A Worldbuilding Project
My thought process: I talked about my dream of doing a PhD researching female writers of epic fantasy. Then I got the urge to actually apply for a program and do the thing I dreamed about. Then I actually did it and applied. Now, I just have to wait to find out if my application was enough. In the meantime, it might be a good idea to get started working on something for the fantasy novel I would potentially be writing during the program.
But I don't want to write a plain Jane Western medieval fantasy1. I want to create something unique. Push the landscape of fantasy. And most importantly, I don't want to have to worry about worldbuilding while I'm trying to write the story. This is where I usually get tripped up when trying to write a secondary fantasy. I'm trying to tell a story, but I get stuck on the worldbuilding. And other writers tell me to not worry about that, to just get the story done and work on the world afterward, but my brain doesn't work like that, because how can I know what the characters would do if I don't know what their culture is?
So I'm going to start a post series for worldbuilding something, and slowly build up a world to work in at some point, whether I get into university or not.
For this to be successful, I have some parameters, otherwise I'm sure things will go off the rails. I have brainstormed the following parameters:
- Physical: the main focus of the project is on a habitable moon of a super-earth planet (which is also inhabited, but not the focus, yet).
- Spiritual: cosmic geography. Gods are real, and there are five of them; the grandfather god who presides over the super-earth, and the four mother or father gods who oversee the moon, each with their own continent, people, and specific magic form. The important thing here is that these gods are somewhere between the Greek gods and the Christian God. They are not as omnipotent as the Christian God, but they are not as humanized and fallible as the Greek gods.
- Magical: magic comes from the gods, and is powered by faith in them. There are four forms, each requiring faith in the specific god it is tied to, as well as more general magics such as healing, which also require faith.
- Theme: the struggle of good vs evil, the balance of goodness vs suffering, and the eternal war of chosen one vs dark lord2.
These posts won't happen very often, and I don't know what kind of stories will spawn out of the work I do for this. But I think it will be a good experience, and I look forward to seeing what I come up with.
See all the posts in the worldbuilding project
Okay, that's not entirely true. I would love to write a chosen one farmboy fantasy in the line of David Eddings. But that's not really PhD material.↩
This is very quintessential high fantasy, but it is also timeless, which is why Lord of the Rings is still one of the best and most well-known fantasy in the world.↩