Giving Breath To Imagined Worlds

If you are an author or avid reader of fantasy and/or science fiction – or if you enjoy role-playing within either of those genres – then you already understand the powerful allure of entering into a Secondary World. You’ve experienced the joys of immersing yourself in your imagination, of exploring the freedoms and consequences of existence in an alternate place where the root assumptions differ from what we hold to be true in our world.
Fantasy can open the mind to possibilities seldom gleaned amidst our daily grind in “reality”. It provides feelings of excitement and release that are difficult to explain to the uninitiated.
I will assume, since you’ve read this far, that you’re already besotted with the creative impulse. But maybe you despair of ever giving the right form to your ideas – or believe that you’ll never even conceive of any ideas that are uniquely your own. So how do you move from your initial desire to its realization as a fully-developed creation? Well, your first clues as to the road to take lie with what you most love. What themes in the stories you read, what eras of history, what cultural or personal issues really attract you? If you harbor strong feelings about any aspects of the human drama then it’s likely that you have something to say about them.
Isolate those ideas. They will be your starting point, the seed ice-crystals around which you can form your own unique snowflake of a world.
When first I longed to write a fantasy novel, I had but two ideas. I wanted to follow a young lad’s mystic initiation, a journey that would take him out of his homeland and thrust him into unknown terrain – both physical and spiritual. So the adventure would challenge not only his resources of body and character, but also his very beliefs about the nature of reality. This was theme number one. My second theme: the setting my character moved through should be strongly evocative of the American West circa early 1800’s – frontier times. Since the “Wild West” is the romantic era of American history – and this is my country, for better or ill – I wanted to pay homage to the great American Myth. Also, I knew I could steer clear of many fantasy cliches by avoiding a medieval, pre-industrial milieu. There would be no dragons, unicorns, enchanted swords, or flying broomsticks; and an unusual conception of magic would be required.
Perhaps you can see now how quickly additional ideas will tend to group around your core themes. Good. Now it’s time to provide some structure, boundaries around this budding world to fence out the incongruous and allow the suitable elements to grow and flourish. I would suggest at this stage that you draw a physical map of your imagined environment. The scope of this map will depend upon your ambition. If you’re running a role-playing game for beginner-level characters, then a plot of land the size of Rhode Island might do fine. But if you intend to write an epic fantasy novel then you might require something the size of Europe or even larger. Carefully consider your goals and then set your parameters accordingly. I opted to sketch a peninsula about the size of New England, connected to a larger continent by a mostly-frozen Land Bridge.
Once you’ve sketched your outline then fill in the topography: mountains, rivers, forests, deserts, jungles…whatever is appropriate for your central concepts. Natural details only, for now; and if you want your physical topography to follow a different order than it does in our world then provide a reason for that. Fantasy worlds are free to dispense with the rules of “reality”, but they must be self-consistent. After all, boundaries are what define a thing. Chess would bore us all if every piece could be moved in whatever fashion we fancied. Challenges – and, therefore, excitement- arises out of limitation. And fiction thrives on conflict.
Once you have your map completed make a dozen or more photocopies of it. On these copies you can plot your setting’s chronology: how peoples and places evolved to your story’s present day. Again, the extent of your history depends upon your ambition. Do you wish to outline three long ages of mortal and Faerie existence like Tolkien did with Middle-Earth? Or would the significant events of three human generations suffice?
I conceived my own setting to be a “New World” and decided that, at the onset of the novel, it would have been settled for about five hundred years. So with ten maps, each encompassing fifty years, I outlined all the events that influenced the general character of the land and its cultures. This was easier to visualize on paper. You can see your nomads migrating down through the northern mountain passes and discovering prairie lands that will become their hunting grounds. Then they skirmish with forest dwellers over rights to the river. Forts are built on both territories. These evolve into towns and eventually into cities. One city is invaded and its inhabitants are slain down to the last woman and child. So in your story’s present day your characters may stumble upon some ruins that are dripping with history.
As you trace developments with these chronological maps your guidelines will be those central themes with which you began. Since I started with two ideas I therefore had two primary concerns as I constructed my timeline. First, since my protagonist would be undergoing spiritual initiation he would need to have guides and mentors. The mystical discipline that he would follow had to evolve. So I was absorbed not only with events like migrations, settlements, wars and alliances but also with speculating about how peoples’ beliefs develop over time. Secondly, I had to arrive at an era reminiscent of frontier times – i.e., with the development of such cultural staples as early firearms, steamboats, locomotives, and civilized townsfolk existing alongside nomadic hunters and tribesmen.