World building and Back story

It’s an amazing thing when you look down at your own ideas and realize you’re creating a world. It makes you feel much more like a ‘real’ writer, even when you’re, like I am, so far from even trying to be published. It’s not something I expected from myself. I always thought my stories would jump around. Worlds weren’t for me. I wasn’t that creative.

I did try to create worlds, fantasy ones, as a child, but the task was always overwhelming. There’s so much TOO a world that you have to think of, and this has plague even great fantasy and sci-fi writers to this day. In fact, while I dislike his writing personally, my biggest admiration and praise for Tolkien is that he managed to create such a large, realistic world. So, a few years ago, I gave up medieval fantasy when writing. It was too hard for me and I couldn’t see the big picture that well. I also gave it up because after 16 years of medieval fantasy I had grown bored with the genre.

So I turned my eye to modern fantasy. (I still love my magic.) I figured, here we go, no need to worry, the world is set up for me. I don’t have to worry at all. Then, to my utter surprise, when the pressure is off, I started to build my world.

This might not work for everyone. I don’t know, I can only give advice for what worked for me. The other day I learned that someone published a novel five years after she started. I always assumed if you were one of those people that said you spend x years working on something, of course it wouldn’t work, you let the project drag out too long. What do you know?

But for me, when world building, it’s nice to start small. Magic Quarter started small. At first, I just had the Themes. One word that your magic gathered around to varying strength depending on the person. Then I decided, how can this magic work with the world at large, so I decided on the magic quarter. When I sat down to actually write Jokers, I worked on it a little bit, enough to understand the setting better. I thought about what would work and how. As my characters evolved, my setting had to evolve to make sure their backstory still made sense.

Then I made a Knight character for an RP with my muse, Astrid. I wanted to use him in a story and I was trying to think, “What could motivate a knight to exist in modern times? Why would one exist, especially with the level of motivation and backstory my character has?”

That’s how my magic users got an enemy, the Knights. Now I have two sides of an ancient war. Best of all, I could switch sides as the stories demanded. Magic users were selfish and cold as a whole. Knights were over driven and close minded. Both could be villains and heroes. I like the idea of that, no clear good and evil.

The point is, I would have never come up with such an enemy for the Magic Quarter without letting the idea comes as it may. If you start small, with a set of characters and a simple setting the setting may grow as your characters grown. I believe a naturally grown world is best, it comes off as more natural.

Try not to push anything in your writing. Pushing forces blocks. While sometimes you’ll have to push yourself, you shouldn’t have to push your writing. You’d be amazed at the gifts your story can give you, so long as you treat it right.