At my recent “World-building and Cultural Research for Storytelling” panel at the Filipino-Canadian Book Festival, one question asked where we start our respective worldbuilding processes. Here I’ll go into more detail about how I start worldbuilding as a sci-fi/fantasy author.
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How I start my worldbuilding process
Ninety-nine percent of the time, my novels start with a character, theme, or “what if” situation – The Quiet is Loud started with a woman with prophetic dreams predicting her mother’s death. Seeker of the Lost Song started with the idea of people who don’t remember their own history. Its sequel started when I finished writing Seeker and a totally different character slid into the proverbial room, letting me know I wasn’t finished with that world.
1) Setting
After the initial story idea, I typically figure out the setting. For me, where the idea will live is part of the story itself. I spend time on details that I feel are critical in creating a good story and believable characters. For example: What’s the climate? What are the flora and fauna? Where do people live? What do they eat? What do they wear? The answers to these questions can lead to some interesting worldbuilding-y answers
In my novel Seeker of the Lost Song, the Vetsi people grow rye and apples like in our-world Finland, but also rice and ube like in our-world Philippines. This is because its magical forest makes it possible to grow crops that normally aren’t seen together.
2) History, mythology & language
Sometimes this is where I start my worldbuilding, or sometimes it comes earlier in the process as I’m creating the characters. I’ll just freewrite the society’s history, losing myself in my imagination. Sometimes the history and mythology are based on real-world history and mythology, and in that case I’ll note what I’m changing and why. If I have to change real history that affected real people, I need to have a really good reason.
When it comes to the language and the names of people and places, I like to ground them in something from our world as well. This way I’m more confident that names will sound cohesive when necessary. However, language being incongruous is also realistic, as any English-language speaker can tell you. In my novella series, the settlers of its tidally-locked planet have Earth-names like Mi-kyung and Cécile, but some have more comparatively fantastical names like Jhaeros and Ektelian. To my mind, when you spend a century and a half building your society on a far-flung planet that’s been all but forgotten by Earth, you likely won’t be beholden to Earth’s naming conventions for very long.
3) Society & daily life
Some questions I ask myself about my characters’ lives and society are: What are their jobs? Who’s in charge? What’s the class system? What’s their economy like? Not only do the answers to these questions help to develop character, but they also offer chances for delicious little societial micro-conflicts that I love. As a writer, that is.
Of course, the worldbuilding process doesn’t end there, but these are my foundational elements. I spend a lot of time on worldbuilding and I don’t have a set pathway that I go down each time, but these are the top three ways I start my worldbuilding process as a sci-fi/fantasy author.