Photo by Lara Jameson
A good book takes readers to a different world, allowing them to experience events they would never encounter in reality. Authors must know how to create engaging characters and extensive world-building.
Every author’s primary goal is to provide their readers with an immersive experience. However, only a few chosen ones can pull it off. Writers always emphasize the importance of showing and not telling, but only some have mastered successfully translating this craft into their materials.
Literary immersion happens when the reader is wholly engaged in a story that they feel as though the world they’re reading about is or can be true. Once people actively picture the characters, see what they’re seeing, and feel what they’re feeling, the authors have crafted a compelling narrative.
Beyond this narrative delivery and the characters carrying the story, where the events also occur significantly influence the readers’ immersion.
What Happens During World Building?
Before authors take the great leap of drafting their first chapter, they have gone through planning – at least, some authors, the plotters, do. They conscientiously plan everything from their working plot, character profiles, and arc. Some even create a seemingly, unnecessary fantasy world.
Extensive world-building is a starting process most authors do for their novels. They take on a journey of creating a multi-dimensional world where everything in their story takes place. Some books and authors can get away and willingly continue writing without one, but this doesn’t mean world-building is entirely trivial. This process can serve as the foundation for character development, providing them with space to perform. Setting basic details about the environment offers authors a stable writing ground.
How authors plan this factor can make or break their readers’ imagination. Harry Potter happening in a mundane world would be an entirely different story than when his adventures took place in Hogwarts.
Building an Effective World
Moon Luck by Harral, which takes place on the moon, provides a detailed location map of the stories’ bases. When no reader has visited the moon and can picture it out, every crater and dip, this provides them a vivid picture of what happens when characters do specific activities in a particular location.
Some writers, like Scott Harral, base their fictional world on reality, while others create an entirely new world. Here are some techniques to follow:
Based on the Genre, Establish the Type
Authors start by picking a genre before drafting anything for their stories. Will it be a dystopian story or science fiction? Authors must create their world depicting the path their story is taking on. Dystopian novels wouldn’t effectively develop in a neat community. Instead, their world-building should be made up of rubble and debris, things that visualize a rundown place as an aftermath of a severe event. By primarily reflecting the genre on the settings, authors won’t have trouble with the story’s development. It will even make it easy for them to create events for the story.
List Rules and Laws
Extensive world-building isn’t just for the physical settings. Authors must also lay down this world’s systems that govern the inhabitants’ existence. Every planet has its governing system, something to measure how people live. For instance, while many might believe a dystopian world won’t have laws, it should still have someone ruling over the place – this becomes their means of governance.
Setting rules and laws help put up boundaries and limitations that make a fictional world more realistic. Without these laws, the stories’ inhabitants won’t have any reason to live within a set standard, making the story convoluted.
Create a History
Every civilization must have a history, the event that made them how they are in the present. This creates a backstory for readers to dwell in, adding dimension to the world and its people. Identifying history makes the world more tangible and real. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Authors only need to establish certain events that strengthen the world’s current situation.
Has the place experienced wars in the past? Does it have any enemies or rivalry that made it a rundown city – in cases of dystopian worlds?
