In my experience, it is interesting when the world itself gives you ideas on what is going to happen. I built a world in collaboration with my best friend in eighth grade - astonishingly enough, some pieces of it are still salvageable! - and we had some ideas of different governments we wanted to kick around with. Once she drew the map, suddenly I knew a lot more about what was going on in those countries: "Ok, whoever held that fertile valley was sitting pretty, so those two countries had fought wars over this land...and still don't like each other: problem when hero from country A meets heroine from country B; cool! And I see why this mountain range would keep this culture isolated...and self-sifficient...and xenophobic..."

I love world-making - that is, taking a concept and going with it, and discovering stuff along the way. Although I had to rewrite a great of my novel once I figured out HOW magic worked (mine takes one mathematical law, violates it, and sees what happens). But there is a thrilling feeling when everything fits together and makes sense instead of being slapped together because you thought it would look cool. When you know that, yes, it goes that way because it has to.

Wishing you all the best in your writing.

Yes! That's it exactly! Once you've figured out that these two nations have a border between them that is the only source for important metals, then you know that they'll aways be fighting over it, don't you?

I did a little more work on it last night, and hopefully will have the major changes gone over tonight. Very excited.

Have you finished your novel?

World building makes me think of Ursula K. LeGuin. I got through most of Always Coming Home before I had to turn it back in. It read like a collection of anthropological essays (complete with glossary of indigenous terms in the back).

Heh. Very true! C.J.Cherryh is another person I often think of — indeed in her writing the plot, pacing and just general story often takes a back seat to the sociology and anthropology of the cultures. And then of course you have Tolkien. I mean, the Simarillion really IS just a big ol' history book.

I uh...want more of a middle ground, you know? I really don't think I have the fortitude to take world building to the levels that some authors have (hats off to them though.) Enough for it to feel real, that's all I want.

I uh...want more of a middle ground, you know? I really don't think I have the fortitude to take world building to the levels that some authors have (hats off to them though.) Enough for it to feel real, that's all I want.

I understand completely. The other reason I had to turn in Always Coming Home before finishing was... I just couldn't finish it! There was too much. It was very interesting and so very deep, but whoa. I kinda missed having a general plot upon which to hang all this detail.

LeGuin must be wired for that kind of prolific world building. How does she manage to do all the other stuff of life (like cook and eat and sleep and do laundry and go for walks outside) and come up with all this backstory?

I seem to recall she spent years and years doing nothing but developing EarthSea. Same with Tolkien. He never did stop expanding Middle-Earth.

It's odd, with world-building, isn't it? You spend all this time developing cultures and histories and very often languages and for the most part, the only person who is really going to care about it is you (which is why I'm talking about technique and principles on this blog, and not specific examples of what I've done.) I've never had much interest in the ethnologies of people's imagined worlds myself. Tolkien's dissertations on evolution of language amongst the peoples of Middle Earth? *snore* But have something happen, have snake-gods and pirates and ambushes and betrayal and true wuv all set against this exotic unique backdrop, and we're SO there, aren't we? And conversely, don't do that homework and we readers know immediately as the hack you are (Robert Jordan I am SO looking at you.)

The map-making session last night went pretty well. We hauled out a copy of Fractal Terrain Editor (a program by Profantasy, the same folks who make Campaign Cartographer) and after some thought and consideration, ditched my old map entirely. That was a bit of a heart-breaker, but it was necessary. I was, in effect, trying to force hurricanes in Southern California, and it just wasn't going to happen. Now I'm shoving hurricanes onto Florida, which is much more realistic. It even works out so the areas that I want to be desert will, in fact, be desert. Yay!!

I read two very interesting essays by Ursula Le Guin, "Dreams Must Explain Themselves" and "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie"; the former is about how she built Earthsea, the latter is about use of language in fantasy in general. I do not agree with some of her points, but I find her arguments quite salient for the most part.

Earthsea, if I recall correctly, started with one island in the story "The Rule of Names" (which tells of an early adventure of the dragon Yevaud). From there came wondering about how is it a wizard becomes a wizard, which became the story of Ged. It kind of developed that it was an archipelago.

She did mention that she put quite a lot of thought in her Hain cycle as well, saying that at one point she knew enough of the language of Karhide (from The Left Hand of Darkness) to write poems in it; however denying that she went into as much work with languages as Tolkien did; Tolkien was a professional linguist. However, her parents were anthropologists, so Le Guin probably absorbed anthropology with her mother's milk - useful in a fantasy writer.

As for my own writing: the novel I actually finished takes place in the world my friend and I made up, but a thousand years later and changed far beyond recognition - I simply had two stories and an urge to consolidate and recycle. That one I began writing in 2000 and finished actual writing in 2002. Then came the rewrites, and then came all the people telling me all the things wrong with it, and then came more rewrites as I figured out the magic, belatedly, and then more rewrites and people telling me all the things still wrong with it and the fact that I can't talk English good. Now it has passed its ordeal, is formatted (I may be the only fnatasy writer to format manuscripts in the mathematical markup language LaTeX) and all that is keeping me from submitting it to a publisher this instant and taking the plunge is that I tell myself "One more check, one more looking over, you know this chapter is not your strongest, you've got to have learned by now what to do about it..." And the fact that I've got to buy some paper and a bunch of envelopes and stamps.

Meanwhile I amuse myself writing about the stuff that happened a thousand years before, and stuff in another world entirely; I found that once I knew how their magic worked, it imposed a bunch of rules upon me which, though they saved me making stuff up and justifying it to myself, left me longing for some time in a world with a different freedom.

Sorry, long story.