Building A World: Week 2

Last week, I talked briefly about the difference between building a world from a top-down and a bottom-up approach.  I then went on to focus on the top-down approach and how it is important to have a set of core rules in your world and how knowing those rules can prevent you from breaking the approach.  For those of you who read my unedited post from last week, you'll remember that I indicated that this week I'd talk about the bottom-up approach.  I've decided that there is something else that I should address first, something that is going to briefly take us away from actual world building, but something that is equally important to the process.  I'm going to discuss the importance of establishing and creating objectives with your worldbuilding.

Building a World: Week 2
Objectives are the real world rules that we need to establish for our self  before we can truly begin to get into the meat of the worldbuilding process.  It is going to create the limits we need to set to make sure we don't lose track of our goal of worldbuilding.  It is going to serve as a reminder of what we need to do in order to successfully accomplish our worldbuilding.  Worldbuilding, at least to me, is a very complex process.  These guidelines help simply the process.

To build a good set of worldbuilding objectives, you first need to follow some very simple ground rules.

• You need to have a goal in mind.
• Your goals need to be realistic.
• The goals have to be useful.

With these rules in mind, I took some paper and started to brainstorm a list of things that I wanted to accomplish with my worldbuilding.  This was my initial list:

Taking ideas that I have and putting them down on paper
Developing existing cultures in my world
Creating new cultures in my world
Creating a set of rules that I can stick to
Establishing facts in a reference for the writing process
Developing the races of my world
Building cities at a macro and micro level
Map building
Establishing a history

The list is decent, but it isn't all that useful.  Many of these items are similar and I feel like I needed to refine the list.  So, for the next step, I decided to match up the similar objectives and look at them closely to find out how they compare.  This is the result of that process:

 Taking ideas that I have and putting them down on paper
Creating a set of rules that I can stick to
Establishing facts in a reference for the writing process

Developing existing cultures in my world
Creating new cultures in my world
Developing the races of my world

The first thing I noticed was that I had two sets of objectives that shared a similar theme.  With this in mind, I went into the next step and looked at a way to combine the objectives together to better describe what I was trying to achieve.  With the first set of three, the objectives were all about the process of worldbuilding.  These were external objectives.  The second set of three, on the other hand, focused on culture and races.  These were internal objectives related to the behavior of people within my world.


With my external objectives, I identified that my main purpose was to have a copy of my world information available for reference and to make sure that I remained consistent with my writing process.  Taking this information, I was able to rewrite the three objectives into a single objective:

Creating a hard/soft copy of my world as a personal reference in order to maintain an accurate and consistent portrayal of the world during the writing process.

For the cultural approach, I decided I needed to expand a bit on these three objectives when I combined them together.  I've recently become fascinated with anthropology and I want to explore anthropology more in depth.  I'd ultimately like to make my cultures at least somewhat feasible from an anthropological setting.  From this, and the notes on my paper, I created this as one of my objectives:

Develop and construct the cultures and races of my world in such a way that it is easy to pinpoint what makes the cultures unique while, at the same time, making sure they remain relatively accurate on an anthropological level.

With the second objective, I was keeping the second rule in mind.  It is very easy to get lost within developing a culture.  What matters when building a culture, something I'll talk more about later, is that you know what makes them unique and not focus on the tiny details that can distract you and the reader.  As I said in my later objective on history, "Who cares about when taxes were raised?"

Now, I'm not going into depth about how I created all of my objectives.  I'll be adding in a link to my final document once I've finalized it.  There is one objective that I do want to discuss briefly before I end up this blog post:

Leave room for new objectives to be added to the worldbuilding process.

There are aspects of worldbuilding that will need to be addressed as I go along.  None of my objectives, for example, discuss things such as magic and weather.  For now, these might fit best under my culture objective.  As I move along with the worldbuilding, I need to be willing to be flexible.  That's why this objective is present.

That's it for this week's entry.  If you are reading this, I encourage you to go ahead and start listing out what you want to achieve with your worldbuilding process.  Be as lengthy or as short as you'd like.  Just be sure to follow the three rules listed above.