Guest Post By Claire Lawson

For fantasy writers world building is often the most enjoyable and simultaneously the most difficult aspect of writing a fantasy novel or series. The creative freedom that goes into creating your own world or alternative version of this one can be both exhilarating and time consuming – not to mention the tendency to get so carried away crafting your story world that you forget to actually write your story (not that I’m talking from experience or anything…). Creating a fantasy world is imaginative play for grown-ups and if you get it right you will hook your readers for life. In ‘The Cadet of Tildor’ Alex Lidell has created a believable fantasy world for heroine Renee that makes her story instantly relatable to her teenage – and indeed any age – fans. Effective world building is one of the major criteria for fantasy fiction awards such as the Aurealis Award and is essential for any fantasy story to give it depth and context. Many writers feel that you can’t world build too much and yet, sometimes perhaps you need to know when to stop. Teenage readers in particular are immediately critical of any story that loses pace in order to impart pages of background information, however fascinating. The key to world building is to create a setting in which your reader can simply lose herself in the story. Not enough and the story won’t make sense and will seem far-fetched. Too much and you lose the impact of the characters and plot. It’s a delicate balance.

Striking a Balance

There are a lot of components to world building. Not just geography but language, history, politics, the types of creatures that inhabit your world, customs and culture, fashions and social norms. Religion, mythology and the supernatural often have major parts to play in fantasy worlds, as do warfare, dietary customs and seasonal festivals. Then there’s astronomical influences to consider. One moon or two? Your world may be similar to reality in some aspects and completely different in others, or it may evoke a particular historical period or ancient mythology. It really is up to you, and it is precisely this freedom that often makes fantasy writing so appealing to an author. It can also cause a writer to become bogged down in the detail however. It is crucial that you as the writer know everything there is to know about your world, but don’t feel you have to share every aspect of this with your reader. The Lord of the Rings and Tolkiens other works are shining examples of the most detailed world building the literary world has ever seen – he even created his own language, complete with grammatical rules and linguistic roots – but even he didn’t include every bit of Middle Earth history in any one single tale. Fantasy gaming and world building – which starts at grand levels and continues through copy editing - is currently very popular and often reminiscent of Tolkiens attention to detail, but a YA novel is something very different indeed. A good rule of thumb is to think about whether or not the information you’re about to impart is integral to your plot – does it enhance your readers involvement with the story? For example if your heroine is staging a revolution some history of events leading up to that point is necessary and useful. Three pages of the history of every revolution that has ever occurred in your fantasy universe is not.

Knowing When Enough is Enough

So how can you tell if you have overdone the world building in terms of how much information you impart to your reader? Some published fantasy writers such as John Wiswell offer the following hints;

Your main character never does anything without comparing it to some action or event her ancestors experienced, or that she read about in history books.
You have invited a little sister/baby elf/talking rabbit just so your character can regale them with bedtime stories concerning the history and mythology of your world.
You have an alternative name for every flower, tree, animal or item of crockery and use them in your story at every available opportunity.
Even your gods pray to gods
Your story reads like a World of Warcraft novel.

The best way to get a feel for how effective world building for teens is done is to read those who are successful at it. As well as Lidell herself, read Tamora Pierce, Suzanne Collins and your own favorites and see if you can figure out why their world building works.

Guest Post By Claire Lawson

The post Guest Post: World Building for Teens – How Much is Enough? appeared first on Challenge the Odds.