Bringing a Fantasy World to Life
Here is a short article I wrote for the brilliant ReadingZone.com about creating a fantasy world. I hope you like it!
Bringing a Fantasy World to Life:
Head, Heart and Sinew
The building of worlds... now there's a big topic for class! But like most things, the creation of a fantasy world has its rules, its dos and don'ts. If we boil all of those down there are, I think, three simple principles of good world-creation, principles worth teaching because they apply to much of creative writing. As we are talking about bringing worlds to life, it might be helpful to think of these principles as head, heart and sinew. Let me explain....
The creation of worlds is so often mentioned in the context of fantasy that you might believe that we fantasy writers are the only ones who do it. But when you think about it, most fictional writing involves world-building. Take for instance one of the most factual genres, historical fiction. Here the author must transport their reader to an entirely different era in which the norms of everyday life have fallen away and been replaced by alien objects, buildings, customs, language and society. The reader must be lifted from the here and now to the there and then and crucially, that transportation will only be successful if the world is plausible, if it contains enough real detail that it is no longer faded and distant but vivid and immediate. Hence the historical author's painstaking research, their immersion in the things and writings of the period, their careful insertion of details that make us BELIEVE.
Real details underpin fantasy worlds too. The wondrous places that fantasy writers would take you to will only feel real if they contain a measure of the familiar, a pinch of the real and a healthy scattering of the plausible. Think of the Englishness of the Hobbits and the Shire, the politics of the great traction cities in Mortal Engines, the boarding school tropes of Hogwarts, the Oxford-like settings in His Dark Materials.
These familiar things provide the firm ground from which to launch our flight of fancy: they lead us by the hand from what we have experienced and what we know to the things of our dreams. By the way, this is of course the particular power of 'portal fantasy' - fantasy that quite literally takes us from the real to the fantastical world via some kind of magical portal, such as Narnia's wardrobe or Harry Potter's platform 9 3/4 or my own bell between worlds. Here the journey is intended to be even more irresistible because the real is a key part of the story - and most importantly, we are shown how it relates to the world of wonders.
So, direct borrowings from reality are not lazy, they are essential. They give the fantasy world its heft. Its muscle and sinew...
Read the rest of the article here:
http://www.readingzone.com/index.php?...
Bringing a Fantasy World to Life:
Head, Heart and Sinew
The building of worlds... now there's a big topic for class! But like most things, the creation of a fantasy world has its rules, its dos and don'ts. If we boil all of those down there are, I think, three simple principles of good world-creation, principles worth teaching because they apply to much of creative writing. As we are talking about bringing worlds to life, it might be helpful to think of these principles as head, heart and sinew. Let me explain....
The creation of worlds is so often mentioned in the context of fantasy that you might believe that we fantasy writers are the only ones who do it. But when you think about it, most fictional writing involves world-building. Take for instance one of the most factual genres, historical fiction. Here the author must transport their reader to an entirely different era in which the norms of everyday life have fallen away and been replaced by alien objects, buildings, customs, language and society. The reader must be lifted from the here and now to the there and then and crucially, that transportation will only be successful if the world is plausible, if it contains enough real detail that it is no longer faded and distant but vivid and immediate. Hence the historical author's painstaking research, their immersion in the things and writings of the period, their careful insertion of details that make us BELIEVE.
Real details underpin fantasy worlds too. The wondrous places that fantasy writers would take you to will only feel real if they contain a measure of the familiar, a pinch of the real and a healthy scattering of the plausible. Think of the Englishness of the Hobbits and the Shire, the politics of the great traction cities in Mortal Engines, the boarding school tropes of Hogwarts, the Oxford-like settings in His Dark Materials.
These familiar things provide the firm ground from which to launch our flight of fancy: they lead us by the hand from what we have experienced and what we know to the things of our dreams. By the way, this is of course the particular power of 'portal fantasy' - fantasy that quite literally takes us from the real to the fantastical world via some kind of magical portal, such as Narnia's wardrobe or Harry Potter's platform 9 3/4 or my own bell between worlds. Here the journey is intended to be even more irresistible because the real is a key part of the story - and most importantly, we are shown how it relates to the world of wonders.
So, direct borrowings from reality are not lazy, they are essential. They give the fantasy world its heft. Its muscle and sinew...
Read the rest of the article here:
http://www.readingzone.com/index.php?...
No comments have been added yet.
