Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions

FAQS About Worldbuilding How important is worldbuilding? How important is your story to you? People hear the word “worldbuilding” and automatically assume that the discussion is going to apply only to people who are writing science fiction and fantasy — after all, for everyone else, this is the world they’re going to be writing in, and it has already been built. That’s not the case. You’re worldbuilding when you sketch out a floorplan of the house that your character lives in so that you don’t accidentally have her bedroom on the first floor in chapter one and on the second in chapter three. You’re worldbuilding when you draw out a little map of the town in which your characters live and name the streets and decide that the corner drugstore is on the corner of Maple and Vine.

Character Trait Cheat Sheet - Kris Noel In order to create a relatable character, you must think about them as having several layers. Knowing and choosing character traits is important because you don’t want them to be one dimensional. It’s all not as simple as saying “this person is mean” or “this person is kind”. Building Stronger Story Themes By Timothy Pontious Strong stories are built on strong thematic elements, or combinations of many strong elements.

The Ultimate Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do. Writing is a muscle. Smaller than a hamstring and slightly bigger than a bicep, and it needs to be exercised to get stronger. Think of your words as reps, your paragraphs as sets, your pages as daily workouts. Let This New York Times Best-Selling Author Help You With Your Magic System Nearly every fantasy novel has magic in it. The genre is practically defined by its use of magic, and if you’re sitting down to write a fantasy novel (and we know you are, what with our Inkshares contest running right now), you need to ask yourself how magic works in your world. Happily, New York Times bestselling author Brandon Sanderson has written extensively on this topic. Sanderson, author of the Mistborn novels series and the Stormlight Archive series, has created a series of laws for making great magic systems. Sanderson knows a thing or two about making magic systems. He fashioned a metal-based magic system called “allomancy” for Mistborn, which is as exciting as superpowers.

How to Write Better: 7 Instant Fixes Does your writing stand out? Do you worry whether your writing is good enough? I can see you nodding your head. You are not alone. s Laws of Fantasy This page has three distinct parts: Watt-Evans' First Law of Fantasy: Stories are about people.Watt-Evans' Second Law of Fantasy: People are never wholly good or wholly evil, and therefore characters should never be wholly good or wholly evil.Watt-Evans' Third Law of Fantasy: The basic human motivations are universal.Watt-Evans' Fourth Law of Fantasy: Everything other than the basic human motivations will vary, depending on the cultural setting.Watt-Evans' Fifth Law of Fantasy: Magic, like everything else, has rules.Watt-Evans' Sixth Law of Fantasy: If a story can be written without a fantasy element, then don't bother with the fantasy element. Watt-Evans' Laws of Fantasy by Lawrence Watt-Evans I make my living writing, and most of what I write is fantasy.

A Poem: A Guide To Words Slut. Makes me think of glitter. I think slut is a really pretty word. Probably because I’ve heard it being used to describe a lot of really pretty people. Generating fantasy maps These are some notes on how I generate the maps for my Twitter bot @unchartedatlas, which is based on a generator I originally produced during NaNoGenMo 2015. There's JavaScript code for the generator on Github here, and the original messy Python generator code can be seen here. You may also be interested in this companion piece, which describes the placename generation. Inspiration

Creative Writing Prompts: Secrets and Lies for Your Characters Nothing is better (or more fun for the writer) than a story-relevant secret or lie. Give some dilemma beneath the surface story to give your character depth, add suspense and tension, and keep your reader turning the pages. You can drop hints throughout your writing and when the reveal comes—you will surprise, shock, and delight your reader. Creating a character with a strong internal conflict, secret, or burden makes for one compelling read! 7 Reasons Why 'Harry Potter' and 'Lord of the Rings' Should Be Required Reading in School  Having trudged through four years of high school English classes, there has unfortunately been only a small smattering of books that have actually inspired me or forced me to consider their meaning. There were the stereotypical required readings such as Romeo and Juliet and The Invisible Man, but while certainly monumental, they did not evoke a sense of amazement and love of literature. The only books that I have read in high school that left me astonished were Wuthering Heights, Crime and Punishment, To Kill a Mockingbird and Les Miserables. I felt that all the others I had to read were simply in the curriculum to fill the specified quotas (i.e. one book on race, another on religion and several from Shakespeare).