Welcome to Secondhand Gods, a Worldbuilder's Blog

    When Henry David Thoreau said that “you cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one,” he was talking about the character of a person, the mettle and merit of a man in this world (as I am sure that in the mid-nineteenth century he would have only concerned himself with the mettle of a man).  I doubt that Thoreau would have imagined that this simple statement – an obvious truth, whose content is indisputable – would be bent to the whims of Secondhand Gods like you and I. 

    For speculative fiction writers (that is, writers in horror, science fiction, and fantasy genres and sub genres) the act of Worldbuilding can be compared to the mythologies of Greece and Rome.  We are the lame god Hephaestus (Vulcan for those with a more Latin inclination), dreadfully grotesque compared to his brothers and sisters on Mount Olympus, hammering at metals and through his strength of will, creating art.   
    That is exactly what Worldbuilders make: handcrafted (or perhaps braincrafted?) art.  Worldbuilding covers a broad swath of the preparatory work towards great storytelling, and most authors in the speculative fiction genres have already, in some way large or small, built Worlds.

    J.R.R. Tolkien – considered the Godfather of Fantasy writers – spent an estimated twelve years working on the Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion (for those who are unaware, the Silmarillion was intended to be Volume II in the Lord of the Rings Saga).  That’s TWELVE YEARS or FOUR-THOUSAND THREE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY DAYS!  In that time, Tolkien not only wrote Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion, but also wrote several volumes of back-story and history, much of which is told through smaller stories and myth (a method one would expect from a philologist such as Tolkien).
    Every author has his or her own peculiar method.  Robert A. Heinlein was known to write several hundred pages of notes for his major works.  In the recent publication Variable Star written by Spider Robinson and Robert A. Heinlein (posthumous), Robinson actually wrote the entire novel based on a large stack of notebooks and loose-leaf paper given to him by the Heinlein estate.
    It was notebooks and loose-leaf like this that created stories like Stranger in a Strange Land, Time Enough for Love and the entirety of Heinlein’s “Future History” story arc.
   
    I personally haven’t found my own “style” of Worldbuilding.  In my youth I unknowingly replicated the Tolkien methodology (I say unknowingly because I didn’t read Lord of the Rings until I was 18), working on a rather juvenile piece of fantasy fiction fraught with clichés, weak plot, and two-dimensional characters.
    In my later years, I’ve tried the Heinlein methodology, with word documents piling up on my desktop, containing enough pages to fill several novellas themselves.  None of it, however, has ever worked out.  My Worldbuilding hasn’t taken off, and I’ve yet to figure out why.

    So now I will put myself on this wacky thing we call the Internet.  Weekly (probably Fridays) I’ll talk about various aspects of Worldbuilding, along with other intrinsic components of storytelling, based on the research I’m doing; I’ll share the methods of others, as well as expound on some of my own ideas. 
Throughout the rest of the week, we’ll just have fun.  I intend on posting things from my most recent speculative fiction project, just to see how good these new methods of Worldbuilding really are.  You’ll see how I do just about everything I guess, from building Kingdoms and Principalities to deciding if the Fiefdom of Generica should have fjords on the coast. 

In advance, because I am an obnoxious man who never remembers to say Thank You, let me just say, Thank you.  I hope that my readers are willing to bear with me, learn with me, and perhaps we can share together our experiences, our methods, and our ideas.  Creation is not a Solo project, no matter what the Bible says.