On Creating Worlds

I’m not a world-creater. While every person who writes imagines themselves to be god to one degree or another, some take particular pleasure in drawing maps and creating landscapes, monsters and lost planets full of intelligent and less intelligent beings.

I’m more of a bare bones kind of guy. I put a protagonist somewhere concrete, like a city street in Chicago, and let he or she go from there. I fret about where in the city they are, if it is realistic that they could cover that many blocks in a car when you just know at four o’clock on a Friday traffic is just going to be murder. I don’t create worlds.

All of that is going to change next month. It already has, really, for I am going to write a fantasy novel. It won’t be your normal giant strapping men with swords killing wizards (was it Asimov who dismissed fantasy as stupid people with swords killing smart people?), but for most intents it will be fantasy. There are dragons and magic, which makes it fantastical enough.

I had prepared myself by setting this in the United States. I figured, why draw a map (because what is a fantasy novel without a map?) when I can just print one out? That’s when things get complicated. If it’s in the US, was it populated the same? Would the same roads be there? What would the roads be made of? If they have cars, would they be powered by combustion or magic?

It gets complicated really fast.

Fantasy writers must spend a lot of time coming up with this stuff. Not just the geography and the history, but the rules. I read a great essay by a writer named Brandon Sanderson (who I never heard of but is apparently very popular among fantasy readers) about the rules of magic. Rules of magic? It needs rules?

He posits that if you don’t explain your magic clearly, you should use it to solve problems, because then it just becomes a deus ex machina. We’re trapped! Oh, wait, I can just teleport us out of here. Very convenient. That’s just sloppy story telling. To paraphrase his essay, if you set hard and fast rules and limitations, you allow the audience to try and figure out solutions for the characters. If you don’t describe your magic (like in Lord of the Rings, for instance) then you don’t use your magic to solve problems– you either use it to create problems or to give your characters a sense of being in a larger world (Sanderson cites the hobbits lost in a larger conflict). He calls it hard magic and soft magic.

There are rules for everything!

So, I’m working on it.