So let’s talk about the world of your book. Later on, we will do a post on how to do world-building. So what is the world? It is the place where your story will take place. Simple as that. Now you have to consider some factors as well because it will help or not your characters and your plot running forward.
Because you have to define where the story takes place you have also to answer when it takes place. If you have a story that places itself in the jungle, besides doing research on jungles, forests, you have to check the flora, fauna, atmosphere. What are the pros and cons of being, living passing through the jungle? Don’t let any information to waste because it will help you how to create better scenes depending if you want to up the intensity or lower the intensity of a scene.
If it is a place that is very cold, you know the clothing of the characters will be different. How they eat. Travel. Maybe food is scarce, maybe wood or gasoline is gold in this world because it can help with the heating mechanisms.
When doing the world is when you need to figure out the rules on how society interacts. How the government runs politics. What are the moral values of its place? Are we talking of a world in deep poverty or in immense riches? Maybe in your story, the world is not that important, and yet it will help you maybe with the sub-plots. Maybe it will help you calculate how long a scene might be because you have one of the characters traveling from point A to point B. Even if you are writing fantasy, something that is not real it has to have its own set of rules so the audience can understand better.
If you take a movie like The Matrix you see that the real world and the matrix have their own set of rules and because of this, the characters interact differently in one and the other. The world helps how these characters can or could thrive depending on where they are. On the matrix, people can bend the rules of the “real life”. People can jump higher, run faster even dodge bullets. On the world of the “real”, it is futuristic yet they abide by what the city of Scion dictates. They have their own government and even though it is sci-fi, they rely on what the machines can do for them. But other than that the people are as normal as you and me. Flora and fauna are not existent in the real world.
So as you can see the world that you put your characters in can help with your story to move forward. It can also help you know how people interact with one and another and develop strong sub-plots.
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