give them new mythologies, new religions, new mysteries and power systems. You can create your own societies with their own customs and their own histories. In a fantasy world, you don’t have to be bound by the laws of physics. To fill it with all the creatures of your imagination. It allows you not only to set the stage on which your story will play out, but to turn that stage into just about anything. In fact, fantasy world-building is all about pushing the boundaries of possibility. And if there’s also excitement, adventure, diversity, and mind-bending invention on the way, well, so much the better. It’s often by encountering these differences that we learn who we are.
It also allows them to say all sorts about our own world. The genre allows writers to explore all sorts of new ideas. There’s also far more to creating fantasy worlds than waving around wands and saying a few magic words. Yet, even where all those clichés are present and correct, you can still create something profound and compelling: just look at the success of George RR Martin’s Game Of Thrones novels. Luckily, it’s a whole lot more than that now. What Is Worldbuilding?īack in the day, fantasy world creation was easy to characterise as a few scantily clad maidens, a lot of swords with names, a couple of big dragons, and a liberal garnish of incomprehensible magic. In short, fantasy world creation can look like whatever you want it to look like. And then, there’s Terry Pratchett’s masterful, loving satire of the whole idea of fantasy world building, the Discworld, which drifts through space and time on the back of four huge elephants, who themselves are on the craggy back of Great A’Tuin The Turtle. It takes in everything from the ruined gothic splendour of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, to Andrew Coldecott’s insular and rural Rotherweird, not to mention all those rugged Orc-filled mountainscapes, terrifying post-nuclear dystopias, and heavenly utopias. There are no limits to what you can achieve in a genre containing landscapes as different as Tolkien’s black and brutal Mordor and Leigh Bardugo’s unsettling and thrilling Grishaverse. These new worlds are a huge part of the excitement and appeal, and for a writer and world builder they offer endless possibilities. It sets us trekking through Middle Earth. It takes us through the cupboard and into Narnia. It’s a genre that lands us in a new world. I might not be able to give a quick definition of fantasy – but I can quickly recognise it when I see it. In fact, I’d be surprised if anyone can come up with a single short and robust definition for a genre that encompasses so much. Or at least, I don’t know how to do it quickly. I don’t know how I’d define a fantasy novel. Learn what’s involved in building fantasy worlds, why this is important, and how to develop your world-building process.
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