At 12:03, i wouldn't worry about materials for the planes, since WWI style Biplanes were made from fabric stretched over a wooden frame. The main plane problem would be where to get the fuel.
@@tankythemagnorite9855 Talking about the same area. Don't know what they people are capable of in regards to getting down to the plains and back, but maybe food is harvested from monster carcasses on the plains--think Japan getting most of it's food from the area outside of the land on which they live. Are the monsters strong enough to send huge slabs of flesh (or whatever) flying into the air as high as the cities or at least most of the way up?
12:12 you can add specialized personnel who descend into the fog to recover materials that are still present on the ground and 'speleologists' who enter stone spiers, which may be hollow, and find water (aspirated from specific plants, which also act as medicines and tissue material, harbor high protein edible fungi etc) find minerals, gems, large animal inhabitants of caves (food) waxy/oily substances for fire or waterproofing fabrics or surfaces, etc
Technically contrast may be used intentionally. Like for example Dark Fairly Tells use the same dreamlike narrative, but are sometimes openly or sometimes covertly twisted and distorted. Madoka Magica is also good example of using light design to make plot even darker (MLP: FiM also use those elements to a degree). But it is tool what need to be used wisely, otherwise we end with Goblin Slayer syndrome. Where first episode of anime is pointlessly dark, only to later fallow goofy isakai style narrative of manga. It pushed away those expecting light stuff, while deeply disappoint fan of dark satire. Where rest of the show is completely different. Those elements are sometimes refereed as Evil Light, Good Darkens of Eldritch in general use.
12:27 For your world of airplanes and spires, why not have large airships casting nets into the mist and acting like fishing boats? How about the two main sources for building materials come from alchemy transmuting certain things into other things, like monster bones into wood, as well as from "divers" - the courageous or insane few who risk being lowered down into the mist to whatever surface these spires arise from. Picture old diving suits with big metal helmets and long breathing hoses.
It’s worth noting that Tolkien didn’t build Middle Earth for Lord of the Rings, he built it for his languages. The stories were later developments, starting out because he felt stories were a way to make those languages and that history come alive and memorable. Tolkien liked history as well. Lord of the Rings came as a result of his publishers wanting a Hobbit sequel, and The Hobbit itself was to write a story for his children, with a ready made Middle Earth elements merged into The Hobbit’s history.
That doesn't sound complete from what I remember researching 20 years ago. The languages weren't the goal in themselves in your. Youb took something out of context. I remember some things that might make someone say that.... But that's not quite right.
@@ramspencer5492 I’m not sure what you researched. But “The invention of languages is the foundation. The 'stories' were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows.” - JRR Tolkien He also began developing the Elvish languages in 1910, but didn’t begin writing the primitive legendarium until WW1. From the primitive legendarium came Middle Earth.
@@spacerxNo. But build a world, then tell a story is probably going end up with greater logical consistency than build a character then tell a story. Themes come second though. That's the biggest failure I see in modern world building. Developing awesome characters and plop them in a partially fleshed out world, then improvise-poorly. You can tell any story, in any world, just find the corner of it that suits your story.
Big franchises like Star Wars and Marvel are known for their elaborate worldbuilding but their first installments didn't have much worldbuilding. "A New Hope" was a basic story about rebellion against an oppressive government with a vaguely-explained magic system thrown in. "Iron Man" was just the story of a genius inventor trying to fight an evil business partner stealing his tech. The goal of a first installment isn't to introduce a massive universe. It's to tell a good story that makes people want to know more about the universe.
most people don't know how much of the heavy lifting of Star Wars worldbuilding was done by the great people at West End Games. The Brian Daley audio dramas introduced several elements that would go on to be referenced and expanded upon later. And then, drawing from the WEG sourcebooks, of course the foundational EU works: the Thrawn trilogy, Tales of the Jedi and Dark Empire.
@@mr.e7541 Marvel, sure, but the MCU specifically didn't. The only thing that was apparent was that it was set in a modern city with the deviation of high tech.
Yea, better to go deep then wide. I thought of something the other day. Writing a book is exactly like solving a puzzle. When you start with all the pieces laid out before you, you have no idea where to even start. But as you go, things start to click. By the time you get 50% through, it suddenly becomes much easier to figure out where more pieces go.
Almost succumbed to Worldbuilder's Disease, until I just decided to build the central framework, the backbone of the story, and make the details as I go. More like the mindset, "I created this world from scratch by myself. I know everything about this world, because everything that is here and happens here is what I WANT it to."
I've created 3 different worlds, each having a 4-5 book plot, and haven't started writing any of it. I have around 100k words worth of world building, but nothing to show for it.
@@Aeras89 well it's the problem of the adaptation and visual depiction then :), Minas Tirith in any case is a city and seat of power so basically a capital of a larger realm, and in book we have it laid out: "The townlands were rich, with wide tilth and many orchards, and homesteads there were with oast and garner, fold and byre, and many rills rippling through the green from the highlands down to Anduin. Yet the herdsmen and husbandmen that dwelt there were not many... "Pippin could see all the Pelennor laid out before him, dotted into the distance with farmsteads and little walls, barns and byres, but nowhere could he see any kine or other beasts. Many roads and tracks crossed the green fields... the chief highway, and that turned south, and then bending swifter than the River skirted the hills and passed soon from sight. It was wide and well-paved, and along its eastern edge ran a broad green riding-track, and beyond that a wall." RotK, Book V, Ch 1, Minas Tirith In the context also, the city preparing for war, is also evacuating and it's surroundings as well, and they already gathered the stores of provisions in case of a long siege and so on :).
I start with characters and a basic setting and then figure out what kind of world would create them and their conflicts. It keeps the characters and world and events all integrated together.
I just did the opposite. I came up with some interesting characters and imagined how their interactions shaped the world the protagonist visits. Everything is connected because everything is a result of a play between very powerful beeings. But your idea sounds incredibly interesting too when the characters aren't able to change a world alone. "Weaker" Characters, like normal humans, beeing the result of their environment makes a lot of sense actually. Thank you for that thought, you just improved my side characters and my factions
@@little_lord_tam This is more like how I do it. I create characters and a magic system primarily, and since I like high power magic systems, the characters, or sometimes the magic by itself, tend to straight up morph the world around them. Otherwise I tend to build around themes and symbolism, depending on what themes the story deals with at the time.
Like to point out that a lot of giants of the genre started off by writing Lord of the Rings clones. Just immediately off the top of the head the first entries in Terry Brooks Shannara series and Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time are both kind of fellowship clones. But they turned into their very own things. If your first story is derivative, make your second better. Emulation is a good place to start.
Yeah, nothing against being inspired by the worlds you really like as a reader! I'm personally just more interested in seeing people present their unique visions to me, rather than being overly derivative - but like I mentioned in the video, character and plot come first for me, so a story can nail that - and maybe not get the worldbuilding super original - but I'll probably still enjoy it.
@@miilkyystars yeah it’s a really good place to start. Every writer has trouble finding their voice. This is a really good way to do help yourself to do so, in my opinion.
@@rawrbeez6625 most of the stories I write are fanfics but I've been trying to branch out, I have several ideas but im not entirely sure how to start without knowing EVERYTHING about my story before I start
@@miilkyystars similar boat here but most of my writing is in TTRPG (which I consider similar since I’m adding my voice into someone else’s world). I have been thinking of trying the sandwich method where I have a beginning and ending in mind and fill out the middle, rather than just going forward and “off the cuff” so to speak. Of the millions of methods there’s always gonna be one that works for you, I just have to find mine 😅 good luck on your story though!
regarding the last point, it doesn’t have to be only about your passions and interests! i’m currently working on a world where people who have the same sleep disorder as me have a high status and, because of the magic system that’s also in the world, they get to be like night guardians and their magic is stronger than average people. a slight change in our world like that can create really interesting things you can work around with worldbuilding
that sounds like a cool book idea! Would love to read something like that. I love when people turn disorders and disabilities into abilities and powers
Yes!! I love that you're writing from a tweak to how your sleep disorder is perceived. My struggles with endometriosis and the period taboo are fueling my book idea.
I like the idea of starting in a town like Hobbiton, where you get to know that town and people first, and then you join the travelers when they leave and together you discover the world. Obviously they know a bit more about it than the reader, but the exposition is more natural. Just keep track of the geography and rules of the world that come up as you go.
My own two cents on the first point: That triangle of character, plot, and worldbuilding - it doesn't really matter which one you start with. As long as you remain mindful of how the three must remain interconnected. I mean, I started with the worldbuilding. Once I felt I was ready to write a story to show off the setting - well, I picked a subplot for secondary characters I loved, promoted it to primary characters and a major plot, and then adapted it. To my writing style. To my world. To my characters. To the types of characters my setting produces for a dime a dozen. There's more than one way to maintain the triangle - "what characters are especially challenged by my world?" addresses it just as much as "what kind of world especially challenges my characters?"
This! I think especially for me because a big focus I keep ending up back at when I write stuff is the way characters' knowledge of the world is shaped by their environment/experiences. So if I'm gonna come up with characters who embody that, I kind of first need... a world for them to be shaped by. So my approach is more like, think of a world and its social values and conflicts, and then ask what kinds of situations would be difficult to be in for someone in that world. And if you look closer into those situations, you will find a character.
My style is just to start with worldbuilding first and then worldbuilding again and then worldbuilding again. Then you postponed the story until you forgot about it, after that, start a completely new setting because you forgot about the previous world you made and repeat.
I agree with so many of your points. I'm currently writing a medieval fantasy and it was very important that the world and languages were introduced in a natural way, very much like how we come across them in daily life. The archaic way people spoke that time was also something I found very interesting so I spent a lot of time learning it and intergrated it into my work. Thankfully the people who I've shared it with are impressed with it all so hopefully, when I get it done my readers will think the same thing 😁
I would add a little nuance to point one. I tend to like books where there's a sense that the world is bigger than what's happening in the plot. It can make the story atmospheric and immersive. Details that don't directly connect with the plot and characters shouldn't be treated with the same amount of detail or lead to digressions, but rich details about things like food and drink or the way a city looks are helpful to getting me into a story. If all the worldbuilding only connects directly with the plot and characters a little too perfectly, it feels less real to me. Worldbuilding can connect with mood, tone, and atmosphere as well as plot and character.
Most Worldbuilding could be summarized by saying: "Don't tell us the name, personality and life of the last 20 kings, tell us there were 20 before, one of them was a crazy psycho, one was truly benevolent, and they were all different. Reader's imagination will fill the rest.
A good framework for this would be to tell us about the current king, the first king, and the most notable one in between. That immediately feels like a complete lineage, because realistically most of the rest wouldn't be very interesting so we barely feel the *need* to fill in the gaps.
I've been working on a world for 10 years. Started with a tiny dnd 1 shot, grew with other various long campaigns. The players actually did most of the heavy lifting for me. Having said that, I actively enjoy working on the world building so it never feels like a chore or a job to me. Starting small though, is ABSOLUTELY the way to go. Work from the inside to the outside and everything will be coherent and congruent.
While not a “story” story, your advice has been invaluable to me for constructing a story for my DnD campaign, I’ve written a few short stories to go a long with it and all of your content is really helpful, practical advice to make them more compelling than they would be. Thanks a ton for what you do!
That's the beauty of DnD is that they ARE story stories. The main difference is that it has multiple authors, and it's absolutely beautiful. Don't sell yourself short. 😊
About #5, I would argue that affordance would be far more crucial. Sure, farmers would be more concerned with dawn, dusk, and midday than with specific times, but they would also have use for gradients of time such as minutes and seconds. Rather than use invented words for these concepts (which readers may have difficulty in remembering), it's far better to simply use terms the reader already understands. Related to this is that such stories are (with rare exceptions) written from the perspective of someone native to that world. Characters are *NOT* going to obsess over niddly details which they normally take for granted - perhaps the worst example is when a character studies themselves in a mirror for no particular reason; assuming mirrors are relatively common, they know what they look like and aren't going to spend ten pages counting their freckles. The amount of time/attention given to any particular detail is going to be proportional to its deviation from the norm of the viewpoint character's story world. "She tore through the plaza, past the elfin half-breed juggling orbs of fire for paltry coins and merchants loading and unloading their hippogriffs" is more than enough to convey that magic and fantastical creatures are fairly commonplace in this world - possibly even hinting at the character's morals by thinking of the fire juggler as an "elfin half-breed". There are many ways this information can be expanded upon, but the viewpoint character isn't going to give much thought to anything they perceive as mundane.
A long time ago I read am essay by Isaac Asimov where he said when you create a world it should have internal rules that make sense. But in the end, the story you write should be able to be written in any world.
For your world with the spires, they could have subterranean farms in caverns under the towns. As long as they have some form of light that would make plants grow, that would work. Or narrow tubes that lead to the surface with lenses to let in and disperse as much sunlight as possible. Also, people could additionally grow their own food to some extent in small gardens above the buildings. Like above buildings gardens on large buildings, or small gardens a la victory gardens. Thought of this. Had to share. 😂
Alternatively they could subside on foods which require lesser light like mushrooms or moss that could grow inside moist caverns. In the world of MTG the plane of Ravnica is a city which spans the entire world and they get their food from something called "rot farms" which are located underground, which I find quite interesting and memorable as it also makes the reader go "yuck"
As always you make me consider everything. I struggle to walk that line between over-crowding and keeping everything connected. Thankfully, it’s fun coming up with ways world building can link to story.
That thing about hours, minutes, and seconds occurred to me early while writing my novel set in early medieval Germany. They didn't have clocks, so they wouldn't have hours or minutes. In the story, if people want to meet, they'd say "I'll meet you midday tomorrow" or just stop by, as it often wouldn't be imperative to meet at a specific point in the day anyway. I check my draft using the "find" option to ensure that I don't have any mentions of hours or minutes.
The Romans had excellent clocks and still only went with "a day has twelve hours each, so in winter, hours are shorter than in summer, but whatever". In the Middle Ages, clock towers became common around the 13th century. From then on, life had a rhythm that was objectively measured - IF you lived in a place with a big church. In rural areas, not so much. If you happened to live in or near a community of monks/nuns or canons, you could also go by "let's meet when they sing complet in the chapel".
On point 3, I think it's worth noting that there's no harm in having reams of info prepared to cover all parts the world building, if that's what works for you as a writer. The crucial part is holding that info in your head, to inform your writing, but knowing which bits of info your audience needs to know, and which they don't. For instance, as part of establishing technological level you could work out what cooking methods are used in the houses of your world. They're never delved into and explained, but they are lightly touched on as the only food presented is what could be prepared in those facilities. This (if you'll pardon the pun) gives the audience the flavour without miring them in detail.
I personally do have world builder's disease and one advice I can give on how to "overcome" it is to embrace it for a while and really ask yourself "Do I actually desire to write a story or do I maybe just enjoy the flow of creativity and the sense of escapism world building gives me?" Because there's nothing wrong with just being a world builder if that's your hobby. No one ever said you have to write a book for your world building to be amazing and valid. For me, by just dropping all pressure and giving myself the permission to world build and write a wiki for as long as I wanted, I eventually realised that there WAS an interesting plot that simply had to be told, one that naturally grew out of my world building because it functioned as one of the core problems of the society at the center of my world. This will also help you completely circumvent the problem of your plot and world being disconnected. Now I am more motivated than ever to write my book because I have such an all-encompassing understanding of what the stakes are AND I already have an extensive wiki to base my writing off of. And sometimes, I still feel like world building instead of writing for a week or two so I take a break from writing and indulge in this other hobby without feeling bad for it. As long as you're not on some sort of timer, this works pretty well I think.
Just a suggestion for the unpublished story about the food/farming, you should have the spires have massive caverns inside the rocky areas and do mushroom farming and underground fishing, and they could also eat anything grow on the roofs of the buildings.
Anachronistic dialogue was the reason why I put down many books and never picked them up again. Sadly, with many authors, that is the hallmark of their style and they never seem to outgrow it.
@@leigh-anjohnson I would say any of the books from the reckoners series. Only Sanderson books I read and the lore was actually really cool but the dialogue was like high school bickering with each character having absurd quirks
Regarding point 5: Where do you draw the line? If you want the language and dialogue to be perfect, you have to write the book in the default language of majority in the setting. Everything and anything short of that is "anachronistic". My novel is a translation into modern English, and I trust my readers to understand that.
That whole section is terrible. I really hope his own dialogue and worldbuilding doesn't actually follow those rules, because it must be a chore to read if it does. It's impossible to write fantasy that can be followed without some anachronisms. That's just the nature of language and storytelling.
@@Dracocetus you have a point, but you still need to pay attention to the language you use. Even in the modern world British royal family members will express themselves very differently compared to, let's say, the average american teenagers. You don't necessarily have to use anachronistic words, but if all your characters use the gen z lexicon you'll never be able to create a believable medieval setting. The other dangerous area is using idioms without knowing their origin. You don't want your characters to accidentally quote Nietzsche or a 90s TV commercial. Also I sometimes notice authors using words/expressions that simply do not exist in world they created or their characters can't possibly know. Like using modern psychology terminology in dialogues to describe the characters' relationships. These things might seem relatively minor, but every time I see an author making these mistakes repetitively the setting becomes less and less believable
@@IrinaAntipina-jt2wn Yeah, but it depends on the world you are creating. Mine is not set in a specific timeline when it comes to style. It's a mix between art deco, Victorian and modern. I agree that if you have a typical medieval setting you should stick to that inn all aspects, but in fantasy where the world is more original, modern day language should be fine. I also think, as it is a translation, terms coming from specific modern day people, events, tv series etc. that every English speakers use regularly, should be fine to use in your fantasy world as it is a translation. Every word we use has originated from our own world anyways. For instance, as this story is in a world with its own species of plants and animals, I still use words like potato or bear for something that might look similar to that instead of coming up with entirely new words for every single unique item. I am also not going to invent new phrases or sayings because I want my story to be communicated in an easy and understandabke way. Making it more complicated to understand makes the story worse in my opinion. Imagine someone in the year 2024 finding a story from another world. It would have been translated into the language we use now, so in that context it makes it more believable. In reality, in a world that has never know the existence of ours, would act totally different to us anyways, in a way we could never relate... If we are talking about making it as believable as possible I mean, but nobody would want to read that because they wouldn't understand a thing 🤷🏼♀️
I spent a good five to ten years suffering from World Builder's Disease. I am in recovery, though I must say I do have a very fantastic world to show my readers in the story, and the time I took away from telling the main story did help me to come up with some of the core ideas of my story. For example, exploring how Necromancy works in the context of my world helped me to come up with a central plot point about my main character, one that I think actually makes the story way, way better than it would have been previously.
I remember starting to write a sci-fi novel, and at some point needing to stop, because I went too much into worldbuilding that it stopped being fun to read, and started being a chore. So I scrapped this novel altogether, and started something else, what I feel more confident with, keeping that idea in a separate folder to just develop further for the fun of it, kind of like a guilty pleasure hobby. It'll never see the light of day, but I like exploring and making up in-depth cultures of this and that species, different space travel ways, etc. to relax.
I agree with 5 of your 6 points. Point 5 is a real problem. Unless its meant to be historically accurate, common current slang is easier for people to digest. You yourself even said it, that you don't need to write it in a Shakespearean manner. Which directly contradicts the point your trying to make. If my story is set in 1500 England for an American audience, what option is there to anachronistic dialogue?
Thanks for sharing. I have a giant world called Terrellium, and I have loads of stories for it, and yes you are right, it is impossible to include everything, unless you wrote history of the world or something.
Re: your spires problems: Didn’t hurt Jim Butcher. He literally did that setting except the biplanes were replaced with dirigibles. The Aeronaut’s Windlass.
Started a dnd camp and started making a world, I liked the world and so I ended up just writing deep into the world. I personally just enjoy world building and find enjoyment out of it. Since that first session that didn’t go anywhere I’ve set two other campaigns at different times in my world. It is pretty enjoyable figuring up history and cool events. I will likely write a story about a character in this world at some point
I do this differently myself, but thats because my goals are different. Im building a setting to create stories in, not a single story, but many smaller tales that collectively tell a larger story. The story of the universe. Its been a lot of fun so far.
I actually avoided all those mistakes despite having just one setting for all my stories. Well, that may be because the premise for my setting is very simple. It's a clash of overwhelming powers. But those powers just cancel each other out. So in the end of the day none of those powerful beings can do much because there are other powerful beings not really interested in letting other powerful beings do as they please. And also there are many regions and time periods in this setting that allow for different story. I can do a classic urban fantasy in a world divided between humanity plane and magic plane on Earth of The Great Kingdom era. I can do the dystopian fantasy in post-apocalypse Earth. I can even do sci-fi in regions of galaxy that are far away from the solar systems where Magic is so weak that it practically doesn't even exist as far as people there are concerned. And to make this more interesting in The Great Kingdom era rest of the galaxy perspective was that Earth was part this huge, benevolent treaty of different systems that was in constant war with The Black Planet Empire. So this was very Star Wars like. That war is still going on after the Great Kingdom's collapse, except The Black Planet Empire also collapse and was rebuilt into what is being The Empire of Night. And since Earth is a fallen planet now without any large center of political power, the treaty also changed dramatically and has now a great military corporation waging the war with all different systems providing the funds instead of having their own armies to protect themselves. But again, all of that doesn't matter on Earth and post-apocalypse most of knowledge and history was forgotten. Civilization is in ruins with people living in small settlements in the great jungle, constantly being threatened by wild animals, magical beasts and monsters. Pretty much the only ones travelling are dwarfs who form merchant caravans. And also heroes and mercenaries who travel between human settlements looking for quests. Main character of my stories is immortal. So he lives in both eras. And he's insanely powerful. He could destroy our sun with a single spell if he really wanted to. But there's a problem with that. He can't really control all of that power well enough for it to be useful in daily life. Think of lifting a huge ass cistern and filling a glass with water from it. Seems impossible, right? And with the power he wields a small mistake can lead to total destruction of entire Earth. So he uses his Magic very sparingly. Luckily he does have other ways to fight. So in The Great Kingdom era my main guy is trying to just live a calm life, hiding in the crowd and trying not to stand out. But of course life has a way of making you do things you don't want to. And in post-apocalypse era he is one of very few people who remember what humanity used to be like. In both cases he's a loner and he's very misunderstood. And to make things even more complicated, he's kinda like two differet beings smashed together and those two halves of him are not always in sync. And that often causes a lot of destruction, which makes it even more complicated. Because my main guy is not the kind of person who would let innocent people die so when his other half gets angry and causes chaos, he blames himself for it and that makes controlling his massive Magic even more difficult. So most of the time my main guy is kinda like a Superman who can lift entire solar systems but struggles to lift up a glass of water without breaking it. And most of his enemies are glasses of water with even more innocent glasses of water around.
This does make me feel somewhat better I am writing a book and I have spent 2 years fine tuning my world and planing story points to flow properly and make the world feel real and lived in but I don’t even have chapter 1 of my book written yet
Great advice, man. I've already fleshed most of these things out from previous writings, but the way you elaborate on them made me really think about what I'm trying to write now. Really love what you said about taking elements of various things you are passionate about and incorporating them into your work. That's huge, and I completely agree that this is an important key to writing something truly memorable. To me, even if no one reads it, or even comprehends it fully, satisfying myself is going to be an incredible accomplishment. You can't do that unless you're fully invested, entertaining yourself in the writing, and people can feel that passion. When it's uniquely yours, it's always better.
A tip that I kind of discovered for using exposition was let the characters do in small pieces, an example would be if there was some big war that happened and one of the characters didn't know about it, have another character give a short history lesson on it, and if you want to retcon anything you can have another character who is more knowledgeable or was at the event correct the mistakes of the others.
I can't wait for the book I've been pouring my heart into for the last 10 years to finally make it to someone's desk, and then get it back saying, "Who wrote this? A brain dead toddler?"
I built my world using the Earth as a guide for the basic geography and used that to determine how changes there would affect climates. Higher mountains near the coasts will block moisture from traveling too far inland which results in heavy precipitation along the coastal side of the mountains and dryer, semi-arid areas on the inland side for example. After that I used real plants and animals for the flora and fauna and determined how that could affect the sociopolitical situation. Trying to figure out if I should start with the outline of what I want to happen and work back for the history that set it up or start with the history and see how that would create what I want to happen in the story.
@@arzabael Hey! Fancy seeing you here! :) Glad you like those other channels. I honestly didn't know I can hide my sub list hahaha. Maybe some day but for now happy to highlight some other cool creators. :) e
I started Worlbuilding my first world a month ago and I am glad I can't say I commited any of these mistakes. It seems spending 50 hours preparing for creating it paid off.
11:38 For your Tom gun Fantasy book sounds so cool! I had an idea for the food thing, what if there were caves in the spires and there is this special algae or plant that grows in it. There are springs for water in these caverns and maybe there is a special element in each aspire that help the planes fly?👀😅 just a thought. Love the video!
I was stuck in the worldbuilding hole for a while. I was convinced I had to build the entire continent at minimum, the governments of each nation, how each nation acts/feels towards each other nation, detailed history, climate history, etc. For a year I delayed any actual writing in favor of such worldbuilding. It wasn't until I sat down and had the realization that my story is never going to be about those things, as it's a personal story about an individual's inner struggle.
15:06 I find it easier to keep the dialogue in mind but not overthinking it, as in modern dialogue fits most eras if we don't include much slang. For example "I gotta go" feels complex to fit in a medieval era at first but it's literally just saying "I must go" and it's gone. I'd find myself overthinking stuff like "I shalt leave, now" 😂
12:00 what if the spires work like hades in greek mythology, where if you eat the food there you can't leave, but the food also cures hunger on some level? Generations of people who would probably love to go elsewhere but can't. This would imply there is somewhere else that is not spires though.
I've made quite a few of these mistakes originally when I first started seriously writing. Especially #2 and #3. I actually made corrections for this immediately when I switched gears to what I'm writing now!
I find it very interesting that you mentioned your world with tall spires, and then you mentioned fungus and mushrooms. When you were describing your city on those rocky spires, I He was thinking that everyone could grow some sort of specialized food mushrooms, in their basements. It could be that all the mushrooms need to grow is moist air. The moist air could come through special ventilation (structural engineering) that provides the dark, damp, and well ventilated air that the mushrooms need.
I’m glad you said what you did about language. I can’t stand how so many modern fantasy and Sci Fi shows that take place either hundreds if not thousands of years in the past or future use the term “speak your truth.” Nobody talked like until the early 2000s and am I to believe people will still talk like that in a hundred year!?! It’s so lazy
On the other hand, I kind of disagree with you. Stories are written to be read be real life people in the modern world, and most readers don’t want to spend 90% of their reading time and energy translating every last thing. Having a few unique phrases and idioms and stuff in your story definitely helps with worldbuilding, but overdoing it to the point that it’s hard to understand can be incredibly annoying and off putting to most readers. You’re likely do drive away the majority of potential readers and only have a tiny handful of the most diehard nerdy fans interested in that type of niche. It’s not objectively a bad thing to do if you’re okay with that option, but it is not doing yourself any favors for marketability. A lot of readers read scifi or medieval fantasy with the understanding that most things go through a “translation filter” for ease of access for the reader. The character didn’t really say “heimlich maneuver” because Henry Judah Heimlich didn’t exist in that world.
@@x_MoonlitShade I’m not talking about writing in Gaelic or 1611 English. Game of Thrones, Vikings, Battlestar Galactica, the Last Kingdom, etc. were all popular shows that didn’t use modern lingo and ideology. Sure, they could’ve used a lot less modern types of curse words on Game of Thrones but other than that it had an authentic feel to it. It’s the same with novels. All you have to do is work a little harder to explain things. Otherwise you are pandering to a very small audience. If something sounds too modern and it’s not in a modern setting, I don’t read it. There’s a lot of others like me. You can have a middle ground instead of alienating one group for another
You bring up a good point about going deeper about writing about what interests you. I’ve always been a fan of animals and studying nature. So I’ve been writing a story about druids, who have been known to harness the power of nature. But as I researched more, I realize that real life druids had a complex history that I can draw inspiration from. And it also helped enhanced the themes of my story. Plus, I have a better grasp of how my story starts and ends. So I can think of the nuances of the world after I write it down. Now, the hard part is just writing the damn thing down. XD. If you’d like to know more, I’d love some Feedback.
@@janedrowned Thank you for asking. The plot is about a boy named Noah. His mother gets infected with a supernatural plague called the Fae-Blight: which causes people to lose control of their Druidry and mutate into monsters. Luckily, he meets a mysterious boy named Barry, Who can turn into a Fae himself. So the two go to a Druid academy to learn how to use their powers properly so they (chiefly Noah) can find a way to stop the Fae Blight.
I toyed with the idea of writing a fantasy/science fiction novel many times, but I never did it. Not only because of laziness or fear, but also because I realized that I'm not cut out to be a author. I wrote a few short stories and published them in internet forums and got positive responses, but I realized that I am really a "world building and big picture guy" who is almost exclusively interested in that aspect and in big ideas about how worlds could look like and function and am barely interested in characters. Apparently I can write convincing and interesting dialogue, but A: it is always a boring chore and B: I have a hard time staying focused and on point. This realization that I just don't give a shit about characters and their struggles and arcs is what kept me from writing a book. In my short stories I always only used the characters as vehicles and tools for the world building and for communicating the world to the reader. You can get away with that in a short story, but not in a novel or even a trilogy or series of novels, I think.
I've never been a writer, but around the start of the year I somewhat came to the conclusion that what I want from my life is to tell a decent story. To aid that along I bought a notebook on which I can jot down random story and world building ideas as they occur to me. I've long been an avid watcher of story analysis videos and even used to write small background stories for my characters in my hobby of Bionicle building. Somewhere down the road that part of the hobby kinda died, but I guess somewhere deep down the ashes seek embers still. I'm not sure when I'll find myself in a stable enough position to sit down and write (or where to publish the story), as the whole idea of writing feels still very foreign to me, and my life is in I suppose a transitionary phase, but I hope I can get into a better vantage point in a timely manner.
With 1, you can worldbuild before you make a story. In that case the advice is to match the right story to the world you've created. Another point I want to make is big before small. Details are irrelevant until you have at least figured out the how the setting as a whole works and the consequences of those decisions. This aren't things you necessary have to explain to your readers, but are critical for you as the author to design a consistent world.
With regards to your fighter pilots in spires setting, this is essentially Jim Butcher's Cinder Spires series, but with airships instead of fighter planes. And he answers a lot of those questions you asked, which is part of why i love the setting so much.
Some excellent advice. Regarding your point of our modern references to hours and minutes not being that talked about even a few hundred years ago, also a very good point. But I will offer an excerpt from the notes that Pauline Matarosso wrote for her translation of the Thirteenth Century work, "The Quest of the Holy Grail." "The Medieval day was marked off into three-hourly sections which corresponded to the canonical hours of the Breviary. The first, prime, was normally fixed to 6 a.m., the second, terce, corresponded to 9 a.m., sext to midday, none to 3 o'clock in the afternoon, vespers to 6 p.m., while compline was the office sung before retiring."
This was... motivational, for me personally. I'm a new writer, and I've bitten off far more than I may ever be able to chew with a personal project that's constantly on the back burner and laying in wait, it might be there for years at this rate and I don't worry so much about "finishing" it, but I do struggle with sinking my teeth into it, and making it "mine" so to speak. It's a giant fantasy world that I want to someday tell multiple stories from, and it's one of my favorite pastimes to sink my inspirations into by keeping notes for it's worldbuilding, but I've certainly spread myself thin before while working on it.
@@Jed_Herne I’d honestly say everything. Sort of just overwhelmed and not sure where to start. So I’m basically just vomiting a heap of ideas and trying to sort it into something useful. Really liked your point of having everything deeply entwined though, so I’m going to start thinking about that!
This really helped a lot. I’m trying to repair a story I’ve written about a king who’s lost everything and is trying to help as many people as he can, it’s basically a bible of lore and timeline to explain, but this helped a lot. Maybe I can also use this to repair my story about an anarchist fitting into a new state of life
Haven’t actually got around to sitting down and getting a solid start on the writing part, but I have imagined up what I feel will be a really good story. And seeing this reassures me that I haven’t made any mistakes in creativity.
Would you be ok with people giving you ideas for that one story of yours with the cities built on pillars? The one you talk about at 11:16. Because I had several. Vertical farms are a thing so you could use that for the story but change them a bit. Maybe these cities have bred a type of vine that runs down the spires that can grow them food. The lower the vines go the more food the city gets but the more risk of monsters climbing up the vines and attacking the city is. This will give a risk reward dilemma for each city. Some will be riskier than others and some will choose unwisely. Farming them with planes would be hard so they could use helicopters as harvesters. Which could be easy targets for planes because they are slower. Pesticides could help with small numbers of insects and birds that would eat the vines but not large swarms of them. The planes seem to be WW2 in design from the picture so they could use the propellers to kill swarms. If they come to a city the planes can protect them from swarms too. If there is a swarm and bandits or pirates then the city would have to make an uncomfortable choice between having their stuff taken or food eaten or splitting their forces up and risking not being able to stop either. Pirates could plan attacks around this if they are smart. Here is a video about farming that could give you some inspiration. Is Aquaponics the Future of Agriculture? ruclips.net/video/59kk4OjJCj4/видео.html Maybe because there is so little space on top of the pillars fish are super rare. So the pillars that have ponds on them are considered wildlife preserves and aren’t built upon. That way if a city has all its fish die they have a place to get more. Having green spaces is also good for humans so they could visit these places. Though too many people would affect the preserve so maybe there is a lottery to see who gets to go to them and leave the cramped concrete cities for a while. A different question you could ask is what do the planes use for fuel. You could make it so the mist is what they use as fuel. This way refueling is riskier as well. If a plane is in a dog fight and is low on fuel they have to make a decision. End the fight quickly and risk being an easy target without fuel if they don’t or go down to get more fuel and put themselves and their opponent at risk of being attacked by monsters. If a plane runs out of fuel outside of a fight they aren’t safe either. Engines need a precise mixture of fuel and oxygen. So if a plane glides into the mist not only are they an easier target for monsters due to their speed but of not being able to get back up. It takes time to pick up speed and in that time the plane can go too deep into the mist and become submerged in it. The intake for air will be covered and just bring more mist into the engine instead of air, flooding it. With too much fuel and not enough oxygen the engine won’t work. The plane will keep falling until it hits the ground where no one can survive the monsters. I guess if the mist was fuel then humans wouldn’t be able to breathe it in either. An oxygen tank could fix both of these problems but if a bullet hits the tank oxygen will be released everywhere. And oxygen is very good at making fires and explosions bigger and maybe not something you want on a fighter plane. There could be big cargo planes that are designed to collect the mist safer. Then store it in the cities. The planes will need a place to land at the cities so runways could be on the sides of buildings hanging over the sides of the pillars to save space on the pillars. Another question is where do people get metals from? Metal is in the ground and there isn’t a lot of that around. So do people need to go farther and farther away to mine pillars? Or are there groups that go into the mist to mine while fighting monsters? Most call them crazy but they call others boring. Over generations the miners have evolved and can now survive the mist minutes without oxygen. Some can even breathe the mist who are thought to be destined for greatness. They are also taller, stronger and have bullet resistant skin from fighting monsters with their bodies. This is the opposite to the flyers who have gotten shorter to not weigh their planes down making them faster. Miners are the only ones who have ground vehicles which are tanks. They get motion sickness at high speeds so aren’t good at flying. But outside of a plane people want a miner on their side in a fight. They are few in number due to dying to monsters more than flyers. There is also the question of why people are resorting to becoming bandits or pirates. Did a city try to get the mist up their pillar by using a pipe and monsters climbed up it, or did they let their vines grow too long, and the monsters destroyed the city. Then the people that ran away tried to get into other cities but they were full and were turned away. Some tried to build on a wildlife preserve and got attacked by the nearest city. Angry at everyone they decided to steal from others. Do they raise their kids to do the same? Do they have blimps as homes and to launch their planes from? The miners would have blimps too but stay closer to the mist. Pirates disguise themselves as miners to get close to cities. It is a cool idea for a story you have. I can think of many interesting things that could happen in it. It’s a world with hard choices that always has trade offs.
As an aspiring soon to be writer with a huge fantasyish story waiting to be told I may be biting off more than I can chew…however…my world isn’t overly complex. I will plan to make full use of all my worldbuilding elements.
I am trying to work on my first story now. Emphasis on trying because I have tried several times before only to crash and burn, which I think happened because of mistakes such as world building and overwhelming myself with trying to do too much. For my current story I have kept it simple. Even though this story takes place on a fictional world, it is 'Earth-like' with the same kind of rules, boundaries, and laws of physics. I also kept it confined to a city. The reader will know that there are other cities, lands, and nations, but the entirety of the story is told in first person view of the protagonist and within the city she is in. It's comforting to know when watching a lot of these 'avoid these mistakes' types of videos that I am already doing it simply using the knowledge I've obtained over the years since my last attempt. I really hope I can see this one to the end.
Actually good and actionable advice. I've seen too many videos that are generic tips. Thank you for your insights and opinions. I'll be taking in most of it, if not all.
I once saw a class that Brandon Sanderson taught(it was one of those free classes you could watch on You Tube or something or other), and he said that all you have to do is take three aspects of your world(clothing, architecture, religion, magic, animals, etc...) and fully flesh them out, and your world will feel complete, which is pretty much what you said here. Subscribed because you are incredibly entertaining to watch.
Im glad i've found a writing expert. It helped me rethink about the novel im currently writing. Your book really helped out a lot, and I will make the best out of it. Just like lord of the rings, my world is basically at a standstill until my protaganist and her companions go through them one by one. I really am thankful to have found you in my recommandations.
I do agree with basically every point except the last point. I think asking a writer to try and be original and unique is going to lead them to a dead end. Most ideas have been done already and to say to someone that your writing will be good only if you try to be original is advice that isn't going to pan out. Instead I think it is better to give the advice, that you somewhat touched upon, to write something you care about. You have to write what you are interested in and not what others are.
I think better advice about originality would be "Find a way to mix together ideas already done that you like in a way you've never seen or heard of it mixed together." Probably a better way to word it, though.
@@mattpace1026 that still isn't great. Because the advice hinges on the idea that originality is what a writer should strive for. Which isn't what they should do. A writer should strive to do something they want to do and make it good. Even if it is unoriginal.
@@Knight1029 So, you would be perfectly fine with someone just blatantly ripping off other people, as long as they wanted to just do the exact same story someone else did? You're just trying to justify your own attempts to rip off someone else's story, aren't you?
@@mattpace1026 what? What are you talking about? When did I ever say it was fine ripping someone off? All I said is that if someone wanted to do something like a hero's journey or a something tropey then that is fine.
@@Knight1029 That is not what you said. You said writers should not try to be original at all. You're backpedaling because someone figured out your laziness.
I disagree about time. I will say, a serf in a medieval society isn't going to have a clock, but cities, might. Farmer on the edge of might refer to morning, midday, and evening, but someone living within the city walls of a castle would be aware of time. No, I'll be there before midday when its morning when they mean one hour. And while it might be slightly anachronistic to use that kind of language to help the reader understand the passage of time within a novel.
In the medieval period, there were many religious houses, where the clergy were called to observe religious practices throughout the day and night by bells which would have been heard by townspeople and villagers at regular times. Not a clock exactly, but a way to break up time.
so not a writer in a traditional sense but ive been building a campaign for d&d. ive shared this with other DMs to help them fill the checklist of avoiding these mistakes.
Thanks for sharing these, as a reader it make sense why recent manga, manhwa, novels that I'm reading are feeling so rough. They always do this Lore Dump and exposition at the first chapter and then forget about it the whole series. Most of the time the world building doesn't make sense or contribute to the story or characters, and using the "Fantasy and Magic" as an excuse to never explain anything about it.
This was very useful and got me appreciating some aspect of my yet unfinished first novel, but also making me rethink some others. You have gained a new subscriber. Thank you so much!
I actually did discover a context where anachronistic texts (text or a way of writing not belonging to the period the content takes place in) that worked really well, sort of. It was essentially a lore book about a fantasy world, but written from the perspective of what was essentially an anthropologist/archaeologist who was studying the history of this world/some of its current state, and so you got the hella good world building, history from more ‘ancient’ times as well as it still being able to be written in a more modern language form. Was rather interesting.
As someone that has spent a great deal of time fleshing out the world of my fantasy novels, I can say that there are definite roadblocks to the process. How much time one spends on their world isn't always an indication of what makes it into the draft, and oftentimes those details are there more for the author's benefit rather than the readers. Having a world in which I know about the geography, the various ways people live and work in those environments, the economy, the political structure, the nature of their own history, and even how they view other cultures through their own lenses is pivotal to walking through the world. Granted-and this is the biggest roadblock-it means spending time away from writing the novel. If a writer is prepared for that level of distraction, then it can be useful. Certainly, we aren't expected to know the nuances of how the plumbing works, or how often some indigenous creature migrates from one location to another, but, knowing when to yadda yadda is just as important as when to NOT yadda yadda.
Very helpful points Jed! I fall prey to some of these, especially the 2nd one. The series I’m working is called ‘The adventures of jazz cat and reggae dog’, a sci-fantasy story about music and a technocracy trying to eliminate live music. The issue I’m faced with is that I’m using real world music genres such as blues, jazz, reggae, etc… but these music styles only exist because of their cultural context. So I feel that to do any kind of justice to those styles and cultures, I need to create fictional circumstances in which these styles could hypothetically arise. It’s been my biggest challenge so far in this project, and feels monstrously big to tackle. I don’t want to be insensitive to cultures and styles of music. I’d love to know your thoughts on this problem.
Maybe instead of creating an entirely new different world, you just create a split-off of this world, so that the history and everything is the same until we get to the point where there's a technocracy?
@@alyxbarter3155 That's a great suggestion, thanks for your feedback. I considered this, though, it would mean sacrificing the core of this story: that it's a world of cats and dogs hahaha (they are humanoid cats and dogs of course, but cats and dogs nonetheless). This is a sacrifice I'm unwilling to make, as this was the original seed, the inception of the entire story, and to scrap that would be to scrap the project. Thanks for your input though!
@@joshuastclairmusic What if it was an alternate world? Like a parallel dimension of sorts to our world except the creatures who live there are different. Humanoid cats and dogs could have always existed and could still have different races (breeds maybe?) and cultures. I don’t know if this idea would fit with your story, but just a thought.
@@novastar1224 Yes, great thought! This is mostly the road I’ve taken. It still comes with a lot of complication (for example, the word ‘breed’ won’t apply in this context as it implies humans involvement in the dogs evolution, if that makes sense… so I’ve created all these different groups/races of canine and feline). It was and still is a daunting task, but I’ve been worldbuilding it pretty consistently every morning this year, chipping away at it and it’s making more sense every day.
What I have found works for me when worldbuilding in my current novel is almost treating it as if I were a DnD GM that is making it up as I go along but because I'm writing a book, I can just go back and set stuff up if I need to earlier in the story.
"Anachronistic dialogue" yes. This is a problem in a lot of fantasy I've read in the past years. Most of them self-published (no judgement) but some of them even trad. You have a medieval-esque setting but the characters talk and behave like 21st century people. I think this may be because the writers and editors are trying to make it more "accessible" to that kind of target audience, but imho it actually ruins the immersion and believability of the story.
A particular comic I started reading had a good concept, but the medieval style princess felt shy about being bathed or changed by her maids, yet was fine showing her legs, etc., and was very casual. On the flip side, one of my favorite books involving time travel had a modern woman bathing, and a Roman soldier came in suspicious of if she were a runaway slave, but threw that theory out when she screamed at him to get out. Certain settings have certain expectations of characters in that setting, especially when it's their whole world, otherwise it breaks the immersion. Some stories work better elsewhere, and some are tailored to the setting wonderfully. The first example would've been far better as a more modern fantasy, and the second (I might be biased) is perfectly executed.
Great video, and I agree except with your bit about time and how it wasnt pertinent until the industrial age. Hours have been a unit of time for centuries and even the Greeks divided their days into 12 hours and eventually 24 hours in BC times. The duration of said hours were not consistent to today, but the concept is quite old. Sundials with 12 hour markings have been found from Ancient Egypt and people from many cultures all across the ancient world needed various ways of determining time of day for prayers and rituals and even record keeping. So for any of you other fantasy writers... hours are still in. Minutes too, the hour was first divided into 60 parts in 1000 AD
Randomly came to mind. Maybe moss and stuff that eats the moss grows around the spires right above the fog where the monsters are. So people rock climb down to harvest this moss and catch these creatures for food.
About starting too big, I think it entirely depends on the scope of your story. If you plan on having your character explore pretty much the whole world and meating people from most, if not every culture/society, I think it is fundamental to already have a good knowledge of your own world. The problem with starting to small and then going big is that it's much easier to make your world less coherent/consistent, and that can really take a reader out of the story. I love worldbuilding, and I'd rather start too big than too small. At worst, I've "lost time" creating parts of a world I would never use, even though it's not really lost time since I've had fun. At best, my setting is perfectly coherent and ready to have stories be told in it.
I find that Robert Jordan's the Wheel of Time is the prime example of what to do and what not to do. There is so much that people who want to be author's (of any genre) can learn from what he did right and wrong. Even in terms of breaking long running series up into different genre types to keep the story fresh and moving forward. The amount of world building he did in Eye of The World is incredible. It's even more incredible for how little he actually built. He laid the seeds for future building giving just enough information to keep the apatite wet, at the same time the first novel was very plot driven. Books two and three continue the action adventure theme while each novel focuses more and more on character building. By book four we have started the genre shift from action adventure to political drama. From there it shifts into spy thriller and spy action. Then we get exploration before shifting back into action adventure/political thriller.
Auncient romans used sun dials to mesure hours So the concept that time wasnt focused on or used till the industrialcrevelution in the 1700s is complet misinformation
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At 12:03, i wouldn't worry about materials for the planes, since WWI style Biplanes were made from fabric stretched over a wooden frame. The main plane problem would be where to get the fuel.
@@tankythemagnorite9855 Talking about the same area. Don't know what they people are capable of in regards to getting down to the plains and back, but maybe food is harvested from monster carcasses on the plains--think Japan getting most of it's food from the area outside of the land on which they live. Are the monsters strong enough to send huge slabs of flesh (or whatever) flying into the air as high as the cities or at least most of the way up?
12:12 you can add specialized personnel who descend into the fog to recover materials that are still present on the ground
and 'speleologists' who enter stone spiers, which may be hollow, and find water (aspirated from specific plants, which also act as medicines and tissue material, harbor high protein edible fungi etc) find minerals, gems, large animal inhabitants of caves (food) waxy/oily substances for fire or waterproofing fabrics or surfaces, etc
Technically contrast may be used intentionally. Like for example Dark Fairly Tells use the same dreamlike narrative, but are sometimes openly or sometimes covertly twisted and distorted. Madoka Magica is also good example of using light design to make plot even darker (MLP: FiM also use those elements to a degree). But it is tool what need to be used wisely, otherwise we end with Goblin Slayer syndrome. Where first episode of anime is pointlessly dark, only to later fallow goofy isakai style narrative of manga. It pushed away those expecting light stuff, while deeply disappoint fan of dark satire. Where rest of the show is completely different. Those elements are sometimes refereed as Evil Light, Good Darkens of Eldritch in general use.
12:27 For your world of airplanes and spires, why not have large airships casting nets into the mist and acting like fishing boats? How about the two main sources for building materials come from alchemy transmuting certain things into other things, like monster bones into wood, as well as from "divers" - the courageous or insane few who risk being lowered down into the mist to whatever surface these spires arise from. Picture old diving suits with big metal helmets and long breathing hoses.
It’s worth noting that Tolkien didn’t build Middle Earth for Lord of the Rings, he built it for his languages. The stories were later developments, starting out because he felt stories were a way to make those languages and that history come alive and memorable. Tolkien liked history as well. Lord of the Rings came as a result of his publishers wanting a Hobbit sequel, and The Hobbit itself was to write a story for his children, with a ready made Middle Earth elements merged into The Hobbit’s history.
That doesn't sound complete from what I remember researching 20 years ago. The languages weren't the goal in themselves in your. Youb took something out of context. I remember some things that might make someone say that.... But that's not quite right.
@@ramspencer5492 I’m not sure what you researched. But “The invention of languages is the foundation. The 'stories' were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows.”
- JRR Tolkien
He also began developing the Elvish languages in 1910, but didn’t begin writing the primitive legendarium until WW1. From the primitive legendarium came Middle Earth.
@Ram Spencer no what he Said was exactly right. The very idea of middle earth wasn't even in tolkiens head till after he made the elven language
It's also worth nothing that nobody else is J. R. R. Tolkien.
@@spacerxNo. But build a world, then tell a story is probably going end up with greater logical consistency than build a character then tell a story. Themes come second though. That's the biggest failure I see in modern world building. Developing awesome characters and plop them in a partially fleshed out world, then improvise-poorly. You can tell any story, in any world, just find the corner of it that suits your story.
Big franchises like Star Wars and Marvel are known for their elaborate worldbuilding but their first installments didn't have much worldbuilding. "A New Hope" was a basic story about rebellion against an oppressive government with a vaguely-explained magic system thrown in. "Iron Man" was just the story of a genius inventor trying to fight an evil business partner stealing his tech.
The goal of a first installment isn't to introduce a massive universe. It's to tell a good story that makes people want to know more about the universe.
most people don't know how much of the heavy lifting of Star Wars worldbuilding was done by the great people at West End Games. The Brian Daley audio dramas introduced several elements that would go on to be referenced and expanded upon later. And then, drawing from the WEG sourcebooks, of course the foundational EU works: the Thrawn trilogy, Tales of the Jedi and Dark Empire.
But Lucas did have a ton of worldbuilding before Star Wars. Unfortunately, he seemed to have dropped it all once the film exploded.
What you said was true I would say. But Marvel by the time the movies came out already had a well-established world-building
@@mr.e7541 Marvel, sure, but the MCU specifically didn't. The only thing that was apparent was that it was set in a modern city with the deviation of high tech.
The first Star Wars movie is basically a standard Wild West movie with the actors clad in space suits.
Yea, better to go deep then wide.
I thought of something the other day. Writing a book is exactly like solving a puzzle. When you start with all the pieces laid out before you, you have no idea where to even start. But as you go, things start to click. By the time you get 50% through, it suddenly becomes much easier to figure out where more pieces go.
Great analogy
Yes. My 10th Grade teacher: "Read intensively before you read extensively."
Jorden, thanks for that. Now I don't feel so bad for not having it all sorted out early on.
once you have something to work with, you can go off of it :)
@jordan: That's exactly how I see it as well. Trying to make different pieces of a puzzle fit together
Almost succumbed to Worldbuilder's Disease, until I just decided to build the central framework, the backbone of the story, and make the details as I go. More like the mindset, "I created this world from scratch by myself. I know everything about this world, because everything that is here and happens here is what I WANT it to."
Nothing beats the fear of "is something i created in my head going to screw me over?!" 😂
Very Frankenstein! Will your monster kill you?
this is exactly what I do. it's much easier to keep track of and allows me to get more work done.
I've created 3 different worlds, each having a 4-5 book plot, and haven't started writing any of it. I have around 100k words worth of world building, but nothing to show for it.
"Where are they growing their food?" Thank you! That's the number one question I keep asking with a lot of stories.
"They grow their food on the pelenor fields."
"But there are no fields, there is an orc army."
"That's the problem."
@@adysonfry9085 my head. And logic. You have the pelenor fields. They were trampled by orcs, so your crops are no more.
This bothered me when seeing Minas Tirith in the movies. A HUGE city but not a single crop or cattle in sight. What are all these people eating??
@@Aeras89 well it's the problem of the adaptation and visual depiction then :), Minas Tirith in any case is a city and seat of power so basically a capital of a larger realm, and in book we have it laid out:
"The townlands were rich, with wide tilth and many orchards, and homesteads there were with oast and garner, fold and byre, and many rills rippling through the green from the highlands down to Anduin. Yet the herdsmen and husbandmen that dwelt there were not many...
"Pippin could see all the Pelennor laid out before him, dotted into the
distance with farmsteads and little walls, barns and byres, but nowhere could he see any kine or other beasts. Many roads and tracks crossed the green fields... the chief highway, and that turned south, and then bending swifter than the River skirted the hills and passed soon from sight. It was wide and well-paved, and along its eastern edge ran a broad green riding-track, and beyond that a wall."
RotK, Book V, Ch 1, Minas Tirith
In the context also, the city preparing for war, is also evacuating and it's surroundings as well, and they already gathered the stores of provisions in case of a long siege and so on :).
Food is just magically created! 😂
I start with characters and a basic setting and then figure out what kind of world would create them and their conflicts. It keeps the characters and world and events all integrated together.
I just did the opposite. I came up with some interesting characters and imagined how their interactions shaped the world the protagonist visits. Everything is connected because everything is a result of a play between very powerful beeings.
But your idea sounds incredibly interesting too when the characters aren't able to change a world alone. "Weaker" Characters, like normal humans, beeing the result of their environment makes a lot of sense actually. Thank you for that thought, you just improved my side characters and my factions
@@little_lord_tam awesome! I like your process, too. Lots to consider!
@@little_lord_tam This is more like how I do it. I create characters and a magic system primarily, and since I like high power magic systems, the characters, or sometimes the magic by itself, tend to straight up morph the world around them. Otherwise I tend to build around themes and symbolism, depending on what themes the story deals with at the time.
Like to point out that a lot of giants of the genre started off by writing Lord of the Rings clones. Just immediately off the top of the head the first entries in Terry Brooks Shannara series and Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time are both kind of fellowship clones. But they turned into their very own things. If your first story is derivative, make your second better. Emulation is a good place to start.
Yeah, nothing against being inspired by the worlds you really like as a reader! I'm personally just more interested in seeing people present their unique visions to me, rather than being overly derivative - but like I mentioned in the video, character and plot come first for me, so a story can nail that - and maybe not get the worldbuilding super original - but I'll probably still enjoy it.
TL;DR : start off by writing fanfics lmao
@@miilkyystars yeah it’s a really good place to start. Every writer has trouble finding their voice. This is a really good way to do help yourself to do so, in my opinion.
@@rawrbeez6625 most of the stories I write are fanfics but I've been trying to branch out, I have several ideas but im not entirely sure how to start without knowing EVERYTHING about my story before I start
@@miilkyystars similar boat here but most of my writing is in TTRPG (which I consider similar since I’m adding my voice into someone else’s world). I have been thinking of trying the sandwich method where I have a beginning and ending in mind and fill out the middle, rather than just going forward and “off the cuff” so to speak. Of the millions of methods there’s always gonna be one that works for you, I just have to find mine 😅 good luck on your story though!
"I doth me thinks this gryphon be attacking us." I cannot adequately express how perfect this line is. 😅
Why do I read it in Urianger's voice
I just hear it in Toby Determined's from gravity falls.
regarding the last point, it doesn’t have to be only about your passions and interests! i’m currently working on a world where people who have the same sleep disorder as me have a high status and, because of the magic system that’s also in the world, they get to be like night guardians and their magic is stronger than average people. a slight change in our world like that can create really interesting things you can work around with worldbuilding
That's pretty cool
that sounds like a cool book idea! Would love to read something like that. I love when people turn disorders and disabilities into abilities and powers
@@ChronicaErysany ideas how to make illeostomy cool 😂😂😂
Yes!! I love that you're writing from a tweak to how your sleep disorder is perceived. My struggles with endometriosis and the period taboo are fueling my book idea.
I wouldn't be announcing your ideas online where people can easily steal them.
I like the idea of starting in a town like Hobbiton, where you get to know that town and people first, and then you join the travelers when they leave and together you discover the world. Obviously they know a bit more about it than the reader, but the exposition is more natural. Just keep track of the geography and rules of the world that come up as you go.
My own two cents on the first point:
That triangle of character, plot, and worldbuilding - it doesn't really matter which one you start with. As long as you remain mindful of how the three must remain interconnected. I mean, I started with the worldbuilding. Once I felt I was ready to write a story to show off the setting - well, I picked a subplot for secondary characters I loved, promoted it to primary characters and a major plot, and then adapted it.
To my writing style. To my world. To my characters. To the types of characters my setting produces for a dime a dozen. There's more than one way to maintain the triangle - "what characters are especially challenged by my world?" addresses it just as much as "what kind of world especially challenges my characters?"
My my
This! I think especially for me because a big focus I keep ending up back at when I write stuff is the way characters' knowledge of the world is shaped by their environment/experiences. So if I'm gonna come up with characters who embody that, I kind of first need... a world for them to be shaped by. So my approach is more like, think of a world and its social values and conflicts, and then ask what kinds of situations would be difficult to be in for someone in that world. And if you look closer into those situations, you will find a character.
My style is just to start with worldbuilding first and then worldbuilding again and then worldbuilding again. Then you postponed the story until you forgot about it, after that, start a completely new setting because you forgot about the previous world you made and repeat.
@@irjiiu1041 sounds like you love worldbuilding more than writing. And that's ok.
@@MGDrzyzga keen observation. Which do you prefer? Do you have any 'puter' skills for map making? WB can be very addictive
I agree with so many of your points. I'm currently writing a medieval fantasy and it was very important that the world and languages were introduced in a natural way, very much like how we come across them in daily life. The archaic way people spoke that time was also something I found very interesting so I spent a lot of time learning it and intergrated it into my work. Thankfully the people who I've shared it with are impressed with it all so hopefully, when I get it done my readers will think the same thing 😁
I would add a little nuance to point one. I tend to like books where there's a sense that the world is bigger than what's happening in the plot. It can make the story atmospheric and immersive. Details that don't directly connect with the plot and characters shouldn't be treated with the same amount of detail or lead to digressions, but rich details about things like food and drink or the way a city looks are helpful to getting me into a story. If all the worldbuilding only connects directly with the plot and characters a little too perfectly, it feels less real to me. Worldbuilding can connect with mood, tone, and atmosphere as well as plot and character.
Most Worldbuilding could be summarized by saying: "Don't tell us the name, personality and life of the last 20 kings, tell us there were 20 before, one of them was a crazy psycho, one was truly benevolent, and they were all different. Reader's imagination will fill the rest.
A good framework for this would be to tell us about the current king, the first king, and the most notable one in between. That immediately feels like a complete lineage, because realistically most of the rest wouldn't be very interesting so we barely feel the *need* to fill in the gaps.
I've been working on a world for 10 years. Started with a tiny dnd 1 shot, grew with other various long campaigns. The players actually did most of the heavy lifting for me. Having said that, I actively enjoy working on the world building so it never feels like a chore or a job to me. Starting small though, is ABSOLUTELY the way to go. Work from the inside to the outside and everything will be coherent and congruent.
While not a “story” story, your advice has been invaluable to me for constructing a story for my DnD campaign, I’ve written a few short stories to go a long with it and all of your content is really helpful, practical advice to make them more compelling than they would be. Thanks a ton for what you do!
That's the beauty of DnD is that they ARE story stories. The main difference is that it has multiple authors, and it's absolutely beautiful. Don't sell yourself short. 😊
About #5, I would argue that affordance would be far more crucial. Sure, farmers would be more concerned with dawn, dusk, and midday than with specific times, but they would also have use for gradients of time such as minutes and seconds. Rather than use invented words for these concepts (which readers may have difficulty in remembering), it's far better to simply use terms the reader already understands.
Related to this is that such stories are (with rare exceptions) written from the perspective of someone native to that world. Characters are *NOT* going to obsess over niddly details which they normally take for granted - perhaps the worst example is when a character studies themselves in a mirror for no particular reason; assuming mirrors are relatively common, they know what they look like and aren't going to spend ten pages counting their freckles.
The amount of time/attention given to any particular detail is going to be proportional to its deviation from the norm of the viewpoint character's story world. "She tore through the plaza, past the elfin half-breed juggling orbs of fire for paltry coins and merchants loading and unloading their hippogriffs" is more than enough to convey that magic and fantastical creatures are fairly commonplace in this world - possibly even hinting at the character's morals by thinking of the fire juggler as an "elfin half-breed". There are many ways this information can be expanded upon, but the viewpoint character isn't going to give much thought to anything they perceive as mundane.
A long time ago I read am essay by Isaac Asimov where he said when you create a world it should have internal rules that make sense. But in the end, the story you write should be able to be written in any world.
For your world with the spires, they could have subterranean farms in caverns under the towns. As long as they have some form of light that would make plants grow, that would work. Or narrow tubes that lead to the surface with lenses to let in and disperse as much sunlight as possible.
Also, people could additionally grow their own food to some extent in small gardens above the buildings. Like above buildings gardens on large buildings, or small gardens a la victory gardens.
Thought of this. Had to share. 😂
Alternatively they could subside on foods which require lesser light like mushrooms or moss that could grow inside moist caverns.
In the world of MTG the plane of Ravnica is a city which spans the entire world and they get their food from something called "rot farms" which are located underground, which I find quite interesting and memorable as it also makes the reader go "yuck"
They could have vertical farms where you just have a skyscraper devoted to growing food.
Like the mini gardens in Tokyo!
As always you make me consider everything. I struggle to walk that line between over-crowding and keeping everything connected. Thankfully, it’s fun coming up with ways world building can link to story.
That thing about hours, minutes, and seconds occurred to me early while writing my novel set in early medieval Germany. They didn't have clocks, so they wouldn't have hours or minutes. In the story, if people want to meet, they'd say "I'll meet you midday tomorrow" or just stop by, as it often wouldn't be imperative to meet at a specific point in the day anyway. I check my draft using the "find" option to ensure that I don't have any mentions of hours or minutes.
Good call - I do the exact same thing with the find feature myself.
"You are in the house of Elrond. And it is ten o'clock in the morning," said a voice "October the twenty-fourth, if you want to know".
The Romans had excellent clocks and still only went with "a day has twelve hours each, so in winter, hours are shorter than in summer, but whatever".
In the Middle Ages, clock towers became common around the 13th century. From then on, life had a rhythm that was objectively measured - IF you lived in a place with a big church. In rural areas, not so much.
If you happened to live in or near a community of monks/nuns or canons, you could also go by "let's meet when they sing complet in the chapel".
Someone once told me that the most important character in any story is the setting and it's shaped how I approach worldbuilding ever since
On point 3, I think it's worth noting that there's no harm in having reams of info prepared to cover all parts the world building, if that's what works for you as a writer.
The crucial part is holding that info in your head, to inform your writing, but knowing which bits of info your audience needs to know, and which they don't.
For instance, as part of establishing technological level you could work out what cooking methods are used in the houses of your world. They're never delved into and explained, but they are lightly touched on as the only food presented is what could be prepared in those facilities. This (if you'll pardon the pun) gives the audience the flavour without miring them in detail.
I personally do have world builder's disease and one advice I can give on how to "overcome" it is to embrace it for a while and really ask yourself "Do I actually desire to write a story or do I maybe just enjoy the flow of creativity and the sense of escapism world building gives me?"
Because there's nothing wrong with just being a world builder if that's your hobby. No one ever said you have to write a book for your world building to be amazing and valid.
For me, by just dropping all pressure and giving myself the permission to world build and write a wiki for as long as I wanted, I eventually realised that there WAS an interesting plot that simply had to be told, one that naturally grew out of my world building because it functioned as one of the core problems of the society at the center of my world.
This will also help you completely circumvent the problem of your plot and world being disconnected.
Now I am more motivated than ever to write my book because I have such an all-encompassing understanding of what the stakes are AND I already have an extensive wiki to base my writing off of. And sometimes, I still feel like world building instead of writing for a week or two so I take a break from writing and indulge in this other hobby without feeling bad for it.
As long as you're not on some sort of timer, this works pretty well I think.
If you really love worldbuilding but no intent to write a story, you could sell your worlds to D & D campaigners, boardgamers, MMORPGs etc.
Just a suggestion for the unpublished story about the food/farming, you should have the spires have massive caverns inside the rocky areas and do mushroom farming and underground fishing, and they could also eat anything grow on the roofs of the buildings.
Anachronistic dialogue was the reason why I put down many books and never picked them up again. Sadly, with many authors, that is the hallmark of their style and they never seem to outgrow it.
The point on dialogue being out of place, I felt that a lot in Avatar 2 where the alien kids sounded like they were in American high school.
Brandon Sanderson does this, and I know it’s intentional but it breaks immersion for me almost every time
@@bencressman6110 Which book are you referring to? The only Sanderson book I've read is The Way Of Kings
@@leigh-anjohnson
I would say any of the books from the reckoners series. Only Sanderson books I read and the lore was actually really cool but the dialogue was like high school bickering with each character having absurd quirks
Regarding point 5: Where do you draw the line? If you want the language and dialogue to be perfect, you have to write the book in the default language of majority in the setting. Everything and anything short of that is "anachronistic". My novel is a translation into modern English, and I trust my readers to understand that.
That whole section is terrible. I really hope his own dialogue and worldbuilding doesn't actually follow those rules, because it must be a chore to read if it does.
It's impossible to write fantasy that can be followed without some anachronisms. That's just the nature of language and storytelling.
Yes, exactly. My own story has a world with its own language but the book is just a translation into English 🤷🏼♀️
@@Dracocetus you have a point, but you still need to pay attention to the language you use. Even in the modern world British royal family members will express themselves very differently compared to, let's say, the average american teenagers. You don't necessarily have to use anachronistic words, but if all your characters use the gen z lexicon you'll never be able to create a believable medieval setting.
The other dangerous area is using idioms without knowing their origin. You don't want your characters to accidentally quote Nietzsche or a 90s TV commercial.
Also I sometimes notice authors using words/expressions that simply do not exist in world they created or their characters can't possibly know. Like using modern psychology terminology in dialogues to describe the characters' relationships.
These things might seem relatively minor, but every time I see an author making these mistakes repetitively the setting becomes less and less believable
@@IrinaAntipina-jt2wn Yeah, but it depends on the world you are creating. Mine is not set in a specific timeline when it comes to style. It's a mix between art deco, Victorian and modern. I agree that if you have a typical medieval setting you should stick to that inn all aspects, but in fantasy where the world is more original, modern day language should be fine. I also think, as it is a translation, terms coming from specific modern day people, events, tv series etc. that every English speakers use regularly, should be fine to use in your fantasy world as it is a translation. Every word we use has originated from our own world anyways. For instance, as this story is in a world with its own species of plants and animals, I still use words like potato or bear for something that might look similar to that instead of coming up with entirely new words for every single unique item. I am also not going to invent new phrases or sayings because I want my story to be communicated in an easy and understandabke way. Making it more complicated to understand makes the story worse in my opinion. Imagine someone in the year 2024 finding a story from another world. It would have been translated into the language we use now, so in that context it makes it more believable.
In reality, in a world that has never know the existence of ours, would act totally different to us anyways, in a way we could never relate... If we are talking about making it as believable as possible I mean, but nobody would want to read that because they wouldn't understand a thing 🤷🏼♀️
Thanks Jed, you make think deeper and consider things I haven’t even thought about during this writing process.
I spent a good five to ten years suffering from World Builder's Disease. I am in recovery, though I must say I do have a very fantastic world to show my readers in the story, and the time I took away from telling the main story did help me to come up with some of the core ideas of my story. For example, exploring how Necromancy works in the context of my world helped me to come up with a central plot point about my main character, one that I think actually makes the story way, way better than it would have been previously.
I remember starting to write a sci-fi novel, and at some point needing to stop, because I went too much into worldbuilding that it stopped being fun to read, and started being a chore. So I scrapped this novel altogether, and started something else, what I feel more confident with, keeping that idea in a separate folder to just develop further for the fun of it, kind of like a guilty pleasure hobby. It'll never see the light of day, but I like exploring and making up in-depth cultures of this and that species, different space travel ways, etc. to relax.
I agree with 5 of your 6 points. Point 5 is a real problem.
Unless its meant to be historically accurate, common current slang is easier for people to digest. You yourself even said it, that you don't need to write it in a Shakespearean manner. Which directly contradicts the point your trying to make.
If my story is set in 1500 England for an American audience, what option is there to anachronistic dialogue?
Thanks for sharing. I have a giant world called Terrellium, and I have loads of stories for it, and yes you are right, it is impossible to include everything, unless you wrote history of the world or something.
Re: your spires problems:
Didn’t hurt Jim Butcher. He literally did that setting except the biplanes were replaced with dirigibles. The Aeronaut’s Windlass.
I found out about that series a few years after I wrote Masks of Steel - really want to read it at some point
Started a dnd camp and started making a world, I liked the world and so I ended up just writing deep into the world. I personally just enjoy world building and find enjoyment out of it. Since that first session that didn’t go anywhere I’ve set two other campaigns at different times in my world. It is pretty enjoyable figuring up history and cool events. I will likely write a story about a character in this world at some point
I do this differently myself, but thats because my goals are different. Im building a setting to create stories in, not a single story, but many smaller tales that collectively tell a larger story. The story of the universe. Its been a lot of fun so far.
I actually avoided all those mistakes despite having just one setting for all my stories.
Well, that may be because the premise for my setting is very simple. It's a clash of overwhelming powers. But those powers just cancel each other out. So in the end of the day none of those powerful beings can do much because there are other powerful beings not really interested in letting other powerful beings do as they please.
And also there are many regions and time periods in this setting that allow for different story. I can do a classic urban fantasy in a world divided between humanity plane and magic plane on Earth of The Great Kingdom era. I can do the dystopian fantasy in post-apocalypse Earth. I can even do sci-fi in regions of galaxy that are far away from the solar systems where Magic is so weak that it practically doesn't even exist as far as people there are concerned. And to make this more interesting in The Great Kingdom era rest of the galaxy perspective was that Earth was part this huge, benevolent treaty of different systems that was in constant war with The Black Planet Empire. So this was very Star Wars like. That war is still going on after the Great Kingdom's collapse, except The Black Planet Empire also collapse and was rebuilt into what is being The Empire of Night. And since Earth is a fallen planet now without any large center of political power, the treaty also changed dramatically and has now a great military corporation waging the war with all different systems providing the funds instead of having their own armies to protect themselves.
But again, all of that doesn't matter on Earth and post-apocalypse most of knowledge and history was forgotten. Civilization is in ruins with people living in small settlements in the great jungle, constantly being threatened by wild animals, magical beasts and monsters. Pretty much the only ones travelling are dwarfs who form merchant caravans. And also heroes and mercenaries who travel between human settlements looking for quests.
Main character of my stories is immortal. So he lives in both eras. And he's insanely powerful. He could destroy our sun with a single spell if he really wanted to. But there's a problem with that. He can't really control all of that power well enough for it to be useful in daily life. Think of lifting a huge ass cistern and filling a glass with water from it. Seems impossible, right? And with the power he wields a small mistake can lead to total destruction of entire Earth. So he uses his Magic very sparingly. Luckily he does have other ways to fight.
So in The Great Kingdom era my main guy is trying to just live a calm life, hiding in the crowd and trying not to stand out. But of course life has a way of making you do things you don't want to. And in post-apocalypse era he is one of very few people who remember what humanity used to be like. In both cases he's a loner and he's very misunderstood. And to make things even more complicated, he's kinda like two differet beings smashed together and those two halves of him are not always in sync. And that often causes a lot of destruction, which makes it even more complicated. Because my main guy is not the kind of person who would let innocent people die so when his other half gets angry and causes chaos, he blames himself for it and that makes controlling his massive Magic even more difficult.
So most of the time my main guy is kinda like a Superman who can lift entire solar systems but struggles to lift up a glass of water without breaking it. And most of his enemies are glasses of water with even more innocent glasses of water around.
Thank you for making this video. You've definitely pointed out a couple of flaws in my technique that I need to think about.
Happy to help
This does make me feel somewhat better I am writing a book and I have spent 2 years fine tuning my world and planing story points to flow properly and make the world feel real and lived in but I don’t even have chapter 1 of my book written yet
Sometimes, using a lot of time on your world and story is good. I haven't finished my first book yet and I started 7 years ago 😆
Great advice, man. I've already fleshed most of these things out from previous writings, but the way you elaborate on them made me really think about what I'm trying to write now. Really love what you said about taking elements of various things you are passionate about and incorporating them into your work. That's huge, and I completely agree that this is an important key to writing something truly memorable. To me, even if no one reads it, or even comprehends it fully, satisfying myself is going to be an incredible accomplishment. You can't do that unless you're fully invested, entertaining yourself in the writing, and people can feel that passion. When it's uniquely yours, it's always better.
Awesome stuff, good luck with the writing
"You don't need to answer all the questions"
Thank you, I needed to hear that
A tip that I kind of discovered for using exposition was let the characters do in small pieces, an example would be if there was some big war that happened and one of the characters didn't know about it, have another character give a short history lesson on it, and if you want to retcon anything you can have another character who is more knowledgeable or was at the event correct the mistakes of the others.
I can't wait for the book I've been pouring my heart into for the last 10 years to finally make it to someone's desk, and then get it back saying, "Who wrote this? A brain dead toddler?"
Do you actually have a book that you're almost done with? Or are you just making the joke? Which is good, by the way. ;)
I built my world using the Earth as a guide for the basic geography and used that to determine how changes there would affect climates. Higher mountains near the coasts will block moisture from traveling too far inland which results in heavy precipitation along the coastal side of the mountains and dryer, semi-arid areas on the inland side for example. After that I used real plants and animals for the flora and fauna and determined how that could affect the sociopolitical situation. Trying to figure out if I should start with the outline of what I want to happen and work back for the history that set it up or start with the history and see how that would create what I want to happen in the story.
Can we talk about how cool that thumbnail is?! Nailed it! Thanks for all the great info, Jed! Been a fan since Wizards, Warriors, and Words. :)
Cheers Nicholas! My hand is still recovering from the bite!
@@arzabael Hey! Fancy seeing you here! :) Glad you like those other channels. I honestly didn't know I can hide my sub list hahaha. Maybe some day but for now happy to highlight some other cool creators. :)
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I started Worlbuilding my first world a month ago and I am glad I can't say I commited any of these mistakes. It seems spending 50 hours preparing for creating it paid off.
Great video. Thank you for this.
You have made some really good points! Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us!!!
11:38 For your Tom gun Fantasy book sounds so cool! I had an idea for the food thing, what if there were caves in the spires and there is this special algae or plant that grows in it. There are springs for water in these caverns and maybe there is a special element in each aspire that help the planes fly?👀😅 just a thought. Love the video!
I was stuck in the worldbuilding hole for a while. I was convinced I had to build the entire continent at minimum, the governments of each nation, how each nation acts/feels towards each other nation, detailed history, climate history, etc. For a year I delayed any actual writing in favor of such worldbuilding. It wasn't until I sat down and had the realization that my story is never going to be about those things, as it's a personal story about an individual's inner struggle.
15:06 I find it easier to keep the dialogue in mind but not overthinking it, as in modern dialogue fits most eras if we don't include much slang. For example "I gotta go" feels complex to fit in a medieval era at first but it's literally just saying "I must go" and it's gone. I'd find myself overthinking stuff like "I shalt leave, now" 😂
12:00 what if the spires work like hades in greek mythology, where if you eat the food there you can't leave, but the food also cures hunger on some level? Generations of people who would probably love to go elsewhere but can't. This would imply there is somewhere else that is not spires though.
Another gem, thanks. Another note in my PKM.
I've made quite a few of these mistakes originally when I first started seriously writing. Especially #2 and #3. I actually made corrections for this immediately when I switched gears to what I'm writing now!
I find it very interesting that you mentioned your world with tall spires, and then you mentioned fungus and mushrooms. When you were describing your city on those rocky spires, I He was thinking that everyone could grow some sort of specialized food mushrooms, in their basements. It could be that all the mushrooms need to grow is moist air. The moist air could come through special ventilation (structural engineering) that provides the dark, damp, and well ventilated air that the mushrooms need.
I’m glad you said what you did about language. I can’t stand how so many modern fantasy and Sci Fi shows that take place either hundreds if not thousands of years in the past or future use the term “speak your truth.” Nobody talked like until the early 2000s and am I to believe people will still talk like that in a hundred year!?! It’s so lazy
On the other hand, I kind of disagree with you. Stories are written to be read be real life people in the modern world, and most readers don’t want to spend 90% of their reading time and energy translating every last thing. Having a few unique phrases and idioms and stuff in your story definitely helps with worldbuilding, but overdoing it to the point that it’s hard to understand can be incredibly annoying and off putting to most readers. You’re likely do drive away the majority of potential readers and only have a tiny handful of the most diehard nerdy fans interested in that type of niche.
It’s not objectively a bad thing to do if you’re okay with that option, but it is not doing yourself any favors for marketability.
A lot of readers read scifi or medieval fantasy with the understanding that most things go through a “translation filter” for ease of access for the reader. The character didn’t really say “heimlich maneuver” because Henry Judah Heimlich didn’t exist in that world.
@@x_MoonlitShade I’m not talking about writing in Gaelic or 1611 English. Game of Thrones, Vikings, Battlestar Galactica, the Last Kingdom, etc. were all popular shows that didn’t use modern lingo and ideology. Sure, they could’ve used a lot less modern types of curse words on Game of Thrones but other than that it had an authentic feel to it. It’s the same with novels. All you have to do is work a little harder to explain things. Otherwise you are pandering to a very small audience. If something sounds too modern and it’s not in a modern setting, I don’t read it. There’s a lot of others like me. You can have a middle ground instead of alienating one group for another
You bring up a good point about going deeper about writing about what interests you. I’ve always been a fan of animals and studying nature. So I’ve been writing a story about druids, who have been known to harness the power of nature. But as I
researched more, I realize that real life druids had a complex history that I can draw inspiration from. And it also helped enhanced the themes of my story. Plus, I have a better grasp of how my story starts and ends. So I can think of the nuances of the world after I write it down. Now, the hard part is just writing the damn thing down. XD. If you’d like to know more, I’d love some Feedback.
What is the plot of your story? Some people in the comments have quite intriguing concepts I get the desire to ask about.
@@janedrowned Thank you for asking. The plot is about a boy named Noah. His mother gets infected with a supernatural plague called the Fae-Blight: which causes people to lose control of their Druidry and mutate into monsters. Luckily, he meets a mysterious boy named Barry, Who can turn into a Fae himself. So the two go to a Druid academy to learn how to use their powers properly so they (chiefly Noah) can find a way to stop the Fae Blight.
Sounds like a fun concept! 👍🏻
I toyed with the idea of writing a fantasy/science fiction novel many times, but I never did it. Not only because of laziness or fear, but also because I realized that I'm not cut out to be a author. I wrote a few short stories and published them in internet forums and got positive responses, but I realized that I am really a "world building and big picture guy" who is almost exclusively interested in that aspect and in big ideas about how worlds could look like and function and am barely interested in characters. Apparently I can write convincing and interesting dialogue, but A: it is always a boring chore and B: I have a hard time staying focused and on point.
This realization that I just don't give a shit about characters and their struggles and arcs is what kept me from writing a book. In my short stories I always only used the characters as vehicles and tools for the world building and for communicating the world to the reader. You can get away with that in a short story, but not in a novel or even a trilogy or series of novels, I think.
I've never been a writer, but around the start of the year I somewhat came to the conclusion that what I want from my life is to tell a decent story. To aid that along I bought a notebook on which I can jot down random story and world building ideas as they occur to me.
I've long been an avid watcher of story analysis videos and even used to write small background stories for my characters in my hobby of Bionicle building. Somewhere down the road that part of the hobby kinda died, but I guess somewhere deep down the ashes seek embers still.
I'm not sure when I'll find myself in a stable enough position to sit down and write (or where to publish the story), as the whole idea of writing feels still very foreign to me, and my life is in I suppose a transitionary phase, but I hope I can get into a better vantage point in a timely manner.
With 1, you can worldbuild before you make a story. In that case the advice is to match the right story to the world you've created.
Another point I want to make is big before small. Details are irrelevant until you have at least figured out the how the setting as a whole works and the consequences of those decisions. This aren't things you necessary have to explain to your readers, but are critical for you as the author to design a consistent world.
I would add one extra thing - make sure your backstory makes sense.
With regards to your fighter pilots in spires setting, this is essentially Jim Butcher's Cinder Spires series, but with airships instead of fighter planes. And he answers a lot of those questions you asked, which is part of why i love the setting so much.
Love the food question! I’m always wondering about that whether irl or enjoying a good book/movie, or world building
It's always educational and motivating to watch your videos. Thank you 🙏
Thank you!
Some excellent advice. Regarding your point of our modern references to hours and minutes not being that talked about even a few hundred years ago, also a very good point. But I will offer an excerpt from the notes that Pauline Matarosso wrote for her translation of the Thirteenth Century work, "The Quest of the Holy Grail."
"The Medieval day was marked off into three-hourly sections which corresponded to the canonical hours of the Breviary. The first, prime, was normally fixed to 6 a.m., the second, terce, corresponded to 9 a.m., sext to midday, none to 3 o'clock in the afternoon, vespers to 6 p.m., while compline was the office sung before retiring."
This was... motivational, for me personally.
I'm a new writer, and I've bitten off far more than I may ever be able to chew with a personal project that's constantly on the back burner and laying in wait, it might be there for years at this rate and I don't worry so much about "finishing" it, but I do struggle with sinking my teeth into it, and making it "mine" so to speak.
It's a giant fantasy world that I want to someday tell multiple stories from, and it's one of my favorite pastimes to sink my inspirations into by keeping notes for it's worldbuilding, but I've certainly spread myself thin before while working on it.
More great tips my dude! Great timing too as I’m worldbuilding!
Thanks! What would you say you struggle with the most when it comes to worldbuilding?
@@Jed_Herne I’d honestly say everything. Sort of just overwhelmed and not sure where to start. So I’m basically just vomiting a heap of ideas and trying to sort it into something useful. Really liked your point of having everything deeply entwined though, so I’m going to start thinking about that!
This really helped a lot. I’m trying to repair a story I’ve written about a king who’s lost everything and is trying to help as many people as he can, it’s basically a bible of lore and timeline to explain, but this helped a lot. Maybe I can also use this to repair my story about an anarchist fitting into a new state of life
Good luck!
I second the praise for Gutter Prayer. Highly recommended!
Haven’t actually got around to sitting down and getting a solid start on the writing part, but I have imagined up what I feel will be a really good story. And seeing this reassures me that I haven’t made any mistakes in creativity.
Would you be ok with people giving you ideas for that one story of yours with the cities built on pillars? The one you talk about at 11:16. Because I had several. Vertical farms are a thing so you could use that for the story but change them a bit. Maybe these cities have bred a type of vine that runs down the spires that can grow them food. The lower the vines go the more food the city gets but the more risk of monsters climbing up the vines and attacking the city is. This will give a risk reward dilemma for each city. Some will be riskier than others and some will choose unwisely.
Farming them with planes would be hard so they could use helicopters as harvesters. Which could be easy targets for planes because they are slower. Pesticides could help with small numbers of insects and birds that would eat the vines but not large swarms of them. The planes seem to be WW2 in design from the picture so they could use the propellers to kill swarms. If they come to a city the planes can protect them from swarms too. If there is a swarm and bandits or pirates then the city would have to make an uncomfortable choice between having their stuff taken or food eaten or splitting their forces up and risking not being able to stop either. Pirates could plan attacks around this if they are smart.
Here is a video about farming that could give you some inspiration.
Is Aquaponics the Future of Agriculture?
ruclips.net/video/59kk4OjJCj4/видео.html
Maybe because there is so little space on top of the pillars fish are super rare. So the pillars that have ponds on them are considered wildlife preserves and aren’t built upon. That way if a city has all its fish die they have a place to get more. Having green spaces is also good for humans so they could visit these places. Though too many people would affect the preserve so maybe there is a lottery to see who gets to go to them and leave the cramped concrete cities for a while.
A different question you could ask is what do the planes use for fuel. You could make it so the mist is what they use as fuel. This way refueling is riskier as well. If a plane is in a dog fight and is low on fuel they have to make a decision. End the fight quickly and risk being an easy target without fuel if they don’t or go down to get more fuel and put themselves and their opponent at risk of being attacked by monsters. If a plane runs out of fuel outside of a fight they aren’t safe either. Engines need a precise mixture of fuel and oxygen.
So if a plane glides into the mist not only are they an easier target for monsters due to their speed but of not being able to get back up. It takes time to pick up speed and in that time the plane can go too deep into the mist and become submerged in it. The intake for air will be covered and just bring more mist into the engine instead of air, flooding it. With too much fuel and not enough oxygen the engine won’t work. The plane will keep falling until it hits the ground where no one can survive the monsters. I guess if the mist was fuel then humans wouldn’t be able to breathe it in either. An oxygen tank could fix both of these problems but if a bullet hits the tank oxygen will be released everywhere. And oxygen is very good at making fires and explosions bigger and maybe not something you want on a fighter plane.
There could be big cargo planes that are designed to collect the mist safer. Then store it in the cities. The planes will need a place to land at the cities so runways could be on the sides of buildings hanging over the sides of the pillars to save space on the pillars.
Another question is where do people get metals from? Metal is in the ground and there isn’t a lot of that around. So do people need to go farther and farther away to mine pillars? Or are there groups that go into the mist to mine while fighting monsters? Most call them crazy but they call others boring. Over generations the miners have evolved and can now survive the mist minutes without oxygen. Some can even breathe the mist who are thought to be destined for greatness. They are also taller, stronger and have bullet resistant skin from fighting monsters with their bodies. This is the opposite to the flyers who have gotten shorter to not weigh their planes down making them faster. Miners are the only ones who have ground vehicles which are tanks. They get motion sickness at high speeds so aren’t good at flying. But outside of a plane people want a miner on their side in a fight. They are few in number due to dying to monsters more than flyers.
There is also the question of why people are resorting to becoming bandits or pirates. Did a city try to get the mist up their pillar by using a pipe and monsters climbed up it, or did they let their vines grow too long, and the monsters destroyed the city. Then the people that ran away tried to get into other cities but they were full and were turned away. Some tried to build on a wildlife preserve and got attacked by the nearest city. Angry at everyone they decided to steal from others. Do they raise their kids to do the same? Do they have blimps as homes and to launch their planes from? The miners would have blimps too but stay closer to the mist. Pirates disguise themselves as miners to get close to cities.
It is a cool idea for a story you have. I can think of many interesting things that could happen in it. It’s a world with hard choices that always has trade offs.
As an aspiring soon to be writer with a huge fantasyish story waiting to be told I may be biting off more than I can chew…however…my world isn’t overly complex. I will plan to make full use of all my worldbuilding elements.
I am trying to work on my first story now. Emphasis on trying because I have tried several times before only to crash and burn, which I think happened because of mistakes such as world building and overwhelming myself with trying to do too much. For my current story I have kept it simple. Even though this story takes place on a fictional world, it is 'Earth-like' with the same kind of rules, boundaries, and laws of physics. I also kept it confined to a city. The reader will know that there are other cities, lands, and nations, but the entirety of the story is told in first person view of the protagonist and within the city she is in.
It's comforting to know when watching a lot of these 'avoid these mistakes' types of videos that I am already doing it simply using the knowledge I've obtained over the years since my last attempt. I really hope I can see this one to the end.
I read Mörk Borg recently. It was very short, rich worldbuilding that I will take notes from.
Actually good and actionable advice. I've seen too many videos that are generic tips. Thank you for your insights and opinions. I'll be taking in most of it, if not all.
Thanks
I once saw a class that Brandon Sanderson taught(it was one of those free classes you could watch on You Tube or something or other), and he said that all you have to do is take three aspects of your world(clothing, architecture, religion, magic, animals, etc...) and fully flesh them out, and your world will feel complete, which is pretty much what you said here. Subscribed because you are incredibly entertaining to watch.
Im glad i've found a writing expert. It helped me rethink about the novel im currently writing. Your book really helped out a lot, and I will make the best out of it. Just like lord of the rings, my world is basically at a standstill until my protaganist and her companions go through them one by one. I really am thankful to have found you in my recommandations.
Regarding time, you may want to look into the contributions ancient Sumer made in that field. Our time system is a lot older than 400 years.
I do agree with basically every point except the last point. I think asking a writer to try and be original and unique is going to lead them to a dead end. Most ideas have been done already and to say to someone that your writing will be good only if you try to be original is advice that isn't going to pan out. Instead I think it is better to give the advice, that you somewhat touched upon, to write something you care about. You have to write what you are interested in and not what others are.
I think better advice about originality would be "Find a way to mix together ideas already done that you like in a way you've never seen or heard of it mixed together."
Probably a better way to word it, though.
@@mattpace1026 that still isn't great. Because the advice hinges on the idea that originality is what a writer should strive for. Which isn't what they should do. A writer should strive to do something they want to do and make it good. Even if it is unoriginal.
@@Knight1029 So, you would be perfectly fine with someone just blatantly ripping off other people, as long as they wanted to just do the exact same story someone else did?
You're just trying to justify your own attempts to rip off someone else's story, aren't you?
@@mattpace1026 what? What are you talking about? When did I ever say it was fine ripping someone off? All I said is that if someone wanted to do something like a hero's journey or a something tropey then that is fine.
@@Knight1029 That is not what you said. You said writers should not try to be original at all. You're backpedaling because someone figured out your laziness.
My best friend is currently writing her first fantasy novel, and I'm glad to see she's not making any of these mistakes.
i want to make a game that has a deep world build, and this helps tremendously!! thank you Jed!!
I disagree about time. I will say, a serf in a medieval society isn't going to have a clock, but cities, might. Farmer on the edge of might refer to morning, midday, and evening, but someone living within the city walls of a castle would be aware of time. No, I'll be there before midday when its morning when they mean one hour. And while it might be slightly anachronistic to use that kind of language to help the reader understand the passage of time within a novel.
In the medieval period, there were many religious houses, where the clergy were called to observe religious practices throughout the day and night by bells which would have been heard by townspeople and villagers at regular times. Not a clock exactly, but a way to break up time.
so not a writer in a traditional sense but ive been building a campaign for d&d. ive shared this with other DMs to help them fill the checklist of avoiding these mistakes.
Thanks for sharing these, as a reader it make sense why recent manga, manhwa, novels that I'm reading are feeling so rough. They always do this Lore Dump and exposition at the first chapter and then forget about it the whole series. Most of the time the world building doesn't make sense or contribute to the story or characters, and using the "Fantasy and Magic" as an excuse to never explain anything about it.
That is outstanding advice for not starting to big.
This was very useful and got me appreciating some aspect of my yet unfinished first novel, but also making me rethink some others. You have gained a new subscriber. Thank you so much!
You're welcome, glad it helped
I actually did discover a context where anachronistic texts (text or a way of writing not belonging to the period the content takes place in) that worked really well, sort of. It was essentially a lore book about a fantasy world, but written from the perspective of what was essentially an anthropologist/archaeologist who was studying the history of this world/some of its current state, and so you got the hella good world building, history from more ‘ancient’ times as well as it still being able to be written in a more modern language form. Was rather interesting.
Could you make on how to write a reincarnation fantasy novel? 😊
As someone that has spent a great deal of time fleshing out the world of my fantasy novels, I can say that there are definite roadblocks to the process. How much time one spends on their world isn't always an indication of what makes it into the draft, and oftentimes those details are there more for the author's benefit rather than the readers. Having a world in which I know about the geography, the various ways people live and work in those environments, the economy, the political structure, the nature of their own history, and even how they view other cultures through their own lenses is pivotal to walking through the world. Granted-and this is the biggest roadblock-it means spending time away from writing the novel. If a writer is prepared for that level of distraction, then it can be useful.
Certainly, we aren't expected to know the nuances of how the plumbing works, or how often some indigenous creature migrates from one location to another, but, knowing when to yadda yadda is just as important as when to NOT yadda yadda.
Very helpful points Jed! I fall prey to some of these, especially the 2nd one. The series I’m working is called ‘The adventures of jazz cat and reggae dog’, a sci-fantasy story about music and a technocracy trying to eliminate live music. The issue I’m faced with is that I’m using real world music genres such as blues, jazz, reggae, etc… but these music styles only exist because of their cultural context. So I feel that to do any kind of justice to those styles and cultures, I need to create fictional circumstances in which these styles could hypothetically arise. It’s been my biggest challenge so far in this project, and feels monstrously big to tackle. I don’t want to be insensitive to cultures and styles of music. I’d love to know your thoughts on this problem.
Maybe instead of creating an entirely new different world, you just create a split-off of this world, so that the history and everything is the same until we get to the point where there's a technocracy?
@@alyxbarter3155 That's a great suggestion, thanks for your feedback. I considered this, though, it would mean sacrificing the core of this story: that it's a world of cats and dogs hahaha (they are humanoid cats and dogs of course, but cats and dogs nonetheless). This is a sacrifice I'm unwilling to make, as this was the original seed, the inception of the entire story, and to scrap that would be to scrap the project. Thanks for your input though!
@@joshuastclairmusic What if it was an alternate world? Like a parallel dimension of sorts to our world except the creatures who live there are different. Humanoid cats and dogs could have always existed and could still have different races (breeds maybe?) and cultures.
I don’t know if this idea would fit with your story, but just a thought.
@@novastar1224 Yes, great thought! This is mostly the road I’ve taken. It still comes with a lot of complication (for example, the word ‘breed’ won’t apply in this context as it implies humans involvement in the dogs evolution, if that makes sense… so I’ve created all these different groups/races of canine and feline). It was and still is a daunting task, but I’ve been worldbuilding it pretty consistently every morning this year, chipping away at it and it’s making more sense every day.
I love reading stories where you discover the world bit by bit though the eyes of the characters. Project Hail Mary (scifi) does this very well.
What I have found works for me when worldbuilding in my current novel is almost treating it as if I were a DnD GM that is making it up as I go along but because I'm writing a book, I can just go back and set stuff up if I need to earlier in the story.
Jed: “don’t start your world too big.”
Me: “too late.”
"Anachronistic dialogue" yes. This is a problem in a lot of fantasy I've read in the past years. Most of them self-published (no judgement) but some of them even trad. You have a medieval-esque setting but the characters talk and behave like 21st century people. I think this may be because the writers and editors are trying to make it more "accessible" to that kind of target audience, but imho it actually ruins the immersion and believability of the story.
A particular comic I started reading had a good concept, but the medieval style princess felt shy about being bathed or changed by her maids, yet was fine showing her legs, etc., and was very casual. On the flip side, one of my favorite books involving time travel had a modern woman bathing, and a Roman soldier came in suspicious of if she were a runaway slave, but threw that theory out when she screamed at him to get out. Certain settings have certain expectations of characters in that setting, especially when it's their whole world, otherwise it breaks the immersion. Some stories work better elsewhere, and some are tailored to the setting wonderfully. The first example would've been far better as a more modern fantasy, and the second (I might be biased) is perfectly executed.
Great video, and I agree except with your bit about time and how it wasnt pertinent until the industrial age.
Hours have been a unit of time for centuries and even the Greeks divided their days into 12 hours and eventually 24 hours in BC times. The duration of said hours were not consistent to today, but the concept is quite old. Sundials with 12 hour markings have been found from Ancient Egypt and people from many cultures all across the ancient world needed various ways of determining time of day for prayers and rituals and even record keeping.
So for any of you other fantasy writers... hours are still in. Minutes too, the hour was first divided into 60 parts in 1000 AD
Randomly came to mind. Maybe moss and stuff that eats the moss grows around the spires right above the fog where the monsters are. So people rock climb down to harvest this moss and catch these creatures for food.
About your citys on Spiers, i didn't think of the Food or Resurces but rather where they get the space to have runways for their planes
About starting too big, I think it entirely depends on the scope of your story. If you plan on having your character explore pretty much the whole world and meating people from most, if not every culture/society, I think it is fundamental to already have a good knowledge of your own world. The problem with starting to small and then going big is that it's much easier to make your world less coherent/consistent, and that can really take a reader out of the story.
I love worldbuilding, and I'd rather start too big than too small. At worst, I've "lost time" creating parts of a world I would never use, even though it's not really lost time since I've had fun. At best, my setting is perfectly coherent and ready to have stories be told in it.
I find that Robert Jordan's the Wheel of Time is the prime example of what to do and what not to do. There is so much that people who want to be author's (of any genre) can learn from what he did right and wrong. Even in terms of breaking long running series up into different genre types to keep the story fresh and moving forward. The amount of world building he did in Eye of The World is incredible. It's even more incredible for how little he actually built. He laid the seeds for future building giving just enough information to keep the apatite wet, at the same time the first novel was very plot driven. Books two and three continue the action adventure theme while each novel focuses more and more on character building. By book four we have started the genre shift from action adventure to political drama. From there it shifts into spy thriller and spy action. Then we get exploration before shifting back into action adventure/political thriller.
The first mechanical clock was invented in the 14th cebtury several hubdred years before the industrial revelution
Auncient romans used sun dials to mesure hours So the concept that time wasnt focused on or used till the industrialcrevelution in the 1700s is complet misinformation
England has had sundials since the romans we knew about time the anglo saxons knew about hours and minutes let alone medievil england