"Worldbuilding," just as the name implies, refers to the process of creating a fictitional world. Every author crafting a work of science-fiction, fantasy or otherwise alternate-reality must worldbuild, an endeavor both enjoyable and frustratingly hard. In this guest post, author Anne Boles Levy discusses the challenges and rewards of the worldbuilding process, and how she created an entirely new planet even before writing a single word of her new novel, THE TEMPLE OF DOUBT.
So you’re in a movie theater and a trailer blasts onto the big screen. An announcer booms “In a world where …”
You’re already there. Volunteering as a tribute in a rank, cruddy version of America? Got it. Nasty dragon torching Middle Earth? Yup. Inside a girl’s head, hanging with her little emo selves? Totes.
One of the best parts of writing THE TEMPLE OF DOUBT was getting that movie camera going in my own head, even if my announcer’s voice sounds, well, like me. I loved the process of creating a setting so my characters could run around and get themselves into trouble in an environment that felt natural to them.
Yummy delicious worldbuilding
Even before my heroine, Hadara, had a name, she had a home, and I got to design every crazy inch of it. Planning planet Kuldor, where THE TEMPLE OF DOUBT takes place, felt like getting an-all-you-can-eat pass to all my favorite restaurants at once. Should I throw in a desert or a glacier? Tropics or temperate zones? Where do I put these oceans? I know…we need a volcano! I’ve always wanted one of those.
Okay, so I was up to oceans and volcanoes, and I’m thinking a volcano with its own island sits above the ocean like a boss. Why not stick it along the equator? It looks nice there.
Out came the colored pencils and scrap paper, and voila! There’s New Meridian, the exactamundo center of the map. But then that decision leads to other decisions, and pretty soon, your butterfly wings flapping along the equator are causing blizzards at the North Pole.
Color me beautiful
If Hadara was going to be a native of a tropical island, and her people had been there since who-knows-when, it’s going to affect things like amount of melanin in her skin. Seriously. This is science, people, even if I’m kind of making it up.
I settled on bronze, because it’s the tone that made the most sense to me. When I thought of the equatorial countries closest to our multi-hued US of A right here on Earth, I came up with names like Ecuador, Columbia, Brazil. And who doesn’t think Brazil is sexy? And they’re a total rainbow over there. Bronze skin totally fit the look I was going for.
Then, if Hadara was going to build a decent wardrobe, her city needed a market with a glorious array of colorful clothes, but where does it all come from? So I made her town a port city, with merchant ships using it as a pit stop while en route to bigger places.
A world of possibilities
Wow, did this open up possibilities. Now Hadara could be worldly and open-minded and really well-dressed without having traveled very far. The world came to her. Her folks could be prosperous, but still just regular, middle-class types. They didn’t need to be royalty for her to get an education or have some freedom of movement.
What kind of tech should she have? I’m not talking iPhone versus Android, more like guns versus swords. I opted out of gunpowder, guns, bombs…pretty much anything that goes bang. Magic would seem kind of lame if pretty much anybody can make stuff explode. And it’s not like anybody hates a good swordfight, amirite?
So. No gunpowder. If you want to make something ‘splode on Kuldor, you have to do it the old-fashioned way --- by conjuring something nasty.
Bottom line
By now, you can see how all these decisions have a cumulative effect. One piece rests on another, fitting in like one of those 3-D jigsaw puzzles. Hadara’s going to be shaped by her surroundings, so when she starts getting all skeptical about magic and the people who wield it, she’s coming from a clearly defined set of circumstances. Her reactions fit her personality because she’s already so grounded in who she is --- or isn’t, as she begins chafing against aspects of her world that she hates.
After all the shopping around for worldbuilding bits and pieces, with geography shaping culture, and culture shaping family life, what we’re left with is a unique path laid out for Hadara from even before I typed page one.
Anne Boles Levy currently teaches English to middle schoolers after more than two decades writing and editing for print, web and radio. Anne is a graduate of Smith College and studied abroad at University College London, and she has her master’s in journalism from Columbia University. She’s also an amateur silversmith and the absentminded wife to her long-suffering husband, Brett. They run around after two children and a cat in Scottsdale, Arizona.
