Even though my debut, The Eleventh Trade, will be a contemporary story, fantasy remains my true love. There’s so much room for exploration, creativity, and experimentation — and I can’t wait to get back back to it! But in the meanwhile, here are some resources I’ve found helpful that you might enjoy, too. My first golden rule of fantasy: The more real you want it to be, the more solid details you should use. I don’t mean like “the blue door that was chipped around the handle except for where it wasn’t chipped, aka everywhere else, and also it smelled...
It will probably surprise no one that worldbuilding is my favorite part of writing fantasy. I love sitting down and asking questions about the cultures I’ve studied, places I’ve been, and stories I’ve heard. It’s always exciting to feel the new place take shape, and to discover my protagonist’s role in it. So I’m thrilled to reveal that now when you subscribe to this blog, I’m able to offer you a cool perk: Creating Stunning Worlds. This is a short PDF that includes my worldbuilding tips, a questionnaire to help you brainstorm, prompts to help you focus your brainstorming, and recommendations...
I primarily enjoy writing (and reading) fantasy. It’s wonderful when your head is full of another world, with all the culture and worldbuilding attached. But getting necessary information about this crazy awesome world across to your reader can be hard. Really, really hard. The best worldbuilding is done in a steady trickle, so soft the reader doesn’t really know how they know the information. I’m not there yet. Instead of a gently flowing, melodious stream, I often find myself taking a hammer to my readers’ brains and being like, “NOTICE THIS, IT’S IMPORTANT.” This, my friends, is an infodump. An...
The way I build worlds is by collecting cool stuff from the history, myth and people around me. I blend these details with my own imagination, and create my own cultures. Culture is a vital part to realistic worldbuilding. Normally there are a few particular cultures that interest me at a given time. I read whatever I can find about them, their environment, their traditions and their myths. The interesting details filter into the new world I’m creating (example: at one time, Venetian widows could only remarry on the stroke of midnight). In the long term, there is nothing more inspiring and challenging than visiting...
