Thought: World Building.

I’ve been slacking off in the Thinking-About-Writing arena these days—but I have a good excuse: school. But now that summer is here, and I’m reading books for fun again, I’m starting to have things to say about them and about writing in general.

So here’s today’s thought: World Building is hard.

I’ve created several worlds for various novels I thought I wanted to write, and I would never say that any of the worlds I created were really able to sustain story. Sure, I had different races, I had the ruling families, I even had some of the history. But as I wrote, I had to keep making new things up, finding little bits and pieces about the world that even I, the writer, didn’t know. Now maybe that’s just how I do it. Hell, maybe that’s how other people do it too, but it struck me as… well, not quite complete.

Looking at someone like—and you all must know who I’m going to say here—Tolkien, it’s easy to see that world building could be hard. Even now, decades after his death, books are still being released of more stories from his Middle Earth. He created a wealth of information about a world that he thought up in his head, a world whose history spans millennia. And he knew what happened in all those years. (I think about this sometimes and I despair of ever writing anything good ever.) It’s incredible. Not that someone could do that, but the sheer amount of things he created for his world is utterly amazing.

But then I read things like Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn and Warbreaker. And I have hope again. Not because the books or their world building are bad, but because they’re good. Maybe it’s that they lack the sense of the epic that Tolkien’s books have, but I’m not sure that’s quite it. What I do know is that the worlds of both books are beautifully thought out. That the reader (or at least I) never wondered about something that was left out. Because nothing seemed to be left out at all.

As a writer, I’m left wondering this: how much does the writer need to know about the world before they can write something without holes? Does the writer know a whole lot more than ends up in the book? How much history does the writer have to invent before their world feels like it has some history? Or is it all up to the writer’s skill in mending those little holes so no one sees them?

I am, of course, thinking about this more and more because I plan on using this summer for writing. Lots and lots of writing. I look forward to telling you all about it as I find my way through it.

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