In the Beginning

    Secondhand Gods created the Heavens and the Earth.  But the Earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the Earth.

    Yes, if you happen to be the theological sort, I just paraphrased Genesis 1:1-3.  In fact, if you were to read the first chapter of Genesis (in any one of the multitude of Christian Bibles) you’d see, in microcosm, the act of true Worldbuilding. 
    Perhaps my blog should have started here, rather than with the creation of the animals, but I was working on a race last week, and it felt far more sensible to start there rather than here.
    I’ve been reading a lot of Steven Savage’s work on Worldbuilding over at A Way With Worlds.  Perhaps his best advice, and the advice I want to focus on today, is what your world really is.  It is your primary character.
    That isn’t to say that you need a sentient world hell-bent on eradicating the technological scourge of humanity (of course, if you did that, kudos).  What Savage means when he talks about the world as a character is that it technically must exist before, during, and after your story.
    The world is as thriving an entity as your heroes; it endures upheavals, lucid periods; it snows, rains, and grows, and without the world, your characters wouldn’t be able to do much of anything, let alone thwart the evil wizard Gargameglan.  So, what is a wayward Worldbuilder to do?  Quite a lot like making a fancy dinner for friends or family, you should do as much preparatory work in advance as possible.
   
    The purpose of building your world is not to create a stage for anyone and everyone to act on; rather, you want to create a stage for your cast of characters to act on.  While there is no such thing as too much background information, there is such a thing as wasting time.  If it weren’t important to know who first pressed a half florin electrum coin, then I’d strongly recommend you don’t write twenty pages about the man’s eating habits on the Sabbath. 
    Savage wisely suggests you write only a little more than you will need to successfully create a world to work in, and to successfully provide yourself with some space for fun.  Historical figures, background characters and “general knowledge” characters don’t need lengthy biographies if they will never be encountered except in the vernacular (that is, the half florin might be called an Aggie, because it was minted by Agrus Quinton Aquila).
    This however does not stop you from creating brief, but fascinating, points of interest for your world.  The Fjords of Temblus, Loch Modan, The Floating City of Venice; your characters may never visit these places, but they can easily be included as a fun addition just for you, and who knows, you might use them in the future.

    I am currently integrating some of Steven Savage’s techniques into my own growing methodology for World Building.  I am a fan of maps, a big fan of them in fact, as I think they provide the best basis for your world possible.
    With a map of any size (the bigger the better) you can see your world, and for some of us, seeing is believing.  Geography – and especially the geography of resources – can affect all sorts of factors in your world.  Let us use a real world example to illustrate the point.
    One of the “rewards” given to France after the First World War was the continually contested area of Alsace-Lorraine, a coal rich region on the border of France and Germany.  Historically, Alsace-Lorraine has traded hands between Germany and France several times.  What has this done to the people of the region?  Would it be so important if it weren’t a resource rich region?
    The answer to the second question is no.  Alsace-Lorraine would have been a null point in the discourse of the Treaty of Versailles.  More importantly, what has this done to the region? 
    If we were creating our storybook world, and created by fluke a country named France, would we say that it is homogenous in language, religion, culture, et cetera?  You could say that and get away with it; all French people speak French, are Catholic, believe in life, liberty, and fraternity, and like Jerry Lewis.  Fine, we won’t doubt you, the mighty Worldbuilder, in saying that.
    However, it would be far more interesting to say that, in your fictional country of France, there is a region known as Alsace-Lorraine, who, due to conflicts over the years, has a divergent set of traits.  Citizens of the province of Alsace-Lorraine are bilingual, speaking French and German, and celebrating some German holidays such as Oktoberfest.
    The same could be said for regions in the southeast bordering Spain.  Certain Moorish and Spanish influences over the last thousand years have certainly had their impact.
    If you didn’t have a map of your world, you might not know where exactly nations grind against each other, or where they coexist peacefully.  You might also lose track of things in one chapter stating that the Oil Fields of Penn are in the North, then several chapters later placing them in the south.
    A well-designed (and it does not have to be perfect on the first try) map can be a great help to world building.  Using Savage’s method, that is, creating enough information to be useful, I’m starting to pinprick spots on my world map (17”x22” or four A4 sheets of paper) and tell little stories about them.  In the long run, this will strengthen my story and my world, making chatter, banter, and colloquialisms far more realistic, not to mention the value it will have in helping me track the progression of the story over geographic areas.