World building tips often focus on fantastical genres such as fantasy and sci-fi because they entail creating worlds wholly other to our own. Yet it’s important to create an immersive, interesting and credible setting, whatever your genre. To create an entire fictional world, one to rival Westeros, Hogwarts (or Dickens’ London), read these world building tips and cautions:
1: Make a checklist of world-building details you want to include
We believe in our favourite authors’ invented worlds because there is enough detail and specificity to make them real. Legions of younger and older readers fell in love with Rowling’s Hogwarts, for example, because (in part) they could imagine her setting to its edges. Readers could picture the castle from the long tables and floating candles of its dining hall to its outer, more dangerous limits. The nearby ‘Forbidden Forest’, for example, or the menacing vegetation and grounds feature that is the unpredictable, thrashing ‘Whomping Willow’.
Great fictional worlds, like this one, have contrasts, details, atmospheres. The vaults of Rowling’s crypt-like bank, Gringotts, for example, have a different tone and mood to her student-filled castle.
Make a checklist of details you want to include in your novel’s world, whether you’re evoking a magical setting like Hogwarts or a real one like modern-day Paris.
Items you can include in your checklist...
Read the full article: http://www.nownovel.com/blog/world-building-tips-engaging-settings/
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