In this week’s episode, Crys and JP talk all about how they worldbuild, including what tools they find helpful to begin worldbuilding and tips to help along the way.
Show Notes
Azgaar’s Fantasy Map Generator
Transcript
Crys: Hello friends. Welcome to Write Away. It is May 20th as we are recording this. I’m Crys Cain with my cohost…
JP: JP Rindfleisch.
Crys: Oh, how was your writing, JP?
JP: It was good. My life is revisions. In a positive way. But I have in the past couple of days been doing about three times the amount of revision work that I normally do, which has been really nice. I think part of it is just having that plan in place has made it move way faster.
I think I am, at this moment, two chapters away from the end. And then it’s just a little bit of cleanup and off to the editor and then more revisions for a different book.
Crys: People can’t see my invisible chair dance party. Yay!
JP: So that’s me.
Crys: And also you had a tragedy this week.
JP: I did have a minor workout tragedy. I think I’ve mentioned it on this podcast that I have a standing elliptical, and in the middle of working out, about an hour in, one of the pedals just completely broke off.
Just, I almost fell. I am graceful enough to not fall. But I’m just going to attribute it to being more buff as the reason it broke. 100%.
Crys: Absolutely. I am back from vacation, and vacation is in air quotes because we all know that I don’t know how to vacate properly. I have such trouble knowing what day it is.
A lot of that’s because the kiddo is gone for just another few days. And so I don’t have my normal schedule, but I am getting stuff done. Lovely. I’ve been really back on using Notion as my tracking things to do and that are done. It helps me a lot with my focus. And so I have been moving forward in small steps on a lot of projects.
And so it doesn’t always feel to my brain like I got a lot done if I don’t look at the list, because I’m getting a lot done over a lot of things and not moving super far forward on one project. But Notion helps me see, yes, you are moving forward on things that matter.
JP: Nice. I have to use Notion at some point like that.
But one thing I do have to say is, even though you were on vacation, you still had guilt on showing me what you were up to. And I want to call you out on it because I don’t feel like you should feel guilty about being on vacation and showing off where you are.
Crys: But so many people are stuck.
JP: I think that’s true, but I love to live vicariously through people. So you can gloat all you want, because it was awesome seeing that you were basically living on the water on stilted property. It was beautiful.
Crys: Yes. So my brag here is that I have a friend who manages a beautiful property. And I visited them about once a year, except for last year, or they visited where I live.
We met when they lived in Costa Rica, in my little town for about a year. About my first year in my little beach town. And they manage a property that used to be on beach, but as water has risen, because climate change, they now live on stilts over water. And so the whole property is basically one giant dock.
I just sit at the breakfast table on the dock, looking into the water with the tiny little fishies. And then in the afternoon, when the water’s calm, I would hop on a paddleboard and just go out over the reef and look at things and saw the most ginormous sea urchins I’ve ever seen. Like bigger than my head.
It was beautiful.
JP: Yeah. Sounds like a whole world that you could create.
Crys: That’s why the fantasy story is based in a tropical area. So I can write all the cool things that I see. Speaking of worldbuilding, because JP was trying to lead in so smoothly and I’m awkward. Our topic this week is how do you worldbuild?
So I’m just going to start off by asking you, how do you start worldbuilding a new thing, JP?
JP: So if I don’t know where I’m about to go, and I don’t really have an idea in my head, I remember someone at some point telling me this really cool what if idea, where you spend about five to 10 minutes on a timer and you pose the question “What if?” and you just write down anything that comes to mind and don’t hold back.
It could be stupid things. What if pancakes fell from the sky? Something along those lines. And just keep going at it. If you specify in a genre, it might help you. So like I did this last night and I was like, what if we colonized Venus instead of Mars? What if we build a Dyson sphere around the sun? All these sci-fi things.
And then once your timer is up, pick a handful and start mixing them together, adding and removing, adapting, and changing them. The idea behind this is maybe your first thought isn’t always the best thought or the most unique thought.
But the thing is, your ability to adapt and change those thoughts, that’s where the uniqueness comes into play.
So when you’re in this timer, don’t try to be unique, put whatever you want on there, it could literally be the main plot of Battlestar Galactica if you really wanted to, but put it down. And then when you come back to it and you’re doing that kind of mixing matchy stuff, that’s when you get your unique voice in there.
So that’s my first step.
Crys: Question about that. Do you only ask questions or do you answer those questions yet?
JP: I think here I’m just posing the what ifs. Because I think there’s a sense of wonder that comes with asking what if, that may not come when you answer that question. I think right now it’s what really sticks out in your mind as like a cool, what if question?
That’s how I like to use this method.
Crys: There’s a couple of different ways that I’ve gone about this recently. One is Holly Lisle’s Story Seed idea, and that is that you create an object, just imagine an object, anything. Could be a necklace, can be a sword, can be a magical glowing box. And you start describing it physically, only physically as much as you can. Try and use as many of the senses as you can.
And then you started asking who, what, when, where, why about it, at least three of each question.
That object may not end up in your story at all, but it spawns like a whole world and a history, as you’re asking who, what, when, where, why? I really liked that.
For this last project I did though, I knew that I wanted… I knew some of the characters I wanted to write and I knew I wanted to write fantasy. So I started there, some character archetypes.
The thing that I think created most of my actual physical worldbuilding was I knew that I wanted a capital city in a tropical zone, but I absolutely hate pulling all of that information up from scratch. Like creating it from scratch. I would rather someone just plop something down in front of me and say, okay, here’s your baseline.
I found this amazing fantasy map generator that I’ve gone all googoo gaga over that does that. I just kept generating new maps until I found a map that worked for me and the reason I’m so like cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs over this map is it allows you to see what the biomes are, what the height elevations are.
It even generates interesting world events that could be going on like a plague over in this area. They’re just adding now exports and and goods that are generated for each area. It creates politics, religions, it even creates like a little political history of who is friendly. It just creates all of this from scratch. And I’m like, great. I can work with this.
You can manually change anything that doesn’t fit what you need to tell for your story. And I’m like, yeah, I can just build up a whole bunch of stories from this without having had to draw the dang map myself.
And so from that, I generated a lot of story plot line because there’s a volcano over here and there’s this kind of religion over here.
That’s for the serial project I’m working on. And I know how that project starts. I know how it ends. I know the major plot points and arcs, just from playing with story structure and that map.
JP: Did you say where that map is?
Crys: I didn’t, because I can’t physically say the word of the username of the guy who created it, but the link will be in the show notes.
It’s something like Azgaard… Yeah. I don’t know. I, so I will link it.
JP: Okay. Yeah, no, I love that as well. When you sent me that, that sparked a ton of ideas. And it’s a really good tool to use as a starting off point. Maybe you’re not familiar with worldbuilding. Maybe you want to just leave a couple of things up to either just randomness or chaos.
Another tool that I really liked to use is a website called vulgarlang.com. It generates a random language based off of choices from it. I really like the concept of how language can influence a culture.
And so using this, it helps with the pieces that I maybe don’t know because I’m no linguistics expert. But at the same time what it does is if I want to say a phrase or a sentence, I can put it in their little translator device and I can see what that phrase or sentence would look like in their language. I can start to get an idea as to how that culture would develop or grow based off of the way that they speak.
I really like using tools like that because basically the whole point of worldbuilding is to create something that happens before and things that happen after the story that you tell.
Because the most important thing, when we talk about worldbuilding is that there are lives lived prior to your protagonist and there are lives lived outside of your protagonist. And when you can include bits and pieces of that information in your story, it makes the entire world feel more rich, feel more alive.
Crys: Yeah, I’m really glad you brought up the whole vulgarlang because con-lang, constructed languages, are something that is on my mind for the next part of this story as my character goes from one country to another where the languages would be different.
And I had this fun idea, and this is one of those things of this tells you more about the culture, not just the language, where I don’t know if this works for the countries that she’s going to, but it’d be… it just made me giggle to think of a country who had a lot of fruits, but they didn’t have unique names for them.
They literally call them spiky fruit. Spiky yellow fruit. Spiky white fruit. And the main character is feeling like what? Why? That just… it makes sense, but it also doesn’t make sense. And that culture just happens to be super literal. Like they just, their poetry to everyone else just kinda sounds awkward because it’s just super literal.
That’s one of those points where the language that you worldbuild tells you about the culture. You could have a very flowery speaking people. And this is also character in cultural development where the characters speak very poetically. And that is probably a more of a slow moving culture that appreciates beauty and the ritual of things rather than efficiency.
JP: This whole concept of why language is so fascinating and other pieces around that it stems off of… like, I listen to a lot of scientific podcasts because I love to get ideas from them.
So when we’re talking about language, I know that there’s a culture in this world that exists where right and left don’t exist. The person’s positional status doesn’t matter. And actually what matters in the language is cardinal directions.
I can tell you that this object is to the north of me, but at no point, can I tell you that this object is to the right or left of me in that language. Because those words don’t exist.
And I think that’s where I really love to grab worldbuilding ideas is from these podcasts, from stories about cultures that exist in our world that you can stem off and build from.
Crys: What are other tools that you use when you’re worldbuilding?
JP: I’m science-y and nerdy. If I’m not writing a magic system or maybe I’m going more towards sci-fi, I personally really love to do my research and I really love to use Google Scholar as a tool, because I want to go directly to the journals that discuss the topics.
One thing I do try, especially if I am searching for information that I have an inkling on, but not an answer on, is I try to check my confirmation bias. I’m not going to say that this is important for everyone writing or worldbuilding, but I think that it is important if you want some type of accuracy to it.
Because when we search for things like… I’m going to get political here for a fun moment. But if we search for something like do vaccines cause purple skin? You’ve already imposed a bias about your opinion as to what that can do. And so the search results are going to look for the keyword purple skin in correlation to the vaccine. And it may not actually come up with answers that may be the true results.
So instead of something so specific, you can search for things like vaccine side effects, and then you can get reputable sources to determine that piece of information. And that’s why I also fall back on the Google Scholar or article things when looking for that.
I know that I’ve done this for a couple of people in their worldbuilding, especially in postapoc, when you want to answer the question of how much food can actually feed a person? Or for a certain period of time? Or how can I build a greenhouse in post-apocalyptic times? And et cetera.
I really love doing that kind of stuff. I really love researching that kind of stuff. And I use Google Scholar for that because there are people that did studies for this that I can find and pick apart.
So that is my method.
Now, when we talk about fantasy, or I personally like to delve into a little more like the theological stuff, I really love looking at just other fantasy books.
I like Reddit. There is a magic building and a worldbuilding subreddit. I really love looking at those and seeing what people are talking about there. And just figuring out how I can be same but different, because I think that’s the key.
Crys: Yeah. I very often get really overwhelmed if I try to worldbuild too much ahead of time. I am learning that I am very much a character focused or character first author, and that’s not a positive or a negative. It’s just, that’s the part that interests me the most.
Some people are plot focused. Some people are worldbuilding focused. I have a dear friend who is very worldbuilding focused. They could just play in that all day without any characters specifically.
I make it mostly a game, if I’m just playing with worldbuilding and so some of the questions I’ll ask are, how do people in this country, or this world deal with mundane things?
Like how is trash handled in this culture? What do they do with it? Is it stinky because no one deals with it? Is it super clean? If it’s super clean then how do they manage that?
And then also comparison. How is this country different from that country in this mundane thing? Or how are their religions different or the same? And what are the little differences between them?
For me, a lot of times comparing highlights those little bits that are important because it’s the differences that are interesting.
JP: When I approach it for writing, I try really hard to not get lost in the weeds because I know that I will get lost in the weeds.
So especially with my co-writer, we don’t answer all the questions when we start and we actually let the story develop and ask the questions and then we would take a moment and we answer those questions together.
I think that the key to me for worldbuilding is focus on the questions that you need answers to and leave everything else to be answered as it unfolds. Because otherwise you’ll totally get lost in the weeds. At least I will.
Crys: Yeah. I often will worldbuild something at the moment when I need it. So for instance, as I was getting ready to write the first chapter of the serial, I messaged JP and I was like, I’m having trouble with language here. Because it was very important to me that this culture that my main character’s coming from didn’t have a gender preference in lineage, or just there wasn’t really gender privilege in this particular culture.
Which meant that the titles of the nobility were not gendered. And so I needed to figure out what sounded not weird to me, and JP threw a bunch of words at me. Because I was like, Lord, Lady, like those just don’t fit. I can make up words, but I’ve already made up like this naming convention for the nobility and that’s how you know that they are nobility.
I think you threw at me Overlord, Ruler, Watcher. And I was like, Watcher actually makes sense because that kind of ties into this vague historical idea I had of the nobility being the Watchers over the coastline and being the ones who would rise people to defend against the incoming invaders.
And I was like, okay. So they don’t really do a whole lot of watching now because their country is the same as the country across the ocean now, like they’re the same. So they don’t really have to do a lot of watching now, but that historically makes sense. They still hold on to that name. Boom. World built!
JP: World built.
You can play on to that and you can say, what are they watching out for? Maybe it wasn’t physical anymore. Maybe it’s something a little bit deeper than that. I love wordplay. I love figuring those pieces out because there are so many different approaches you can take that aren’t just the standard historical approach to it.
That was a moment in your worldbuilding process and as you were writing that, you’re like, “Aw, dang it. I need a word for this.”
And Abe, my co-writer Abe and I, we were, I think we’re on like our fourth book of the series. And we finally hit a point where we were like, okay, we don’t necessarily have a fully fleshed out backstory for one of our characters who lives for several thousands of years.
And we were like, okay, let’s just come up with that now. We traced things back, and as we’re tracing it back, like it flowed with everything that we’ve already talked about with the story and it fit in so perfectly.
I’m not going to say that always happens, but the fact that we were confident enough in our storytelling that when it came time to reach this point in worldbuilding it fit like a perfect puzzle piece that we were just missing until we reached that point that we needed it.
And so that’s why I don’t think that you need your whole world built in a concrete fashion before you write.
Crys: Sometimes the constraints, as many times as I have cussed myself out for things I have previously written that no longer fit with what I want to write, but I’m held to the previous constraints, they inspire you to be more creative.
And sometimes those are the things that readers end up liking the most because you were forced to go beyond the default of what you wanted to write.
JP: Yeah. Another tool that I do, because I hoard them, are RPGs. Role playing games. They are books on a entire world built without really focusing on a story, because you create the story.
So in that aspect, you can look at books like Dungeons and Dragons or my personal favorites, Invisible Sun, Numanera. I could keep going, but I won’t. Or looking at something like the Cypher system, which the last few that I’ve named are by Monte Cook, but those all have worldbuilding features.
Some of them are more lax than others to give you more mechanics to a world that you can then build. Whereas some of them are more concrete, Dungeons and Dragons is more or less concrete. And you can use these as starting off points on how you can build a world without feeling completely lost in the weeds.
Crys: Another tool that kind of goes back to that Story Seed tool, but it’s a little bit different. Just finding something that you really want to put in your story, like a talking cat, whatever, and figuring out how it would make sense in your world.
Like I really want to do XYZ, how would it make sense in my world? That’s worldbuilding.
JP: Brandon Sanderson has a lot of online videos regarding magic systems and worldbuilding, and one of his most impactful things he says about magic building is that it isn’t the cool parts of the magic that work, it’s the limitations, the weaknesses, and the costs that really drive how a magic system functions in the world.
As cool it as it is that Gandalf can come in at any point in time and just shine a bright light and everyone’s at peace, it’s even cooler when you have a character who is only capable of pushing things away from them, and they have to figure out how they can use that in a fight. Now, those are two different magic systems, both are dependent on your narrative. One is a soft magic system, meaning that it’s very like, a wizard did it. And then you have a hard magic system where, you have costs and et cetera.
I think limiting functions of your worldbuilding and having to figure out how to survive with those limitations, regardless of it’s magic or worldbuilding or whatever, makes for a better story.
Crys: Well, I think that wraps us up pretty good. Even though we could talk forever.
My question for our listeners this week is what is your favorite worldbuilding tool? Worldbuilding is not limited to fantasy and sci-fi. Those of you who are writing historical or even contemporary romance still have to worldbuild your city, your town. So you can have an answer for this too. And I would love to hear it.
JP: Yes, that’d be excellent.
Crys: Don’t forget. We now have a Patreon and the link will be in the show notes. And if you join our Patreon for as little as $1 a month, you will get our weekly updates, more thoughts on the previous episode, and at higher levels, you’ll get to join in on our live stream Book Club, you’ll get to help us pick future book clubs and you’ll get extra special bonus episodes as we create them. So give us a check out and thank you so much.
JP: See you later.
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