World/Character Building/Development Techniques
3 posts in this topic.
-
A place to discuss techniques and ideas as well as giving advice or tips for how you create and develop worlds/characters.
-
Usually my worlds begin with a basic concept or idea-- This could be for the world itself, the plot, or even just the characters.
For example, with my story "The Pilgrim", what kicked that story off was simply the idea of following a pilgrim through the world. From it came several lands, an ancient prophecy, the Ivory Church, a race of manifestations of nature... well, the list goes on.
Or take, the story I'm currently working on, which began with one sentence-- "The Gods are gone".
From that central idea, I usually try to dig up some central ideas about the plot before going forward. I knew I wanted the world to be post-apocalyptic almost, where reading and writing are almost lost arts. So I made one of the characters a Muse, one of the few storytellers roaming the world. This naturally led to home of the Muses, within an ancient valley, then the Wastes beyond, then the lands of a Thousand Kingdoms between. Honestly, much of the time it's just an exercise in pure, unadulterated creativity-- And that's what I love about writing Fantasy. The ideas like "Hey, let me make the Ocean boil", and justify it with legends of falling stars.
At any rate, this is a broad topic, so I hope that gets the ball rolling! -
I haven't done extensive world-building or character building yet, but I like to try to come up with things by using some basic or fundamental elements from what is common in fantasy, but also give it a twist by building a lot of it from a random or semi-random, far-out imaginative train of thought that I come up with. I think with fantasy, if you combine it with some traditional elements, you can make use of the ridiculous as well.
Sign in to reply to this topic.
Delete this post?
Are you sure you want to delete this post? This cannot be undone.