World building

Before I begin I highly recommend watching Brandon Sanderson’s YouTube page where he teaches a class on sci-fi writing as a surprising amount of his information is wildly applicable to numerous non science fiction stories and writers.

Okay so World Building. For me my favorite part of the story and my favorite aspect of writing.

It is the first thing I notice and harp on because for me it’s the most important.

To me the world is much a character as the ones you name and write and should be treated as such. Since some people have a difficult time with it I am going to give a (hopefully) simple step by step guide to help you as a potential author or already working author who’s looking to brush up on your skills.

To illustrate this I am going to do an exercise where I world building with you the audience. So get binder/ or notebook, or a blank word document and let’s begin.

Also should you actually take this excercise and use it to make your own story please tag me, not for credit but just so I can read it because I want writing and creating to be accessible to any reader/writer. Plus I think it would be cool to see how some of you would write the setting differently than I would.

Okay so first things first we have a spark of an idea Yokai and idols in honor of Bunn’s series Hannya (who inspired this post)

Okay so we have a basic idea now the  next step should be character profiles however that’s a different topic all together that I can write on if yall want but for now let’s just say we have our main character

Raiju an oni bodyguard who does magic on the side.

Okay so now we start world building. The first question every good writer should ask is the world the main characters reside in hostile or helpful to them followed by Why.

So using Raiju let’s say the world is Hostile to him, why because he’s a typically 7-9 foot giant with dark red skin and horns, with a kinitsugu pattern of gold through his skin.

Now that we have that we can build upon that and ask “how is the world Hostile to him?”

There are infinite number of choices here but because I’m relatively lazy I’ll go with a simple way. Oni specifically are treated hostilely by through architecture and social ostracism.

So for example unless an Oni hides disguises itself, builds their own house or lowers themselves they will always bang their head on every single door they encounter. So from here we can make infinite choices or story telling options just in terms of how a space is physically built and it gives the reader a subtle tell to look out for. So for example let’s do a scene with Raiju and lady he met at work…who to chose…oh I got it Jisun.

Raiju walked into Jisun’s apartment building without needing to duck his head on the main lobby door or the elevator door. His left eye slowly swelling from the earlier scuffle.

“You know you didn’t have to fight for me back their big guy,” Jisun says to him as the elevator stops on her floor.

“Well then I wouldn’t have gotten your number or seen your place” Raiju says as he enters Jisun’s apartment. He sits down on her couch while she goes and grabs an ice pack. When she comes back she lays it on his swollen eye.

As she does Raiju says, “is your landlord an Oni?”

Jisun turns to Raiju and says, “no she is a Datsue-ba, but how did you know she was a Yokai?”

“Well with you being a tanuki and the doors being high enough so I could walk through them I just assumed,”

“Okay weird but I get it.”

Raiju laughs as he stares at the ceiling.

From here you can kinda build endlessly on top of but there’s still more fine tuning to be done.

So you’ve established your world’s character and disposition towards the mail characters… what’s next. Scope

The next question you want to ask is how big is whatever story’s unique mechanics are affect the world. So let’s go back to Raiju.