Writer Wednesday: World-Building History

 

Today we are focusing on world-building history. All month we've been focusing on creation stories, so this week we've been looking at the idea of the historical building of a world. Yesterday we looked at living history prompts which you can find here.

Looking for extra insight on how to effectively world-build? Check out this article from Masterclass we enjoyed and this article from Reedsy. For more tips check out this article at The Write Life.

Trivia:

Dragonriders of Pern is considered a book that has great world-building. Take inspiration from this book and write a world that has a society of dragons. Create a system for your dragons that has religion, culture, history, war, food, environment, and anything else you can think of.

Quote:

Take inspiration from this quote and write a faerie story. This isn't necessarily a fairy tale. 

“I propose to speak about fairy-stories, though I am aware that this is a rash adventure. Faërie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, Tolkien on Fairy-stories (taking from Goodreads)

Exercise: 

World-building Step by Step:

1.) Know your Basics: choose your genre, your environment, and your weather. 

2.) Rules and Laws: is this a strict structure with lots of hard laws and a curfew or is it a loose system? What is the religion of the world? Is there a social system? 

3.) History: Decide if your story is set within this world or an epic fantasy world. If it's set within our own world, think about if you want an alternative history or if you want humankind's actual history. If you're setting the world in the future, create a history between the present day and the future year you chose. If you're choosing epic fantasy as your genre, think back at least three centuries for your world. Think about the wars, the pandemics, the great events, the ice ages, and the change in eras. This is a good opportunity to study history.

Happy writing!