Apologies for the pun. I just couldn't help myself.

So I have found that the hardest part of writing (for me, anyway) is world building. It wasn't something that I gave any appreciable thought to when I first started these novels. I just wrote in generic "fantasyland" (if you've read any fantasy or played an RPG, you know the place.) Everyone speaks a common language in fantasyland, and there are orcs and elves and a lot of heaving bodices and knights in shiny armor with big swords and wizards wear robes because...well...because. It's all the bastard step-child of Tolkien and Gygax and whatever else was sort of smushed together to make these stories. Elves are very pretty and very arrogant. Orcs are very savage and very tough. Magic exists, although it seems to have virtually no effect on the structures of societies, except maybe in as much as the villain usually is one, and maybe the hero too (or at least his mentor.)

And it is SO extraordinarily difficult to stop playing in fantasyland. There are so many tropes that are simply taken for granted, especially for a dyed-in-the-wool DnD geek like myself. For a long time, I didn't even realize what I was trying to rebel against. I simply felt this vague sense of dissatisfaction with the writing.

I was, at least at first, working with intellectual property started by my ex-husband, a brilliant man, but not necessarily a man who cared to think through the ramifications of his decisions on a meta level. You see, we had decided to write our first novel in his RPG game universe, because we thought that would make our job easier — the world building already done. Quickly though, details began to nag at me. Why did the seemingly vestigal royal houses of the Empire still persist when they did nothing and ruled no one? Because he liked it that way. Why was there a mysterious Emperor who roamed around incognito and messed around with the heroes? Because...and this one was a hard one for me to deal with once I realized it...he really liked the Emperor in the Saberhagen books, and so he introduced his equivalent in ours. Why the monotheistic God vs. Satan overtones to the books? Because my ex-husband was, at heart, still a Catholic, and he could not picture a universe that was not dualistic. Why were all the names FRENCH?

It did not bother him at all that he referenced anachronistic terms and ideas that did not just shatter suspension of disbelief but often crushed it into a fine paste and used it as spackling compound.

I know it sounds like I'm being very hard on my ex-husband. Perhaps I am. He was damn good with tricky plot complications, and a genius at pacing, but when it came to world building, he just didn't care. Not a bit. If it was good enough for Eddings or Salvatore, it was good enough for him.

I quickly found it was not good enough for me.

I began...changing things. Let's come up with an explanation for the Royal families, first of all, and why is the military structure set up like that anyway? He would complain and we would have these little catfights over details, and finally he relented and I starting making modifications in greater earnest. And then came the divorce and I insisted on the copyrights, and then well, then I could really start disassembling the whole universe and putting it back together again, a process that has been ongoing.

In the meantime, I'd come across a few authors who had a rather profound impact on me: Steven Brust and Glen Cook. Steven Brust had taken the common clichés and turned them on their ears — he made little secret that the Draegarans were "elves" (the "humans" to the East even called them that) but he plays delightfully with language (the word the Draegarans use for themselves translates as "human" which the humans think is rediculous because THEY are clearly the "humans" which the Draegarans think is rediculous because THEY...) and because he never calls any race by some stale generic noun, it all feels very fresh (perhaps it would not have, however, had I been more familiar with the nuances of Hungarian culture.) Brust also showed me the inverse of Clark's Law — that in any society, sufficient magical ability would be indistinguishable from technology. Sure, people would use magic to blast their enemies, but they would also use it for the most prosaic means if it was possible to do so — fireballs are nice, but instant communication and good lighting is better. Cook showed me that with any advance in technology, magical or not, any sufficiently organized ruling power of the land will be quick to move to control that power, and if they don't, they will quickly be replaced by someone who did. Only if that authority feels it is safe to do so will the advance be allowed for non-military uses. Plus, Cook's lands just didn't FEEL like anything in this world (at least not until later books with that somewhat transparent overlay of India.) Language barriers were often a problem, the monsters felt unique...tasty stuff.

But constructing a complex society from scratch is HARD. Excruciatingly hard -- it is a daily example of how imaginative one ISN'T. I can understand, I really can, why both Brust and Cook fell back on the easy out by using reflections of Earth cultures (Brust using Hungary and Cook using India later in his Black Company series.) I wasn't, I admit, very happy with that solution. It does have the advantage of feeling very complex and real (because it is modeled on things that are complex and real) and it is, on a base level if nothing else, easy to identify with. You rarely need to be told, for example, that an Indian-like society with a death goddess is going to have assassins. It's understood before the first cultist ever shows his strangling cord. I started up a free wiki (because it is an excellent way of seeing what you have figured out and what you haven't) and began to write down information, encyclopedia-style, about my world. I wondered if I was putting far too much time and effort into something that might get a passing sentence. Maybe.

Then my boyfriend bought me a book by some fellow named Steven Erickson. Now if you want to see what really taking the time to do your worldbuilding before you ever set pen to paper or fingers to keyboard can do for you...this man is the one to check. out. An anthropologist who evidentally started doing the fantasy novel thing as a bit of a lark, his skill at crafting societies, cultures and the broad sweep of history is really what makes these books shine with extraordinary brilliance. I won't say his work is "original" (at least three of his races very neatly fall into the categories of "dark elves," "shadow elves," and "light elves" and Mother of Darkness/Dragons is named Tiam) but these are really minor quibbles, and the unwillingness to do without elves is a faux pas I've unapologetically committed myself. Erickson's inspiration came from his example of how thorough world-building could support a story and provide it with power, scope, richness, and meaning. It's been so hard to work on the worldbuilding when I could be getting into the writing, mucking about with words and sentences, getting my hands dirty, but Erickson's books have given me an excellent lesson in the rewards of patience.

Anyway, I highly recommend you pick him up. He's a hell of a good read.