Worldbuilding

How much world building is the minimum necessary before you start writing?

Well, it depends.  Two main factors: one, how different you want your story to be, and two, how much you’re willing to make up as you go along.

How different you want your story to be is important.  If you’re writing another generic dwarves/elves/dragons fantasy, you don’t need to do a lot of worldbuilding on your races etc (though the less generic you can make it, the better, but that’s often something that can be made up as you go along).  If your fantasy world has no non-human races, a complex system of magic and strange geography, you’ll want to work out at least some of the politics and that system of magic – as well as any major unique pieces of geography beforehand.

How much you’re willing to make up as you go along is variable from writer to writer and story to story.  You can start with a small portion of the world – where your story starts – and some of the basic rules, and expand on them when it comes up in the story.  This is always done to at least some extent – I don’t think anyone lays out every single detail of their world before ever starting to write – but is something to be careful with.  Its easy to have inconsistencies sneak in when things are changing as you write the story, and its always important to keep some notes on what you’re doing as you go along.

An example on this:  I have a science fiction adventure story – space opera, basically – story that has been in my head for a while that I’m considering putting some work into.  However, the story opens with a space battle and I know it will involve a great deal of inter-system travel.  From these two facts, there are several pieces of information I need to know.

First, there is a space battle – so I need to know how space battles are fought.  What kind of weapons are used, what kind of engines, what kind of ships.  I know its a surprise attack, so how is surprise possible in space in this setting?

Second, I know there will be a lot of travel.  If this is across systems and stars, I need to know how they travel between star systems – their form of faster than light travel.  Suffice to say that skimming the internet provides a lot of suggestions for this topic, and the form travel takes brings us back to the space battle details above.  (Most notably, the drive system I’m thinking involves firing exotic matter into a wormhole to open it wide enough for a ship – providing even civilian vessels with a drive that can be readily converted to serve double duty as one hell of a cannon)

I also need to know, if we’re traveling around the galaxy, how the galaxy is organized.  Is it one huge empire?  Several huge empires in a standing cold war, with a number of smaller polities scattered around?  Single star system governments, with the occasional polity of two or three stars?  If we’re traveling the universe, how many customs agents are we going to need to deal with?

So, with that insight into my world building process, I leave you to your own.

Glynn