Your fantasy or science fiction world needs to be grounded in reality. You need to give as detailed a map as possible, or as you need to carry the storyline. The more background information you create about your world, even if you don’t write it into the story, it will show up in your unconscious handling of the characters and storyline.
What I mean is that you need a deep background in the world to be able to plot within it. The geography of your world is part of that deep background. It becomes the skeleton over which you can lay your story.
Geography both enables and restricts your story. You should not, for example, expect to see fur-wearing barbarian sword wielders in the milieu of a tropical island chain, except as violent invaders.
You can use the geography of your world both for and against your characters. In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, he uses the geography of Mount Caradhras and heavy snow to set up the need for the Fellowship to traverse the Mines of Moria.
In his Iceriggers Trilogy, Alan Dean Foster creates a world called Tran-ky-ky where the world is deep into an ice age, and all the oceans are frozen. His aliens, also called Tran, have skin flaps between their arms and bodies like the wings of a flying fox, and their feet have retractable claws that can act like ice skates.
Ursula K. LeGuin’s world of Earthsea is a sea and islands, with no major land masses. The cultures are pre-industrial, with high levels of sailing skills. The fact that the world is entirely islands is reflected by the fragmentation of government and culture.
In Marjorie B. Kellogg’s diptych, Lear’s Daughters, the planet Fiix is wracked by extremes of weather, which informs the entire culture and history of the world. It turns out that there are two malfunctioning, gigantic machines fighting each other instead of working together. The story takes place in the middle of the war between the two machines, Lear’s Daughters.
You can see how the world itself and its geography do more than set the stage for the novel. In Lear’s Daughters, the geography of the planet Fiix is a key element of the story. In the Earthsea novels, the islandic nature of the world is a backdrop for the action.
In many cases, you will need to create a varied geography so that the world you are building has enough variation to be seen as a real world.
In any case, the world you are building must be internally consistent.
In your world’s geography, you must also populate it with appropriate flora and fauna. A world without the insects, small animals, predators, and prey animals just doesn’t ring true. The plants and trees need to be consistent in your world, too.
Now, here’s the kicker. You will probably use less than 10% of the information you put together to design your world. Unless the geography of your world is itself a character, it is going to be seen in the background of the story as the plot progresses.
But you still have to build the entire world. If you don’t build it out entirely, your story will seem like the walls are made of cardboard. The reason for this is that the world is inside you and informs you and your writing on both a conscious and subconscious level. When you operate from within your fully built-out world, you simply can’t make a mistake based on how your world works.
Worldbuilding applies to fantasy and science fiction equally. The science needs to be plausible. Movement in space needs to conform to physics. If you are using a faster-than-light space drive, give some thought to how it might work. The same holds for faster-than-light communications. Of course, you can just borrow an existing trope, like the number of authors who have borrowed the “ansible” from Ursula K. LeGuin. Since it has a name, you may not have to explain how it works. The same holds true for magnetic or inertialess drives.
So even though you are writing mostly about characters, those characters and their actions are formed in part by the geography of where they live and where you have them acting.
While what I’ve said here is aimed at science fiction and fantasy, it could just as easily apply to mysteries, romantasy, or historical fiction. No matter what you are writing, you need to have a solid and consistent world.
Walt’s been an author and editor for fiction and nonfiction for more than thirty years. He was Editor in Chief of Eric Flint’s Ring of Fire Press and Editor of the Grantville Gazette magazine.
Currently he’s an acquisitions editor for Misti Media LLC and editor of their Nazca Press imprint. He’s edited over fifty novels and hundreds of short stories, and before that, he was an avid reader and fan.
Walt welcomes and encourages feedback and suggestions. He is also available for editing services.
