Over at the lobo_luna community, I've completed a question and answer session. I thought I'd post the questions and answers here as well.

Can you talk about your world building process?



We'll take this question and break it down into the three most prominent types of stories I write: modern urban and rural fantasy, space opera and science fantasy, and the secondary fantasy world the Rija stories are set in. Any horror I write generally falls into the urban fantasy world-building, just darker.

For modern urban and rural fantasy, I rarely bother building locals. Instead, I use the Twin Cites, or small rural Oklahoma towns I grew up in, and then I add the fantastical element. This where the world building happens as I begin to ask questions. How did Old World European fey end up in Minneapolis? Where do they live? How do they interact with the spirits of the land who lived here first? How does magic work? What is its internal logic? It's cost? What can and can't it do, under normal circumstances? How do the "fantastic" elements of this world interact with "normal" people?

For space opera and science fantasy, the big question was: space travel. I decided to take a science fantasy approach and allow faster-than-light travel. Look, I'm not a hard science fiction guy, I'm not deeply grounded in hard sciences, and I'm not terribly concerned with creating a hyper-realistic SF continuum. So I made conscious choices, including FTL space travel, colony worlds, and such. Then I had to decide on how we got here and where we are now. I've written several stories up and down this timeline, but all of them, despite the trapping of an alliance of colonies who have thrown off the rule of a slowly dying planet earth, what I focus on are individual stories. One thing this does is, it keeps the liberal arts major from exceeding his scientific knowledge (too much). I'm more interested in the choices Lt. Lisa Cochrane has to make than I am in her little courier ship. I could spend a ton of time on the rover Robert Wilson is driving across the frozen wastes of Apollo's Green, but I want to know about Robert, not the machine.

For Rija (and Kearsee, though I've only written one story with her), the secondary fantasy world is based on a gaming world I've been working with for over thirty years. Again, I made choices, in this case creating a faux-European world just on the cusp of something akin to our renaissance period. It is a place of deep politics, far flung kingdoms, and vast tracks of uncharted wilderness. It is imbued with a sense of adventure and exploration tempered with advances in science and philosophy. Here I had to make choices about how people live and are governed. Noble families? Trade unions? Again, how does magic work? What are the rules and costs? Rija is a woman, so what are the roles of females characters in this world and how are they viewed?

One of my favorite world building tools is this series of questions you need to ask yourself, created by Patricia C. Wrede. I leaned heavily on it when I started to quantify and solidify the world Rija lives in, called Dolenbyd.

I'm still refining all of these worlds, so I look at them as living, breathing, things. Which is tough, because once you publish a story, that bit of world building is out there. It is hard to go back and do a continuity retrofit once you've published three or four stories in a setting! Well, unless you're Marvel Comics, but let's not worry about that right now.

This was a hard question for me, because as I pointed out earlier, I'm not really a "Big Idea" kind of guy, I'm more of a small stories focused on a character writer. The world building I do is small and focused. I think--for my money--the single most important thing is for the writer to decide on how things work in his world, and then be consistent in the application. The world has to have an internal logic of its own--no matter how different your world is from the one we live in--and it needs to stick to it. If you want a Giant Space Kraken lurking in the dark matter to ambush space ships, that's cool, but understand why it exists and what it does within your world and your story.

Build it, and then be consistent.