Geography rules our lives. In my area, an inlet of the Pacific Ocean, Puget Sound, dominates the landscape. Numerous rivers, two decently large mountain ranges, a bunch of volcanoes, and innumerable lakes and ponds impede travel in this part of the world. We are forced to build roads that follow these obstacles, go around them, or climb the lowest passes.
Here, the shoreline of Puget Sound determines the path of the interstate highway. The major cities and towns are located where there are good deepwater ports.
The roads wind around these obstacles and add to the distance we must travel, increasing the time it takes to go from one place to another. In this part of the world, we cross bridges every day.
Building even rudimentary log bridges requires engineering, but humans have been making them since before we discovered fire. If you want your log to stay put, you must drop it where
- It won’t roll away.
- It won’t be washed away.
- It will bear your weight.
- It will reach the other side with enough clearance that you can safely travel across it without its falling into the chasm or water.
If you are designing a fantasy world, you might want to make a pencil-drawn map. Place north at the top, east to the right, south to the bottom, and west to the left. Those are called cardinal points. Placing the north at the top and the directions east, south, and west following at 90-degree intervals in the clockwise direction is standard in modern maps.
Even if your story is set in a town, a map will help you avoid contradictions. Knowing which direction they are going at the outset is critical if your characters travel from one spot to another. The lines and scribbles you add to your map are the information you can use to check for consistency in your narrative.
I use a pencil so I can easily make changes to my map as the story evolves during revisions. My first maps for any given novel aren’t fancy. But I do suggest you lay your map out like a standard real-world map.
Forests and meadows like water. The climate of an area will be affected by the placement of mountains. Mountain ranges running north and south create what is known as a rain shadow.
This is demonstrated by the radical difference in climate and fauna within my state of Washington. Wikipedia says:
The high mountains of the Cascade Range run north-south, bisecting the state. In addition to Western Washington and Eastern Washington, residents call the two parts of the state the “Westside” and the “Eastside,” “Wet side” and “Dry side,” or “Timberland” and “Wheatland,” the latter pair more commonly in the names of region-specific businesses and institutions. These terms reflect the geography, climate, and industry of the land on both sides of the Cascades. [1]
A river may emerge from a mountain spring or a glacier, but it will flow downhill to a valley where it will either continue on to the ocean or will pool and form lakes and ponds. Farms are usually situated on flood plains or near sources of water.
Access to water is crucial to life and prosperity. Humans have long understood the value of clean water for drinking, and you can’t count on getting that from streams or pools. Wells and the technology to make them have been around for a very long time. Cisterns have too, collecting rainwater for drinking and irrigation.
The oldest reliably dated well is from a neolithic site on the island of Cyprus. It has been dated to around 8400 BC and consists of a round shaft driven through limestone. The well tapped into an aquifer at a depth of 8 meters or 26 feet.
On your fantasy map, rivers, mountains, lakes, and ponds will impede travel, forcing a road to go around them.
Those detours will add to the distance and increase the time it takes to travel using whatever the common mode of transportation is for your chosen level of technology.
Having a realistic grip on the length of time it takes to go places is critical to keeping the narrative believable. I keep a calendar of events for each novel, which has saved me several times.
Maybe you aren’t artistic, but you want a nice map for your book. The little scribbled map you make to keep your narrative logical will enable a map artist to provide you with a beautiful and accurate product. An artist can give you a map containing the information readers need to enjoy your book.
Are changing seasons a part of your story?
In a first draft, it’s challenging to fit the visual world into a narrative without dumping it on the page because you are in the process of inventing it. Don’t worry about fine details when you are laying down the story. Go ahead and write “It was autumn” when you have an action scene that must be shown.
A blunt statement like that is a code embedded there for you to expand on in the second draft. It is there to enable you to get the story out of your head and move on.
However, in the revision process, I take those three words, it was autumn, and change them up, using them to lead into the action.
Ivan drew his cloak around himself, listening to the soft rattling of branches moving with the breeze. The occasional calls of night birds went on around him, as if he weren’t full of doubt and indistinct fears, as if he didn’t exist to them. Leaves fell, brown and harvest-dry, drifting, spiraling down to the forest floor.
When it comes to geography, the “three S’s” of worldbuilding are critical: sights, sounds, and smells. Those sensory elements create what we know of the world. What does your character see, hear, and smell? Taste rarely comes into it, except when showing an odor.
Moira slipped the egg into the bag. It was the smallest but was far heavier than she’d thought. It took all her strength to carry it back to the entrance. She moved from boulder to boulder until she disappeared into the shrubbery. At last, hidden in the thick undergrowth, she breathed deeply. The metallic aftertaste of terror and bitter air lingered in her imagination, overriding the musty scents of earth and leaves and the rank odor of dragon scat.
Now she had to wait until the beast returned and went back inside its lair. Moira wrapped herself and the egg inside her cloak, blending into the underbrush. “Don’t worry, little one. I’ll keep you safe and warm.” She felt justified in her theft; the little dragon would never have survived the hatching frenzy. The others would have devoured it.
In my part of the world, the native forest trees are mostly Douglas firs, western red cedars, hemlocks, big-leaf maples, alders, cottonwood, and ash. Because I am familiar with them, these are the trees I visualize when I set a story in a forest.
My husband and I once drove from Olympia Washington to Grand Marais, Minnesota. After leaving the rolling prairies of North Dakota, we went through many miles of birch forests—something I had never seen. I was surprised at how short the vast woodlands we passed through were as compared to the dizzying heights of the forests near my home.
Those birch trees were nowhere near as tall as the giant cedars and Douglas firs I was familiar with. But once you were away from the road, the birch forests became dark jungles, tangled and mysterious.
Cities have complex geography and an environment that is theirs alone. It is created by the city’s original terrain and the materials its founders used to develop the architecture. Tall buildings loom, creating canyons through which we must pass on our way to wherever.
The odors and sounds of modern 21st-century life are essential components of worldbuilding in a contemporary novel. Cell phones, the bells and alerts of appliances, traffic sounds—we live in a noisy world. The way the streets sound to pedestrians is a crucial element of modern city life.
But villages have always had sounds and smells that are unique to human habitations. We have always created communities where resources are plentiful, but over time, climate changes. When it does, we adapt.
History and geology tell us that what was once a good place may become a desert over time. Your narrative will mention all the terrain your characters must deal with, and a little map scribbled on notepaper will help you keep things on track.
Next up: Visualizing the flora and fauna of the world. No matter where your story is set or the era it is set in, there will be life of some sort–even on a moon where you are that life.
Previous in this series: Worldbuilding part 1 – Checklist for Creating Societies
Credits and Attributions:
[1] Wikipedia contributors, “Washington (state),” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Washington_(state)&oldid=1142551716 (accessed March 5, 2023).
Image: Wikimedia Commons contributors, “File:Well-cistern.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Well-cistern.jpg&oldid=730998786 (accessed March 5, 2023).
We humans are tribal. We prefer an overarching power structure leading us because someone has to be the leader. We call that power structure a government.
Power structures are the hierarchies encompassing the leaders and the people with the power. Government is an overall system of restraint and control among selected members of a group. Think of it as a pyramid, a few at the top governing a wide base of citizens.
The same sort of God complex occurs among academicians and scientists. Some people are prone to excess when presented with the opportunity to become all-powerful.
Once NaNoWriMo is over, I try to shave my cast of thousands down to a reasonable level.
Take a second look at the characters in each scene and remove those with no real purpose. (Save everything you cut in a separate file—you might want to reuse these characters someday.)
What is even worse, halfway through the first draft of the second book in the series, Marta suddenly was a protagonist with a significant storyline. She actually becomes Marya’s mother-in-law in the third book. Fortunately, I was in the final stage of editing book one for publication. I immediately realized I had to make a major correction: Marta was renamed Halee.
Names are also a component of world-building. While recording Tales from the Dreamtime, a novella consisting of three fairy tales, my narrator had trouble pronouncing the names of two characters. This happened because I had written the names so they would feel foreign and look good on paper. 
Some people call this writers’ block. I think of it as a temporary lull in my creativity.
Sometimes, the problem is that your mind has seen a shiny thing, a different project that wants to be written, and you can’t focus on the job at hand. If that is the case, work on the project that is on your mind. Let that creative energy flow, and you can reconnect with the first project once the new project is out of the way.
In my real life, getting our house ready to put on the market saps my creativity, but I am muddling along. Boxes here and there, getting rid of this and that—it’s exhausting. Sometimes I don’t have the energy to write.
When we daydream, our brain is free to process tasks more effectively.
When I begin writing a first draft, I try to approach writing each scene as if I were shooting a movie. We know that each conversation is an event that must advance the story, but it must also give us glimpses of who each person is.
Having the fundamentals of the conversation to work with sharpens the scene in my mind, enabling me to frame it properly. Once I know what they are talking about and have the rudimentary dialogue straight, I add the scenery. Then, I insert the props and add the speech tags. The interaction grows, shedding more light on their relationship.
My above sample is not perfect, as it is from the first draft of a short story I never actually finished, but you get the idea. We learn more about the characters’ relationship with each other and see their place in this environment. The layers that form this scene are:
Set dressing (the props you place in the scene) shows the immediate environment. Having characters interact with props provides opportunities to insert hints that a deeper backstory exists. However, only have them interact with props that are organic or crucial to the story. This eliminates the problem of 
By beginning with the conversation and envisioning each scene as if I were filming a movie, I can flesh it out and show everything the reader needs to hang their imagination on. The reader’s mind will supply the details of the immediate setting depending on the clues I give.
Every writer knows the backstory is what tells us who the characters are as people and why they’re the way they are. At the beginning of our career, it seems logical to inform the reader of that history upfront. “Before you can understand that, you need to know this.”
But knowing this and putting it into action are two different things.
Be aware: if you are writing from an omniscient POV, this can be tricky and lead to “
Romance novels average 50,000 to 70,000 words. In shorter novels, there is no room for sweeping, epic backstories. Instead, information and backstory are meted out only as needed through conversations and internal dialogue/introspection.
Even with all the effort I apply to it, my editor will find things that don’t matter. She will gently take a metaphorical axe to it, highlighting that which doesn’t advance the story or add to the intrigue.
In many thrillers and cyberpunk novels, the faceless behemoth of corporate greed is the overarching antagonist. It can be represented by characters who are portrayed as utterly committed to doing their job and loyal to their employer. In many cyberpunk novels, the antagonists tend to be goons-in-suits, enforcers who work for the corporation.
Level 7 is a 1959 science fiction novel by the Ukrainian-born Israeli writer 
This type of psychopathic antagonist is explored exceedingly well in George Saunders’ brilliant sci-fi short story, 
When evil is a behemoth on the order of a mega-corporation or a military coup, the villains who represent it all have reasons for their loyalty. They’re like the hero; they care intensely, obsessively about something or someone. They have logical motives for supporting what we are portraying as the enemy. Our job as authors is to make those deeply held justifications the driving force behind their story.
Artist: Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902)
Volume control is a crucial part of the overall pacing of your story. “Loud” deafens us and loses its power when it’s the only sound. However, like the opening movement of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, the entire range of volume can be effectively used to create a masterpiece.
Dark emotions, such as depression, can be shown through a character’s reactions to things that once pleased them. Perhaps they no longer find beauty in the things they once enjoyed.
Visceral reactions are involuntary—we can’t stop our face from flushing or our heart from pounding. We can pretend it didn’t happen or hide it, but we can’t stop it. An internal physical gut reaction is difficult to convey without offering the reader some information, a framework to hang the image on.
Conflict keeps the protagonist from achieving their goals. Significant conflicts and emotions are easy to write about. But in real life, our smaller, more internal conflicts frequently create more significant roadblocks to success than any antagonist might present.
In real life, we are drawn to certain people and get to know them better through conversations.
Good conversations and mental dialogues bring written characters to life and turn them into people we want to know, our closest friends.
Internal dialogues (rambling thoughts) are often a thinly disguised info dump in my first drafts. I seek those out in the second draft and either cut them to a line or two or eliminate them entirely. I try to avoid italics if possible, so this is how I write thoughts nowadays:
However, I have no problem understanding an accent and visualizing a character as foreign when the author consistently uses one or two well-known words that a non-native speaker might use, such as si, ja, or oui, in place of yes. Most English speakers recognize and know the meaning of these words when they see them. All it takes is a straightforward word to convey the proper foreign flavor.
The laws of grammar sometimes break down on the quantum level in conversations with our friends. This is also true of written exchanges.
Rule 3: Commas—Do not place a period between the closed quotes and the dialogue tag. Use a comma because when the speech tag follows the spoken words, they are one sentence consisting of clauses separated by a comma: “I’m here,” he said.
Conversations, both spoken and internal, light up and illuminate the individual corners of the story, bringing the immensity of the overall story arc down to a personal level.
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 
