Claire Legrand

There’s this fairly famous anecdote about something that happened between J. K. Rowling and the Harry Potter producers during the filming of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. As the filmmakers were constructing Grimmauld Place (the home of Harry’s godfather, Sirius), they began designing the Black family tree. They quickly realized that, in order to make the family tree truly legit, they needed many more names than what were provided in the book. These wouldn’t be random made-up names on the walls of this set; they would be the real frickin’ Black family.

So, producer David Heyman contacted Rowling and was like, “So, hey awesomesauce, we need more info about the Black family so’s we can make this family tree. How ’bout it?”

Fifteen minutes later, Rowling faxed him the Black family tree going back several generations.

The first time I heard this story, my reaction was somewhere between admiration, despair, and HOLY @%&*!

That level of detail is astounding. It made me love her. It made me hate her. It made me want to BE her.

Of course, that’s silly. Every story is different, every story WORLD is different, and every author is different. It’s pointless and even harmful to become obsessive about comparing yourself to other writers and their methods. (Notice I said become obsessive. Casually investigating others’ methods, trying them out, taking along the bits that work for you, and discarding the bits that don’t, is a Very Good Thing. Remember THE LINE OF DOOMARCATION. A little obsessiveness goes a long way…UNTIL YOU CROSS THE LINE. Beware.)

So, no, I’m not going to obsess over J. K. Rowling’s level of detail and berate myself for not having gigantic family trees for all my characters. However, the fact that Rowling could so quickly supply the information the filmmakers needed shows how much time she has spent developing her world. She knows it. She breathes it. And that level of intimacy and care for your world-building is essential to making your story believable to readers.

This is especially true when you’re writing fantasy or science fiction, or anything where your story’s reality is not our reality. In these types of stories, familiar cultural, political, geographical, spiritual, and technological foundations are turned upside-down, mutated, or absent altogether. You won’t be able to make your readers believe what should be nonsense unless it, in fact, DOES make sense. You have to spend the time working out the logic of things, the systems that form the foundation of your story world.

I love doing this stuff. It’s not easy, and it can often be painstaking, but it’s SO rewarding. To be able to insert little snippets of culture and folklore and societal rules into your story, and have it feel organic and natural, is the quickest way to bring your story to life. This holds true whether you’re writing the most fantastical of fantasies, or a very Real Life contemporary. It’s just far more important in that fantastical fantasy. Readers are smart, and their No-BS radars are especially finely honed when reading stuff like fantasies. If it doesn’t make sense, they know it, whether they know they know it or just instinctively reject it.

Lately, I’ve been working on my newest WIP, Cracked. Building the world of Cracked is turning out to be different than what I’ve done with previous books.

With Earthshine, it was a combination of writing preliminary bits and pieces of legends, folk tales, and cultural systems during the planning stages. I did this for a very, VERY long time. Then, when I finally started writing, certain story world aspects emerged organically as I wrote. For the most part, however, everything was in place beforehand.

With The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls, a much simpler and shorter story, Victoria’s world just existed, BAM, almost immediately. I had a very clear picture right from the get-go as to what I wanted her town to look like, feel like, taste like. I did absolutely ZERO world-building exercises before sitting down to actually write that one.

Now, with Cracked, I’m back to what I did for Earthshine, mostly. I’m writing a collection of fairy tales that help establish a history for my story world, back story and motivation for certain characters, and just the general tone of the story I’m trying to tell. So far, it’s been EXTREMELY helpful. It’s taking a while, but world-building is not like sitting down to write X number of words every day. The process of discovering your story world is different for each project, and forcing it can only lead to Very Bad Things. As I take my time developing these fairy tales, bits of my story keep revealing themselves to me in surprising ways.

I have to wonder — would I have discovered these elements of my story world if I had just sat down to a blank document and started writing, like with The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls?

I don’t think so.

Again, the path of discovery for each story world is different. Victoria’s world is sharp, bright, cut-and-dry (or so it seems), and brazenly unashamed of what it is. Therefore, it makes sense that my discovery of it was equally matter-of-fact, lucid, and abrupt.

However, the world of Cracked is one layered in secrets, underworlds, and dark family histories, so of course it makes sense that discovering it would be a more dangerous, arduous, and painstaking process — like unearthing a fossil with toothbrushes, bit by bit,  rather than simply yanking it out of the ground and hoping nothing breaks.

Bad world-building: “WTF, there’s a giant frickin’ tree growing out of that cathedral. *throws book across room*”

Good world-building: “There’s a giant frickin’ tree growing out of that cathedral. Duh. *continues reading*”

The great thing about world-building is that you can do whatever the heck you want with it. Once you establish your story world, you’re bound to the constraints and parameters you set. But while you’re building that world? Psh. Anything goes.

I’m not the most creative of world-builders. I primarily just write little storylets explaining whatever I know absolutely needs explaining, and then go on from there. But I also like to do things like

• write newspaper articles (or something similar) for whatever world I’m in, to discover what’s going on in that world beyond the scope of my characters
• create playlists consisting of mood pieces for each of the different settings in my story world (for example, I have an Earthshine playlist made up of mood pieces for each of the countries featured in one of the storylines)
• find visual inspiration by searching our real world for settings and elements I can reshape and insert as needed, thereby giving my readers something familiar on which to base their interpretation of my story world
• transplant a character from one work into the world of another work, and have them explore; this is the true test of if your world makes sense; if your other-work character can’t figure out what’s going on in this new world, and can’t explain it by translating what’s going on into terms that he or she understands, then you’ve done something wrong

What about you? How do YOU build your worlds? Activities and exercises beforehand? Build as you go? A combination? What are your favorite things to do when discovering a new story world? What is most helpful to you?