Worldbuilding: Not Just for Writers of Fantasy or Science Fiction by Patty Jansen

By Patty Jansen

The word worldbuilding conjures images of castles and space ships. Strange worlds and fanciful places that exist only in the imagination. Because literally, a writer of Science Fiction or Fantasy needs to build a setting from the ground up. You need to think about the social system, the climate, the economy, and everything else that makes a place tick. When all of those things are made up, creating a realistic setting for your story is a lot of work.

But does that mean that worldbuilding skills are limited to writers of speculative fiction? No. In reality, any setting that's not 100% faithful to the real world uses worldbuilding. It is just that writers of contemporary genres do so much of the earthly stuff subconsciously. Everyone knows how the real world works, so we don't need to think about how a locality works, even though the place in question is made up.

Yes? So, when you write a story set on a tropical resort island, do you know what kind of wildlife would frequent the beachfront? Do you know what time the sun sets, and whether that would be before or after dinner?

Writers of Fantasy or Science Fiction routinely write all these things down. What is the climate like? What are the animals like? How far from the equator is this locality? Why is a city or town economically viable in this locality? What is the reason behind local customs?

Writers of other genres can use similar notebooks for unfamiliar earthly localities. You can add a great lot of detail (and authority) to your setting when you show that you are familiar with your setting, whether real or made up. Whether real or made up, all settings require reading up. A snowy place is a snowy place, no matter whether it's set in an everyday world or some fantasy world. Familiarity with the constraints of a cold climate helps in making the setting more authentic.

Stories are not set in a vacuum. Your choices of climate, locality and vegetation type have consequences on the story itself. They may be peripheral consequences, but they will make a story seem more real. If you're in a desert, water will be scarce but fresh food will also be expensive. If you're in a desert, villages will be subject to drought and crippling floods. Settlements will be small and perhaps nomadic, unless there is good transport. People in deserts do not eat a lot of vegetables, unless there is some cost-effective way of getting them there.

At all times, you should ask yourself: why does the locality make sense? How does the society work and why? Writers of Science Fiction and Fantasy are used to asking themselves these questions.

However, all worldbuilding in fantasy is extrapolated from the real world, and therefore it is also useful for the real world.

My recent trilogy involves a type of people who can live without hearts as ghosts. Rather than explain this phenomenon away with magic, I decided to do something different with it: the 'magic' is something akin to radiation originating from an ages-old device. This means that the 'magic' is locality-bound.

It also means that the people living in the area affected by the radiation must have a resistance to it. Ergo, there would be other people who do not have a resistance to it, and they would live outside the radiation's area of influence, in a different country. These people approach the dangerous radiation with logic. They've devised ways to measure it, much like we would in the modern world. Much of their weather relies on pattern generated by this radiation. My reading up for this setting involved articles on radiation poisoning, and on weather patterns, all things from the real world. So, while the setting was entirely made up, a lot of real world stuff went into it.

Patty Jansen lives in Sydney, Australia, where she spends most of her time writing Science Fiction and Fantasy. She publishes in both traditional and indie venues. Her story This Peaceful State of War placed first in the second quarter of the Writers of the Future contest and was published in their 27th anthology. Her story Survival in Shades of Orange will be published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact.
Her novels (available at ebook venues) include Watcher's Web (soft SF), The Far Horizon (middle grade SF), Charlotte's Army (military SF) and books 1 and 2 of the Icefire Trilogy Fire & Ice (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005TF1B9K) and Dust & Rain (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006GODGVY) . Book 3 will be out in 2012 and will be called Blood & Tears.
Patty is on Twitter (@pattyjansen), Facebook, LinkedIn, goodreads, LibraryThing, google+ and blogs at Must Use Bigger Elephants: http://pattyjansen.wordpress.com/