Alpha SF/F/H Workshop for Young Writers » worldbuilding Thu, 23 Apr 2015 11:30:05 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Worldbuilding, Part 3: Religion and Mythology Tue, 13 Mar 2012 03:00:10 +0000 I’ve always loved reading about ancient mythologies, and creating religions and mythologies of my own is probably my favorite part of worldbuilding.  However, like government and social structure, mythology and religion are very complicated, and very easy to do wrong.  I still remember the time several years ago, when I was first starting to write my stories down, when I was frustrated by the fact that all the mythologies I created were flat, dull, unrealistic, and nowhere near as cool as the mythologies I was always reading about. Eventually, after a while of looking more closely at those mythologies, I was able to figure out what I was doing wrong and break down the basics of mythology and religion.

The first and most important part of any mythology or religion you create is that it must do what all mythologies and religions attempt to do:  It must answer at least some of the big questions of life.  Why am I here?  Where did I come from?  Where did the world come from?  What comes after death?  These are questions that everyone asks, at some point or another, and in the absence of an answer, people will come up with answers of their own.  Even if, for example, in your world, even the gods don’t know what happens after death, people will still come up with answers to believe in.  It’s human nature to want to answer questions.  A religion that doesn’t at least try to answer any of those questions doesn’t make sense, and a society where people are content to sit back and make no attempt to answer those questions isn’t going to be realistic.

When creating a mythology or religion, you need to come up with answers to the big questions (a creation myth, an afterlife), you need to create the gods, and you need to figure out what roles the gods play and how they are worshiped.  It can also help to come up with a few myths and stories about the gods, if they’re going to play a major role in your story.

First off, creation myths.  You have a fair bit of freedom when it comes to creation myths, as they tend to differ quite a lot from mythology to mythology, though there are some similarities.  Generally, it involves some sort of void, and then life suddenly springing from the void.  After being born, these beings then somehow created the world and either found or created the other gods, and then life was created.

The afterlife is another major thing that you have to figure out in religion.  There will almost always be alternate afterlives depending on what you did in life.  Usually this takes the form of a judgment in the afterlife, like the traditional heaven and hell.  There are also mythologies and religions that believe that the soul is reincarnated, and I’m sure there are plenty of other, less well known ideas.

As far as the gods themselves go, one major thing that you need to keep in mind is that people worship gods that represent things that are important to them.  Death, for example, is important to all cultures, so many cultures have a god of death.  Other common themes are wisdom and knowledge, war and battle, things like the sky, earth, and sea, fertility and motherhood, love, weather, fire, and trade.  Most cultures will have gods representing one or more of these things.  Depending on the culture, different gods will be more prominent.  For example, Odin is the god of war (among other things) in Norse mythology, and he’s also the king of the gods, which indicates that war was important to the Norse culture.  Another example would be that a god of water would likely be extremely important and high ranking in a sea based or desert nation, but less so in other cultures.  If, for example, you wanted to write a sci-fi story involving gods, the gods would probably be completely different from the gods in a fantasy story.  You might have gods of spaceships and FTL, or gods of big organizations, or gods of stars, or gods of things like fusion and entropy.  It all depends on what’s important to the culture.

Another key factor in creating a pantheon of gods is figuring out what roles the gods play, relative to each other.  Some pantheons might be very structured, with a clear leader and stable, unchanging hierarchy.  Other pantheons might change constantly, as old gods die and new gods are born, and as one god usurps the rule of another.   Others might have a sort of council where everyone has equal say, and still others may have no order to them at all.  Just make sure that you understand how the gods relate to one another, and that their society makes logical sense.

You also need to figure out what relationship the gods have with mortals.  Do they regularly walk the earth, or do they stay in their own divine realm?  Do they ever speak to their high ranking priests or the leaders of the nations that worship them?  Do they care about their worshipers and help them when they can, or are they ambivalent?  Do they ever have children with mortals?  Do they choose who will rule their worshipers?  Are the gods themselves truly immortal, or are they merely ageless?  What happens when a god dies?

One last, important thing you need to figure out if gods are going to play a large role in your story is why they need worshipers.  A lot of people seem to forget this.  Why do the gods need worshipers?  Why can’t they just do everything themselves?  You need to somehow put limits on the powers of the gods.  There’s the common explanation that gods need prayer, and they get stronger the more worshipers they have, but that still doesn’t explain why the gods need worshipers to do things for them, and it’s been done a lot.  This doesn’t mean you can’t use it, but there are other ways.  Maybe the world was nearly destroyed in a divine war thousands of years ago, so the gods made a pact not to interfere with the world anymore, so they need mortals to do their bidding.  Maybe the gods are simply unable to manifest in the mortal world very well.  Maybe they’re vulnerable in the mortal world, so they don’t like to manifest there unless they really have to.  Or maybe there are no such limits, and the world is torn by divine war, and it’s all the mortals can do to try to hide and pray for their gods to protect them from the other gods.

And that’s it for the worldbuilding posts. If you have any tips of your own for creating mythologies, let us know in the comments!

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Worldbuilding, Part 2: Government and Society Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:40:00 +0000 In my last post on worldbuilding, I only talked about the basics.  In this post, I’ll go into more detail on a few aspects of worldbuilding, mainly government and social structure.

The most important part of creating realistic societies in a fantasy world is, in my opinion, research.  You can either directly base your societies off of real world societies, or you can take bits and pieces from here and there, or you can create your own society mostly from scratch, as long as you know how a society works.  You won’t have to go into much detail on societies in many stories, but there are plenty of other stories where you will need to, and it can really show if you don’t know what you’re doing.

As far as research goes, you can learn about ancient cultures, look at modern day politics, or read books such as Machiavelli’s The Prince (which I found very helpful for understanding how people can gain and keep power).  You don’t have to do a ton of research, unless you’re writing a novel full of political intrigue or something like that, but just knowing how your society works can go a long way.

There are lots of elements to creating a realistic society, and a lot of things that you need to figure out.  Even for something as simple as a little fishing town, there will still be different classes, different roles that must be filled, and people who are in charge.

What is the class structure like in your society?  Is there a middle class, or is there a small group of elite and lots of poor?  How big is the divide between classes?  These are things that you have to figure out.  Generally, a society with a middle class and less of a divide between classes is a nicer place to live for the average person than one with lots of very poor people and a few very rich, and is considered a more ideal society.  You also need to figure out what roles the people play in a society.  In less wealthy, less advanced, and less ideal societies, a lot of people will have to be farmers.  There usually need to be some craftsmen as well, and of course there are those who are in charge and some sort of law enforcement.  In a more advanced society, there will be less farmers and general labor workers and more people like scientists, artists, and engineers.  If the society has a standing army, there will also be soldiers.

Another thing that you need to think about is how warlike your society is.  Maybe it’s a peaceful little village that’s never had to deal with more than little skirmishes.  Maybe it’s an average nation that neither actively seeks out war and conquest, nor completely avoids it.  Maybe it’s a great warlike nation that crushes its enemies beneath its heels and is feared by all its neighbors.  All of those societies would have a different military and attitude towards war.  Peaceful and pacifist societies would probably have very few, if any, trained soldiers, and may only have a few weapons aside from hunting weapons.  Some societies may ask their lower class to train in combat a bit in their very limited free time and then draft them into an army when war comes.   Very warlike societies may make it mandatory that every able citizen train as much as possible to be a fighter (Sparta would be a good example of this).  A society may or may not have a standing army, depending both on how warlike they are and how wealthy and advanced they are (the less people who have to be farmers, the more people who can be full time soldiers).

Another important thing that you need to figure out if how the government works.  Who’s in charge, and how did they come to power?  How do those who are in charge keep power?  Is it a democracy or a monarchy?  Is the society largely controlled by the people, the nobility, the rich, or the church?  Are the leaders oppressive or fair?

It can be useful to think about how the government was formed and how it was changed over time.  If the government you’re creating is a democracy, why is it that?  Is that the norm of the world?  Is it a unique and new idea?  Was it put into place after a cruel monarchy was overthrown?  If your government is a monarchy, how is the monarch chosen?  Is it the standard hereditary monarchy, or something different?  Does the monarch have absolute power, or are they more of a figurehead?  Maybe it’s neither a monarchy or a democracy, and the nation is completely run by the church or the rich, or maybe it’s something completely different.  You just need to make sure that those in charge could realistically ascend to and keep power.

There are many ways that the government could keep power.  The two main ones, as Machiavelli put it, are fear and love.  There are various ways that either or both of these can be achieved.  Love is more straightforward than fear.  If a government treats its people well, protects them from outside dangers, lets its people have some power (or believe that they have some power), and/or recently replaced a much worse government, it can likely gain at least some love from its people, which will keep them from wanting to overthrow it.  Fear can be used in many different forms.  It can be the fear of external threats in the absence of the government, the fear of the government and military itself, the fear of the change that would be caused if the government were overthrown or the fear that something worse could take its place, or many other things.  A government almost always needs one or more of those elements of either fear or love to stay in power, and if the people grow to hate the government and don’t fear it, or if that fear was suddenly stripped away, chances are they will attempt to overthrow it.

Another very important part of many societies is religion, which I haven’t covered in this post.  The next post is about religion, gods, and mythology, and I’ll cover the role religion plays in society and government in that post.

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Basics of Worldbuilding Mon, 02 Jan 2012 22:29:36 +0000 All stories happen somewhere.  Whether your story is highly advanced sci-fi, sword and sorcery fantasy, urban fantasy, or any of the other many subgenres of speculative fiction, chances are you’ll have to do at least a bit of worldbuilding.  How much worldbuilding you do depends on the story, how long it is, and where the plot takes the characters.  Novels will generally require a lot more worldbuilding than short stories, for example.  How much worldbuilding you do also depends on your writing style; some people don’t do very much worldbuilding at all, only as much as the plot requires them to, and some people (myself included) do tons and tons of worldbuilding, much more than is actually required for the story.

Both of these approaches work, as long as they both meet the basic requirements for worldbuilding:  Your story needs to feel like it’s happening somewhere, that there’s something beyond just the central conflict of the story, and not like the characters are just walking around in a plain, grey, featureless field of blandness.  The world needs to have flavor, and it needs to feel like it could be real.  However, you also don’t want to bog down your story with too much information on the world.  You don’t want to have tons of references to that city over there that you never see and that plays no role in the story, and you don’t want to go into detail about how the complex government system works if it isn’t important to the plot.  Generally, stories are about the characters, not the world they live in.

The most important things about worldbuilding, in my opinion, are these:  Know how much worldbuilding to use in your story, as I outlined above.  Try to be at least a bit original–usually, readers aren’t going to be super thrilled about a story set in a generic fantasyland that looks like it came right out of the Dungeons and Dragons core rulebooks.  The best way to make sure your world is original and hasn’t been done to death is to read a lot.  And lastly, you want the world to feel real, like it could actually function even if it has magic or advanced technology or whatever.  One of the most important ways to make a world feel real is to think about the logical consequences of the ways your world is different from our own.

Logical consequences are what should happen when you add something strange to a world.  If you decide that everyone in your world can fly, don’t just leave it at that.  Think about what would happen if everyone could fly.  How would transportation change?  What would combat be like?  etc.  A good example of logical consequences would be the effects of the many years long seasons in A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin:  Everyone fears the coming of winter.  They have to stock up tons and tons of food in the summer to survive the winter.  Many aspects of their society are built around how to survive the long winters.  When you introduce something magical or not of this world into your world, you need to think about how it would affect the world.  I find it very annoying if I’m reading a book, and the writer comes up with some neat concept that would have interesting effects on the world, and then doesn’t even bother to figure out the logical consequences.

Research can help a ton.  I did a lot of research on economics, for example, when I decided that I wanted time to be currency in one of the novels I’m writing.  You can also ask friends and fellow writers what they think the logical consequences of something would be, as they may come up with something that you had never thought of before.

That’s just the very basics of how to worldbuild, and what to think about while worldbuilding.  In the next few posts in this series, I’ll talk more about what to actually put in your world.  Next up is governments and social structure.

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