My first world, Alden, has been built and rebuilt 4 times in an effort to learn how to work through the process of world building, most of that without any guidance at all. Alden was initially developed as a gaming world, which meant it was originally put together in a patchwork fashion without regard to any logic or common sense. Its current incarnation is more for writing stories than gaming, and is far more consistent and logical.

And that's what a world you write in must be: logical and consistent.

World building is something that every writer should and does do. Whenever you decide what's in a particular setting of any given story, you're world building. When you determine how things work, what guidelines apply to the people in a particular place and time, you are world building. Every time, every place, whether real or fictional, has its own rules. These rules govern the weather, the plants and animals, and the people. Writers who ignore this fact, and the rules of the time and place they've chosen to write in, risk writing unbelievable fiction.

If you write about Calcutta, you need to know everything you can about Calcutta because writing something that doesn't fit is sure to be noticed by someone. And if you create a world and say it has magic, but that magic doesn't affect those living in the world in some way, then your assertion that is has magic will be unbelievable and hurt your authority as "the author."

So, what will world building do for you and your writing?

First, it helps you become familiar with the time and place your story is taking place in. If it's a real place, researching for your world building will help make your story more believable, which makes it easier for readers to suspend disbelief and get into your story. World building adds depth to a story. A writer can add specific details s/he may not have known before without world building - scents, sounds, and so on, all of which make a setting more real. Precise details help draw a reader into the story, and world building helps a writer discover what details are needed to make the setting more real. In this way, world building supports a story. It helps the author make the story more complete and, in a sense, more true to itself.

There must be laws, there must be limits, and there must a price to using resources, whether that price is a mighty headache or needing to find new ways to get around because all the oil is gone. Laws, like the law of gravity, govern the universe and our little part of it. These laws place limits on what can happen, how much power we have, and so on. World building establishes these laws and the rules of what is and what is not possible in particular place and time. However, these laws and rules aren't explained in writing, they are used as a part of the story. Just imagine taking a story you're working on and removing gravity. How would your story change?

Choose your rules carefully. They set up the framework for your story and you are stuck with them until the end of the book, or trilogy, or series, or series of trilogies! Unless you show a change in the rules that govern your world, everything written in that specific place must conform to the laws used previously. If you decide all the daisies in your world are pink, you'll know better than to put a blue daisy in a vase without finding a way of explaining why it's blue. By the same token, if you suddenly make daisies blue in the middle of your story, you'll know to fix it to keep the world consistent.

Fictional worlds must make more sense and be more coherent than the real world or they come across as unbelievable. World building helps you create that coherency. Once you establish your rules, they should be broken very rarely, and there better be an explanation for the exception or believability is blown. In this way, world building gives you guidance as a writer. Spur of the moment things are great fun to add, but you'll know which ones not to use by whether or not they fit into your world's guidelines. In the end, everything will fit together and work together to create a vivid, believable background for your stories. The reader will see how the world works.

World building also gives characters depth. We are products of our interaction with our environments, and our environments determine a lot about us. Most of us would find living in medieval times pretty inconvenient, but that's because we live in a world where life easier. We have appliances that make keeping a home easier, microwaves that make cooking food faster, and so on. But with these conveniences, we also have other prices we pay: pollution from vehicles, for example. Places and characters are given a sense of history through world building. How various members of society react to certain events is often determined by what has happened before. But without world building, it's difficult, at best, to determine what marks history has left to influence reactions to new events.

I highly recommend the following books that show how world building can be interwoven into a story to enhance the story. Truthfully, you could not remove the world building that had to be done to write these stories without damaging the stories themselves, the setting is that integral to them.

The Empire Trilogy by Raymond E Feist & Janny Wurts:
Daughter of the Empire
Servant of the Empire
Mistress of the Empire

And The Coldfire Trilogy by C.S. Friedman:
Black Sun Rising
When True Night Falls
Crown of Shadows

The Coldfire Trilogy is not as interwoven as the Empire books, but they show the direct affect of a particularly unusual world on its inhabitants. They are fantasy, but I recommend you give at least the first book in each trilogy a shot, even if you don't read fantasy. One way of learning about how certain aspects of writing impacts stories is to read how other authors have used them.

Work on your world building when it works best for you. Some authors prefer to world build before they get a single word of their story down. Others wait till they are almost ready to polish the manuscript before tucking in their world building elements. What will work for you will depend on the story, the length of the story, and what you find most useful, although it's best to have it done and integrated before you reach the polishing stage. Regardless of when you start, however, you will find it an ongoing process as long as you use the same world. For example, I tend to world build through the writing process. I worked on my magic system before I developed my the basic foundations of my novel. In my third revision, I came up with a major problem and had to add to my magic system to cover that problem. I imagine my world will keep evolving as I work my way through the various novels I have planned for it--no world stays static, but that evolution will make sense based on the work I've done before.

Regardless of when you world build, there are some basic tools and guidelines for world building, as well as a basic process to it.

Keep back ups and hard copies of all your work. Find a way to organize them that makes them easy to go through and find what you need when you need it. I've found the best way for me to access what I want and keep it all in a fairly organized manner is to use notebooks. Right now, Alden has four notebooks dedicated solely to the world and a fifth dedicated to characters. And keep backups on at least one other disk.

You will need graph paper and pen or pencil or a combination thereof to create maps of the planet, the cities, even the buildings upon occasion. You really don't need a room to move locations from one chapter to the next, and a concrete map of the house will help keep everything in place.

A big part of world building is research and you will want to build a library of resources to help with your research. Resources should include online sources as well as books and magazine articles, and they should cover everything from baby names to information on specific locations and people. Some of these resources should be specific to the genre or the time period you're working in. A compilation of online sources can be found here, and I'll list the sources used for specific lessons within or at the end of each article.

Use some kind of accordion file to keep copies of those sources you can't otherwise hang onto, such as Internet based resources or library resource books that they won't lend out. Internet stuff tends to move and disappear frequently, so printed copies whenever possible is the best way to make sure you have a source available when you need it.

Profiles are a wonderful tool for world building, for me at least. and you can find the profiles I've created and use here on the Alden.nu site in Lessons . Whether you use my forms or create some of your own, profiles are a great way to get down the information you need in an organized way. And since they are preformatted, they'll help you see what you still need to work on by the spaces that are left blank.

The process of world building is both simple and complicated. You want to work from big to small and general to specific, but you only develop what you need when you need it. Keep in mind that world building isn't to be the primary activity of your writing. You don't need to know the physics of your world down to the last little period unless you're writing a highly technical science fiction novel, and even then you probably don't need to know every single last little metaphysical, physical, and scientific detail.

Research what you need. Create guidelines for how things work in your setting. Profile races, cultures, people, places, and things as needed. That is, wait until you know it's going to be in the story to bother with it. There's no point in profiling the green fangled wallagazoo if it won't show up in your story even if it exists in your world.

Write down every decision you make. It's almost a guarantee that the one thing you need is the one thing you've forgotten and is the one thing you failed to write down except in a story some place, and when you look there, the reference is so obscure it doesn't help you realize what your decision was at all.

Now, there's one thing you should know about all this world building you'll be doing: most of it will be just for you, the writer. It will affect your writing, make your setting deeper and richer, but most of the information will not be given to the reader. What you definitely do not want to do is write long, summary explanations of how things work. The way magic works on your world will be shown through the interactions of the characters with the magic, not through a long treatise on using magic on planet x. Summary used like this is boring and drops the reader out of your story.

You will still be concerned about plot, characterization, and all the other things that apply to good writing. The writing and the story must carry themselves as if the world building were not necessary. Your job as a writer is to get the story right. Still, that seems like a lot of work for something that your readers won't be seeing directly and in its entirety. So, how can you use world building when you are writing?

World building is a wonderful way to explore your world, especially if it's a fictional world. All worlds have places of power, places of mystery, places of beauty, places of ugliness, and places where evil seems to reign. Even the real world is not exempt from such places. The Grande Canyon, the Great Pyramids of Giza, Stonehenge. These are all places here in the real world that fall in at least one of those categories. Your worlds should have the same mystery and wonder and places that reflect that, as well as the common, the horrible, and everything else that weaves together to create a world.

Use it for background material, to give your world concreteness through the sounds and smells and sensations that you develop for a place. World building will give you vivid details to weave into your writing that will make your setting more real. In real world stories, this will come more from research, but that research is your version of world building and is just as necessary as creating these things is for a SFF writer.

You can also use your world building to check your facts. Details make a difference, and changing the details without an explanation of why will pull readers out of the story. You don't want a reader to be thinking, "I could have sworn his eyes were brown, not blue. Did he put on contacts and I just missed it?" Using your world building as a reference will help prevent such jarring changes.

When you create profiles of the people, places, and things in your world, and detail those profiles as much as possible, you are giving yourself more to work with in your story. You are adding depth to your world, taking it beyond the two dimensional. You give yourself material to work with and information to help you make sure what you said on page 4 applies on page 104 unless you clearly made a change in between those two pages that the reader knows about.

Let's take a look at some principles that apply to world building:

1. World building applies regardless of genre. How much you need and how detailed will depend on what the writer, the story, the genre, and the readers need to make the story work. Hardcore SF readers will want more technical stuff than fantasy readers and both will need a lot more detail than a mainstream book would call for.

2. All world building requires research, even if you're "making it up." Real world stories need research on the locations it takes place in so the author can write about those places with authority. Fictional worlds should still rely on the common laws that govern our world: a world with a strong gravity will not have people floating into space, for example.

When working with a fictional world, you will be researching everything from the physics of the planet to how weather works to how technology works, and so on. These things all must make sense to the reader. If you violate the laws that the reader knows (gravity on planet x makes everything float), you better find a way to explain or show why or how the law works the way it does on your fictional planet.

We didn't use to have to do that as writers. It used to be that readers would just accept what an author wrote, and many readers still try to do that today. But, in general, readers are more savvy about how the world works, and it makes it harder for them to suspend disbelief. Now days authors have to help readers do that by making their world logical and consistent and well put together. "It works that way because I said so," doesn't fly too well with readers any more. They need to feel that you built your world on a logical foundation. They don't need to see or know about that foundation, but they do need a sense that it's there. And the best way to make sure you don't have to explain something that breaks the laws we know is to research.

Think of it this way: if you make sure that 98% of your world is well founded in research, then readers are more likely to forgive the 2% of bullshit you throw in.

3. All worlds, fictional and real, require the same amount of detail and must be treated as real paces. That means they should have a history, there are laws that govern the way things develop, there's an underlying logic, and the pieces fit together. In worlds with magic, magic is part of your technology. It must have rules and the use of it must change over time.

4. Good world building and good writing go hand in hand.

5. How close the world is to an earth-like setting determines how simple your task will be. Obviously, earth-like settings allow for the readers to just assume more than settings that are completely alien, particularly concerning the planet's characteristics such as gravity, number of moons, tides, etc. Earth-like worlds require less explanation, and therefore far less work for the writer. But that's not an excuse to skimp on the world building either.

6. Everything on your world must come from something. Nothing is "just there" and things don't "just happen." You don't have to state where it came from or how it evolved but you need to know it. For example, on earth, oxygen comes from plants. Knowing where things come from will also help you know what happens when the source goes away. What happens to us without plants?

Don't assume you have to know it all before you start writing. Remember, you only need to know as much as you need for the story. Unless something's going to happen to the air supply on your planet, knowing where it comes from is not a big deal. And keep in mind, most of this stuff you can simplify and make similar to earth. Why rewrite something that works if you don't need to?

7. Your world must have laws to govern it and its development. This does not mean you need to know every last detail about the physics of your world, but you do need to know what will apply to your story. Readers need to know what can and can't happen in your world, and the reader can't know until you do. These laws will also help you be sure to make your world consistent in your writing. If there are exceptions, you need to know what they are and what will trigger them. Exceptions should not be common and the events that rigger them should not be things that happen every day.

8. Every action results in a reaction. Not all reactions will be dramatic (sparking nitroglycerine, for example) or immediate (the affect of air pollution on the ozone layer is a slow process), but the author needs to know what is happening in his world and how it got that way. And the author needs to know that when someone does action a, reaction b will happen.

9. Along the same lines, every action has at least one consequence. If you get caught stealing, you go to jail. If you kill all the plants on this planet, we better find a way to produce oxygen or we won't survive. Consequences must be seen in your story.

10. Anything that's available on your world will be used and will affect its development. Look at our history: the atom bomb, biological weapons, etc. If your world has magic, it will be used, the use of it will develop and change, and it will influence the development of your world. All worlds have some level of technology that does the same thing, even if it's just stones used to grind grain. And this will change and evolve as the world ages.

11. If there are humans present, you need to know how they got there and how the world affected their development. What's different from the humans we know? What's the same? Be aware that if there are not humans present on your planet, you're going to run into trouble with a frame of references for your readers. Not saying it can't be done, but it will be difficult because all readers come into a story with a human frame of reference.

12. If you write more than one story in your world, if you have trilogies and series planned, your world building will be a continuous process for that world. You will either be developing new areas of your world, taking it through the changes forced on it by its history, or finding yourself bumping into new situations that require you to make modifications and additions.

There are two keys for this evolution of your world: keep it consistent and keep a record. You can keep that record novel by novel, in a historical timeline, or whatever, but be aware of the WHEN as well as the WHAT in your world's development.

Sources for lectures (research is good!):
The Complete Guide to Writing Fantasy, Darin Park & Tom Dullemond

World Building, Stephen L. Gillet

The Writer's Guide to Fantasy Literature, Philip Martin

The Writer's Complete Fantasy Reference, Writer's Digest Books

How To Write Science Fiction & Fantasy, Orson Scott Card

Worlds of wonder: How To Write Science Fiction & Fantasy, David Gerrold

Patricia Wrede's Fantasy World Building Questions

articles at HollyLisle.com

lectures at Forward Motion

as well as numerous other online resources.

Other sources:
Smithsonian Handbooks
pricey but good, basic resources; you can also check for: Eyewitness Handbooks , RD Handbooks, and the DK Handbooks; however, I believe these books were all predecessors to the Smithsonian Handbooks.

Writer's Guide To Places, Don Prues & Jack Heffron

World Builder Projects