It doesn't matter what genre you write in. Want to do a novel of the west? A medieval fantasy? A dark post-modern epic? A coming of age tale set in the here and now? While the characters are by far the central driving force in most books and short stories, the world around them can be a character in and of itself. Even if it isn't, a well-built world can add a richness to a story that draws the reader in and gets their imagination painting pictures.
The pieces that go into a world are a wide and eclectic collection of images, facts, history, legend, and pure fiction. You can start from the big picture and move inward, or start with the details and move out. Let's do the second:
- You've got your main character in mind. You may only have a few facts about them, like the basics of their appearance and some personality traits.
- This character is from a specific time period, or at least from a fictional world and era you can map to a time period. For example, maybe you're working on a medieval fantasy novel. You want to make your own world, but you're partial to the time around 1350. You can use facts about this time period to help build the setting and the kinds of things the character might encounter. Even if your world is fictional, basing it on a real time period can help to add some continuity and depth for the reader.
- This character is from a certain place within your world. They have a hometown, home province or county perhaps, and home country. All three of these items are important in determining who this character has encountered, what their upbringing might have been like (once you choose a social class, especially), what they are familiar with and what will seem alien to them. If you are building a fish out of water type story, then here is where you set the stage of "normalcy" your character conflicts against. Or, maybe your character is perfectly happy in their normal little home.
- There are other places within this world. Your character's hometown is surrounded by other towns. The province or county is surrounded by others. There are other countries in this world as well. Here is where you seriously begin to get into geography. Are you dealing with a standard kind of round planet? How are the continents laid out, generally? How much of this world is your character going to encounter, either by going there or by meeting people from other areas? How much of each continent is one country, and where are they divided up into many countries or warring nation states? (Or if you're going interstellar, here's where you start getting into other planets, solar systems, galaxies, and more.) Has your character ever been to these places? Will they ever? Do they think they ever will?
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