Building A Real World part 2

When I begin my world building process, it’s hard to know where to start. There’s just so much that needs created to make the world feel real. I’m sure every writer has felt like this at one point. The best advice I can give is to start where you’re most comfortable.

Here is a quick set of areas needed for a world to feel real.

1.    Characters.

2.    Places.

3.    Storyline.

4.    Laws of man.

5.    Laws of nature/magic/science

            I’ve always felt I was best at getting the story plotlines together, but sadly that’s a horrible place to start. What I had to do was come up with a few characters first. I wrote down a minimum set of characters and worked on them a bit. Most genres will have some specific type of character like the hero and villain, and their friends/minions.

            After I had a small scale of character roughly worked out, I used story plotting to guide me through the rest of the way. Nazarea once stated that she will have written her query months in advance of completing her novels first draft. This is a great tool to use to help one world build with story plotting. It lets you find holes in the plotlines, which shows us where we need to focus on. It could be that we’ll need more characters, how the character should interact, or even something to do with the basic nature laws of the world. And remember to use your CP’s. Bounce ideas off them, and don’t worry about giving away secrets. They’re there to help.

Sometimes when creating the world, there is a temptation to make it perfect. Several of my friends always get on me about how horrible my endings are. They want picture perfect, or what I like to call the Disney Effect. To this I always tell them to go watch The Matrix.

Confused? Let me explain. There is a part in the movie where Morpheus has been captured by the Agents and they’re holding him in a large skyscraper. As Agent Smith is interrogating Morpheus he expresses why he thinks humans didn’t accept the blissfully perfect world. “Human beings define their reality through misery.” This is great advice. Keep the world imperfect, or rather, make the imperfections your perfection.

So now you know how I work to build the world and get through my writers purgatory. Do you guys have any tips or another process that works for you?

Auzy 

Building A Real World part 1

Any one of my CP’s can tell you how much I hate world building. I loathe it so much that I’d rather edit stories from any pretentious butt-wad who’s convinced they’ve written the next Harry Potter series. No joke.  So of course my current project has required me to build a world from the ground up.

In other words, I’m in a writer’s purgatory.

Regardless if you feel the same about this process as I do, world building is an incredibly daunting task.  There were times where I just wanted to give up. Only two things stopped me—my incredible CP’s, and a beast of a story that was begging to claw its way out of my skull.

There really was only one choice. Do my time and hope to get an early pardon for good behavior. After a few failures, I finally came up with a system that helped me through. Hopefully they’ll help you too.

What you need:

1.    Amazing CP’s.

2.    Tablets.

3.    Lots of pens.

4.    A push-pin or dry erase board.

Why you need them:

1.    The best CP’s will push your ass.

2.    One tablet for general brainstorming, one for ideas you really like, and one for everything you definitely want in it.

3.    Lots of pens because you’ll probably lose most of them.

4.    The boards will allow you to check off huge categories like characters and places, and keep you focused on a foundation for the story. It’s the rock of the novel.

 

After you have these down, it’s time to get down and dirty. There are just so many things that are needed in order to make this world feel real to the reader. We have all the different types of characters, places, and even the karma of the world (or lack of it). In short what a lot consider as the fun stuff. But those will be in other post in the very near future.

Do you have a way to start your world building that works wonders for you? Let us know.

      Auzy

Sparking Creativity

            In case anyone doesn’t already know, I’ve been working on building the world for my latest novel entitled Isle of Exiles. It’s the part of the writing process that I thoroughly hate. Currently I’ve gotten stuck on the setting of my novel and doing everything I can to figure that out.

This has brought up an interesting question: What do we do to spark creativity?

            I have a few tricks that usually work for me. A lot of the things are simply done to get my mind off of the story. Things like reading, watching a movie, or blasting some bad guys on the PS3.

            There are some others that I’ll do while I’m in the middle of writing a scene. Stuff like taking a nice hot bath or an extended shower.

            So now that you guys know some of my tricks, anyone else have  trick that works for them?

Auzy