World Building & Research: Lessons Learned
In my first two novels: Friends, Lovers, and Roses, and The Mist-In Crest Hill County, the thought of world building never crossed my mind. I usually focus on characters first, and build the environment around them. Which many of us do...but this may not have been the most effective way.
What is World Building – Why it is important?
World building is creating a believable environment that your characters live in. There needs to be things for them to touch, feel, and interact with – and those things need to appear to have a life of their own. It is similar to television, where the background actors give a sense of reality to the scene. In a novel you cant see the background, so you have to create it, and its relationship to the characters around them.
World building is important in novels, because we as the reader, need to be invested in this reality you have created, we need to FEEL something when we are reading. Sometimes we can make the mistake of filling the pages with dialogue, without concentrating on the world around them. This is as important as plot, dialogue, or prose.
Thinking of the world around your character as a character – meaning the old building your characters live in, can actually contain a history (ghosts, rodents, mysterious neighbors, odd passageways, etc), that can affect the people that live there. So thinking of where a character is located, and the history of that location, can create avenues for amazing stories.
What I Discovered - And how it can help.
As I forge into my first YA novel, with a sprinkling of fantasy/mythology, I am understanding the importance of World Building – and doing it before, and not during the writing process (having a character storm off to a room in the house, when you have introduced the apartment as a bachelor), which can become a waste of time, and creativity.
The City:
Know where your character lives in the map of the world (or universe). Knowing the city can affect how and what type of life they live. Is it a cold environment? Are there mountains, or rivers? Is it on Earth? Does is resemble parts of Earth? What cities are close? Looking at a map can help you to start grounding your reality, and that makes it real to the reader as well.
The Blueprint:
Housing, neighborhoods, local shops. Having a clear blueprint of the neighborhood helps to know where you character is going, and who they will encounter. Whether it is a fantasy world, or the real one, you will soon have your characters living in a space they have to interact with. Can you remember that the smell of the local diner you wrote about in the beginning by the time you write page 300? If they can smell it, it has to be close. If there is a diner, is there also a business or homes around it to sustain it? What type of clientele frequent it? Teenagers (there must be a mall nearby), Children (schools, playgrounds), Elderly (more diners, parks).
When your characters are reacting to the world around them, creating a blueprint helps. With technology, I have learned to use Google Maps or Earth, to screenshot a view of city streets, or areas around the world, and make this the street my character lives (or at least the neighborhood). You can see what makes up a city/village/town much easier. You can also make a sketch of a neighborhood, park, or apartment. This way when a character storms out of a room, you know there is one (and where it is located) for them to storm to.
The Research
In creating my next work, I am understanding the importance of RESEARCH. This should always be a part of the writing experience, but even small things will need to be researched in your work. It creates the environment, and makes it real for the reader. In my upcoming book Around The Block – I have a character going to the roof of his apartment. When I wrote it, the character is going up the stairs, and opening the door leading to the roof…and then I got stuck. I didn’t know what a roof looked like, or what it was made of, or how the view would look. So I researched roofs, the type of materials used, went downtown to a few rooftop restaurants to look out over at the roofs across the city. I wanted to create a reality based upon what I knew...what I had researched.
Researching the small things, can make a big difference in your world-building. It can be done ahead of time (and faster if you have already created an outline for your novel), or during (as in when your character is suddenly thrust into a new environment or situation), where you research on-the-fly – like dragon comes in from the sky, and you need to understand the mannerisms of dragons, and the myths surrounding them.
Keeping a separate notebook with research notes in it can assist in keeping and growing your world beyond the scope of your current novel. It also helps you create a society where more books can be created, more worlds, more stories. The more you learn about the world you create, the more you can expand it with confidence.
The Final Word:
Helping your reader become pulled into your work, and being fascinated by your style, is more than just fancy prose wrapped around multi-layered characters. It is pulling them into a world they can also see themselves lost in, and one they want to explore more of. It’s the ability to take them away from their own world, and into one that they would be welcome to visit, explore, or change. World-building has that power - before the real story has even begun.
