2.8 – Development of the world
This one is going to be shorter, I hope, because today concerns us especially in genre fiction: Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror. Let's talk about how to present and develop the world we've created for this novel, if at all.
The foundations of world-building
I'm not going to roll up too much because I don't like talking about worldbuilding too much, and I feel like focusing too much on it in the end ends up backfiring.
Worldbuilding requires a main concept from which derives the world on which we are going to base our history. "It's the real world but with dragons." "It's Victorian England but we're invaded by aliens." "In this medieval world there is magic of the elements." "America but the Nazis won the SGM." Something.
The next thing is to rebuild the world around that concept. If ordinary people can warm up with fire magic, winters will be easier to cope with. If there are dragons, surely we have taken them to almost extinction to extract raw materials from them, or they raze the cities before we can do it.
The fact is that the world cannot be exactly the same. The consequences of the existence of this concept have to be noted. We have to show that, what the world we are in is like because of the differences with ours.
Once we have shown the world, it is possible that at some point this world will change. Just as sometimes history (that of humanity) goes back and forth, the created world can do the same. The world grows and changes, politically, geographically, sociologically, technologically...
But when we talk about developing the world in a fictional story, we do not have to refer to the world developing itself, but to develop it for whoever is reading us.
Spreading the information
Your world may already be well thought out and developed. If it is something new for those who read us, when it starts it will be like the beginning of a game of games like Age of Empires or similar... it begins in an illuminated area, which shows the terrain, and around it there is fog that prevents you from seeing. There is dense fog, which does not allow you to see anything, and softer fog, which allows you to see the terrain but not its current situation.
The information we give in the novel dispels the dense and soft fog in the part of the world we are talking about. When we move on to something else, the soft fog envelops that part of the world that we now know above, but when we look again could have changed.
As in this kind of game, the amount of information we need is neither too big nor too small. If it is very small it is frustrating, because we feel that we do not see anything and do not know what is happening in the world, while if it is very large, we overload ourselves with so much information (most of it useless) and do not pay attention to what is important.
That is why, when we show something new to those who read us, we are developing the world in their eyes. There are four basic ways to do this.
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