When I was at Uni, I studied under a brilliant tutor called Edmund Cusick. He had founded the imaginative writing course at Liverpool John Moores, and very much made the distinction between imaginative writing and creative writing as educational terms.
He encouraged all of us to use our imaginations to their highest possible level, and most of us were devastated when he passed away in 2007 at the age of just 45.
In my second year of uni, I took part in his module dedicated to writing fantasy. Oddly enough, as you may have noticed, it is my chosen genre – although I was yet to discover the joys of steampunk!
Edmund dedicated a substantial part of his course to designing a fantasy world in depth, starting with the map and fleshing it out with culture, language and people until you had a fully formed place in which to tell a story.
The point of this reminiscence – other than to draw your attention to a man who was a massive influence on my writing – is that I am very familiar with putting together fantasy worlds.
So it would probably surprise you to find out that I absolutely hate what the concept of worldbuilding has become.
This is probably a holdover of the fact that I tend to delve into the dark depths of reddit comment threads and goodreads reviews, but I truly dislike that, to a fairly vocal part of fantasy fantom, it seems that unless you have met some ever-moving goalpost of what they feel worldbuilding should be, your story will never be good enough.
I was taught that the world is a place for your characters to stand on while their story is being told, and while a well developed fantasy world is a great thing, developing that world is a tool. It is a means to an ends when it comes to telling your tale.
For some though, the concept of worldbuilding has become a club with which to beat prospective authors over the head. Unless you’re slavishly putting in as much world details as George RR Martin or writing entire historical texts that would put Tolkien’s output to shame, you simply aren’t trying hard enough.
I’ve been lurking around r/fantasywriters for a long time, and I’ve essentially given up on trying to answer questions on there, because there are too many people who get bogged down in trying to create the perfectly explained magic system or cultural history for their world, and forget that there needs to actually be a readable story alongside it.
Please, please, PLEASE, never forget that fantasy should be fun.
If I could give one piece of advice to every person who is writing and concerned that their worldbuilding isn’t good enough? Don’t set your detail in stone, and don’t tell people about it. Let them find out about your world through your stories.
Anyway rant over. I’m writing again. Quite a lot, actually.
My main problem is I usually finish at 4AM.
Onwards and upwards
-Ben.
The Mind of Ben Myatt 