World Building

After a discussion with a friend yesterday, I’ve been thinking about world building a lot. It’s the single most vital thing we do when we embark on a novel (or story or film). It is that first vital step that leads to everything else. If you don’t have a solid world, where can your characters, no matter how well drawn, exist?

Of course, with world building comes a host of problems. Once the world is built, if you play fair, you can’t decide to alter it because it has become inconvenient. It seems obvious, but it’s hard to do. I know that I have run flat up against some of the rules I created in the world of the Custodes Noctis and have spent some time wondering if I could ethically (well for me) just tweak the world a bit.

But then, that’s cheating.

I’ve created this world, and as much as I can’t change the world I live in to conveniently work for me—if I could I would own a Ferrari or Bugatti, my house would overlook the sea and I would not have to get up to go to work every day. Sadly, I can’t do that, and in all fairness doing it in a place I have created through writing is just the same. It’s cheating myself and more importantly my readers. It’s something you always have to consider when setting out, and as I look forward to different worlds and different series, I am eying the underlying structure of those worlds very carefully, because once in place, I can’t move them.

And I have to admit, I have a problem with writers that do just change things when they become inconvenient. It is cheating. You can’t have a world that (for a bizarre example) the sun rises in the west and all of a sudden go “well, that’s not working” and flipflop it without some reason, and some major event that actually alters the structure of the world. Just changing it is laziness, cheating, and it’s breaking every rule in the, pardon the expression, book.