Creating this sense of world is one of the most important--and challenging--aspects of a fantasy writer's craft. (Perhaps less so for some types of urban fantasy, but that's for another post someday). How do authors do it? I don't know all of the tricks, but here's a few things I noticed:
1) Characters care about the world they live in and want to understand it better;
2) The history of the world plays a role in the present and is revealed in a gradual, logical manner;
3) The world is multi-dimensional, rather than divided into "good" and "evil";
4) Distinct cultures, classes, nationalities, races, religions, and/or loyalties are presented and the intersection of these presents conflict; and
5) Many aspects of the world are not as simple as they first seem.
I'm sure there are others that I'm missing . . . please post them in the comments.
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2 comments:
Wow...the "whys" of setting. I'd never explicitly considered that before. Of course, the quintessential epic fantasy is Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and supposedly he developed a whole mythology for it.
I find this interesting. I focus on groups nearly the way I approach individual characters: What do they want? What are their motivations? And I find it easier to make groups (classes, nationalities, etc) multi-dimensional than a single character. Maybe it's because there's often more than one character representing that group. Epic fantasy is fun because it often has a cast of thousands. :)
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