Skip to main content

World-building: Not Just For Fantasy Writers

A bug-like alien with outer space and planets in the background.
Image Credit: Openclipart.org


I was choking on dust all week, especially in bed late at night. So I made sure I spent this Saturday afternoon dusting the flat. And it’s not even half done when you think about it. Being a rat pack, more dust is in the clutter of my house than sand in the Sino-Indian border’s desert. I think I have to scan and put some of those old manuscript copies and notes for past work on flash drive and trash the paper copies. Though there are certain paper copies of my work that I forbid myself to exclude to digital form, since I’m a lover of the printed word and like to read and present words on a tangible medium such as paper. But enough of that.


On World-building

I told you last time that I would have a post on world-building. Most people probably think of world-building as something only done by fantasy writers who make up imaginary universes. That’s not true. World-building is simply the manner an author describes the environment the story takes place in, regardless of whether that environment exists in the real world or not. Unless you’re a historical fiction writer, there is going to be some made-up details of that setting you’re depicting. And so because of those details, you would have to do what has become popularly referred to by us authors as “world-building”. I’ll use an example of a horror short story I’m currently working on. Keep in mind, I’m still in the process of writing this story, so some of these details may change by the time it’s published. But I’m still hoping you’ll find this as a good example to world-building. I don’t have a title for the story yet, in case you’re wondering, but you’ll know what it is when I announce its publication.

Developing an imaginary setting out of a real region

The short story I’m working on is set in the Sino-Indian border region, which is the region that borders China and India. So it’s a real area of the world. However, the province within that region I’m setting my story in is one that I created based both on Chinese and Indian cultures, especially Tamil culture on the Indian side. I came up with this “mixed” race of people because I am involving religious beliefs dating back before Hinduism and part of the myth system is made up by yours truly for purposes of the story.

Yet I wanted to give the story an effect of taking place in our own reality. After all, it involves an archeology expedition. So I used Google Earth to look at photos of the Sino-Indian region and to look at the names of places in that part of the world. I also used Wikipedia to check facts about Indian and Chinese cultures and the mythological systems of the two. However, because Wikipedia is an open source tool that anybody can post and edit articles on, I advise people to always verify the articles’ references and, if possible, to use those referencees for further research especially if they seem reliable. Such reliable references are ones published by credible universities or well-known publications by expert journalists such as National Geographic.

Because I wanted the society in my story to be more or less directly descended from one predating Hinduism, I researched the various ethnic groups of India and China and came across the Tamil people who are, according to a Wikipedia article, one of the largest and oldest existing ethno-linguistic cultural groups who have not had a state of their own. This means they have spread out all over Asia and so it could be believable if I based my Sino-Indian border province on that group’s culture.

Naming the Setting

I wanted to find a name that reflected the ancientness and obscurity of the province. Because Sanskrit is one of Asia’s oldest languages, I used Google’s translation tool  to create a meaningful name for the province. Without creating a spoiler, I’ll let you know that because the story involves a character who goes through a kind of blindness as well as a dangerously enlightening experience, I decided to give the province a name that means blinding light. So I typed in the words “land of blinding light” into the translator’s text box and came up with “Kurutakkum oli nilam”.  The name suggests not only the experience one of the characters goes through, but also the geography of the region, in which the story’s setting itself, which is somewhere near Aksai (on the Chinese side), is all desert. However, even though the province is on the Chinese side, I made it tremendously Indian influenced in the culture including its religious beliefs. And so the people themselves are mixed both biologically and culturally.

For More on World-building . . .

I probably don’t explain world-building as well as I actually do it, but one author who is really good at explaining it is Auden Johnson. She’s really big on it. So if you’re interested, I strongly suggest you visit her blog, Dark Treasury



Do any of you fellow fiction writers out there research facts for your world-building? If so what sources come in handy for you? And for you out there who aren’t authors but are avid readers of fiction, what do you feel makes a convincing imaginary setting whether based on a real region of the world or completely imagined by the author? Please feel free to leave your answers in the box below.


Until next time . . . 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Book-To-Movie: ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’

Credit: Wikimedia Commons I apologise for posting outside our regular post-day which is late Saturday night/early Sunday morning. However, I got behind on several things last week and so had to postpone the post to today.  I’ve been a reader of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books ever since I was 11. What I’ve always liked so much about the series is that, like a good horror story, the stories often take place in dark settings and involve bizarre cases. Conan Doyle’s novel, “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, definitely contains these elements. It’s a detective story that crosses over into the gothic horror genre. Several movie adaptations of the novel have been made that go as far back as a 1915 German silent film. In 1959 Hammer Studios released a version starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. As much as I’m a fan of the Hammer horror films, I have not seen that one yet. The only one that I’ve seen so far is the 1939 adaptation starring that other big name in classic Bri

Book-To-Movie: ‘I Am Legend’

A vampire similar to the ones in 2008's "I Am Legend" which starred Will Smith. Credit: Pixabay.com It’s time for another Book-To-Movie review! In a Book-To-Movie, I review a book and its movie adaptations. This month’s book and its movies based on it is I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. While vampires were no longer in in the American pop culture of the the 1950s, science fiction horror in general was. So Matheson’s I Am Legend brought the scientificising of vampires into the pulp literary scene of that era. Not too long after, in the early ‘60s, the first of three book-to-movie adaptions appeared and was renamed The Last Man On Earth which starred Vincent Price. The other two were The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston in the ‘70s and I Am Legend starring Will Smith in the 2001s. Even though each one debunked the myth of the vampire as a supernatural being, each had its own depiction of the creature. ‘I Am Legend’, The Book Set in a near post-apocalyptic fu

Book-To-Movie: Stephen King’s 'The Raft'

Credit: Pixabay.com It's the third Saturday of the month and so that means it's time for another Book-To-Movie ! In a Book-To-Movie we review a book and its movie adaptation. One of the reasons I as a horror fan don’t read a lot of Stephen King’s work is because most of it consists of novels that go more than 400 pages. I have a short attention span when it comes to reading, ironically since I consider myself an avid reader, and so I normally won’t read a work that is much more than the equivalent to a 350-page mass market paperback. The other reason why I don’t read a lot of King’s work is that, as literary scholars will tell you, a lot of his writing is poor. However, he does have some good writing in his works, especially his earlier stuff, including his short horror tales. So if I read anything by Stephen King it’s usually his short stories or novellas. One of his collections I’ve read is Skeleton Crew which includes some of his good, or at least better, fi