Another post in my Random Helpful Links for Aspiring Authors series. (That I have just christened this moment.)
Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America website is one of those fantastic things that you can spend hours reading and thinking about when you really don't want to go to sleep or do your calculus homework. It's comprised of approximately a million questions to help you figure out all of the specific little details about your very own fantasy world, to make sure that it rings true to readers. How does magic factor in? What sort of government does it have? What's the proper way to set the table?
Though I didn't discover this site until well into the Thistleswitch process, I think it's fantastic. It forces you to think about things that may not even actually matter to the story itself, but that flesh out the world for your own mind. And it's a pretty dang fun writing exercise to decide on the answers. The entire process is based on your own imagination and creativity - if you can think it up, it can exist in your world. Not that this isn't the case when you're not using a handy dandy online outline, of course; but the outline saves you the trouble of thinking up the questions, and lets you focus on the answers themselves.
It makes me want to make up a bunch of fantasy worlds - ones that I don't even have a story for - just so that I can flesh them out and make them unique.
No comments:
Post a Comment
If you comment, you're all that and a bag of chips. Like, high class chips. From Trader Joe's, or something.