Worlding Building
I’ve always been in awe of those who can build worlds so easily, Terry Pratchett created an entire world of crazy and wonderful stories. He created one of the complete fictional worlds to ever be printed on paper. The Discworld was more than just a location to tell a story, it stood on its own as if it was another planet in our very own solar system. Tolkien created his own language to fit into his world. Everything about world-building has always amazed me.
So I thought I’d try my hand at it. As you may have read recently, I have been struggling with some mental health issues and lost all motivation to write anything. With the recent positive steps I’ve been taking, I’ve been trying to ease myself back into the writing world. Creating stories, characters, everything.
One of the ways I have decided to try this is with world-building. Most of my stories have been easily inserted into the current world. The current, mundane, boring world. (🙄) But in my young years when I was pushing out a new story every other day (ahh those were the days…) I lived in a fantasy world, one that didn’t quite match this world but didn’t work anywhere else.
I decided world-building would be a nice creative writing exercise, something that I would be proud of and would be useful in my future writing endeavours. But BOY, did I underestimate how much work with would be. Sure, I got the basics down. I’ve got my world map drawn and my location’s names, but the information each one needs?! Every time I try to do more work on this project something else crops up. Another piece of information that I need to make this world believe is thrown into my lap.
But you know what the good thing is? It doesn’t phase me. Before this would have been an overwhelming project that I would have given up on weeks ago. However, now I understand a lot more about myself and about my mental health, I can allow myself to drop the project and come back. Little bits here and there that will all eventually add together to make one massive project. I’ll look back at this complete world one day and be so proud of myself. There is no deadline here, but if you want to come along for the journey, join my Discord group, where there is a channel just for world building.
