Education is an often overlooked aspect of worldbuilding, even though education defines our individual worldviews and skill sets and also supports society as a whole. After all, people can’t occupy trades or other societal roles if they don’t know how. Today I want to explore how to develop the educational systems of your world… and why “fantasy school” isn’t always the answer. Continue reading “Fantasy School… or Not – Worldbuilding Education”
Culture and tradition are crucially interwoven. Tradition is the means through which culture is preserved and reinforced, which makes it the ultimate tool for exploring fictional worldviews. I’ve talked about building festivals and holidays before, but today I want to focus on how to use both “special” traditions (like holidays) and everyday traditions (like nightly worship) to emphasize and support a cultural worldview. Continue reading “Culture and Tradition in Fantasy”
In the past I’ve discussed how to use fantasy worldbuilding to explore worldview (and why it’s important to include real-world worldview), and I’ve talked about how to build the foundation of your world (which is what will form the basis of worldview). But I haven’t actually talked about why a cultural worldview is important as an aspect of the worldbuilding process, so today I want to fix that.
This is the core point. Everything else is secondary. A cultural worldview colors every aspect of a culture, influences how your characters think, breeds conflict when worldviews clash… Everything within and surrounding a culture is going to be influenced by that culture’s worldview. Therefore, it ought to be an intentional consideration. A culture’s worldview is the axis Continue reading “Why Cultural Worldview in Fantasy is Important”
I’ve said this before, but there are many ways to approach creating a fantasy world (or sci-fi world). Should you work outside-in or inside-out? Should you use vignettes? Beyond the basics, what is the best order to take things in? Those are questions that are going to be unique to each writer (and potentially each world), so I can’t give you a concrete answer, but in this post I’ll show you a few of the processes I use for my own worlds. Continue reading “Worldbuilding Process: Three Examples”
A couple of weeks ago, I had the strange idea to write a post about why we don’t have flying cars. “Well that’s random,” I thought. “Where in the world am I going to post that?” And then the idea rattled around in my head for a couple of days and I realized I could associate worldbuilding principles to my reasons for our current lack of flying cars. So… here we are. XD Continue reading “5 Reasons We Don’t Have Flying Cars (and the Worldbuilding Takeaways)”
