Crafting a Fictional World (By the Back Door)

One thing writers and readers know about fantasy novels: they take place in highly detailed fictional worlds. While it takes a lot of time and imagination to craft the fantastical elements of a land separate from our own, it doesn’t have to be daunting.

On the blog today, we welcome Eliza Chan, the No.1 Sunday Times bestselling author of Fathomfolk and its sequel, Tideborn. As a fantasy writer, Eliza writes incredible stories inspired by mythology, East and Southeast Asian cities, and diaspora feels.

Discover Eliza’s creative process for epic fantasy world-building and the essential elements she discovered while creating new realms that will captivate readers.

Some writers are Alexander Hamilton. They write like they are running out of time, ideas pouring from them like the rain falls in Glasgow.

I am not one of those writers. It took me a long time to realise this, and to accept that it doesn’t make me any less of a writer if I have to coax the ideas out and make the connections. I’ve come to embrace the process before drafting, or sometimes even during. I believe we need to follow our own sense of wonder and curiosity to find the inspiration needed.

The truth about fantasy writing

I’ll let you in on a secret. The notion of writing an epic fantasy was intimidating to me. Authors like Tolkien, who made up their own language as well as centuries of history, set the bar very high. I had read many a tome with a thick glossary and dramatis personae, with maps and ballads.

I am not a writer who enjoys writing the fine details. I’m more of a ‘splash some paint on the canvas and figure out what shape it makes later’. What I learnt in writing the Drowned World duology was that I did world-build. In fact, the city itself is like another main character, and something I was surprised to find myself consistently complimented on. I just did it by the back door.

So if the idea of all that planning and research seems overwhelming to you, let me show you how I managed to convince myself I had written the bare bones, but in fact ended up writing a complex secondary world setting.

Draw inspiration by reading, reading, reading

A very long time ago, when I was in high school, I had a friend who adamantly decided not to read whilst he was drafting his epic fantasy novel, in case he was influenced by what he read. Of course, we are influenced by what we read. We do not live in a vacuum. We are influenced by our upbringing, our culture, the place and time of our lives when we are writing, and the media we consume, be that books, games, film or TV, and much more.

I tried using footnotes after reading Nabokov’s Pale Fire. I wrote a second-person narrative after reading N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season. I dared to write characters who looked like me after reading short fiction by Zen Cho and Ken Liu.

Read widely, both in the genre you aspire to write in but also outside it. Even within the fantasy genre you can find mystery, politics, romance. To me, reading is as important as writing to be inspired and encouraged by what other writers are doing with words.

Read to see what boundaries other people are pushing, and then push them in the direction that interests you the most. For me, Asian-inspired fantasies were being published and lauded more, with the likes of Sue Lynn Tan and Rebecca Kuang making waves. Fonda Lee’s Jade City showed me that Asian-inspired did not have to look historical or like a wuxia/xianxia drama; Asian could look modern too. This gave me the permission I needed to write something more akin to an urban fantasy setting, but with the plot of epic fantasy.

{{blog-banner-20="/blog-banners"}}

There’s nothing new under the sun in a fantasy world

I have always turned to mythology for inspiration. Mythology and folklore, in particular, are such slippery forms of storytelling, passed down through the oral tradition around campfires and in disparate communities. It used to frustrate me that I could not find one definitive version of a tale, but a dozen slightly different ones.

I’ve since realised that therein lies its power. Sometimes we think retellings are a new thing, as if it has only happened in the last decade or so. But there have always been retellings. Hence the popularity of Arthurian myth, of Greek legend – even of Spider-Man and Batman!   

Read widely, both in the genre you aspire to write in but also outside it. Even within the fantasy genre you can find mystery, politics, romance. To me, reading is as important as writing to be inspired and encouraged by what other writers are doing with words.
—Eliza Chan

The immersive world of mythology

I enjoy turning to mythology because, as a child who could not read Chinese, it was a part of my heritage and culture that was rendered opaque. I half-understood the wuxia dramas my mother watched, but she tired of me asking for a summary explanation every five minutes. Now with the subtitles and translations, these are much more accessible.

I like to buy a book on local myths and folktales when I visit a country, and consider how the culture and landscape influence the stories that are told. Seeing some of the themes that cross cultures, such as shapeshifters, seductresses, life-giving water and trickster creatures. When I write, I have these in mind as a jumping-off point, but I am not simply retelling the story.

It is all too easy to get into your own head and say ‘someone else has done that already’, and call it quits. Even if the spark idea is not new, the execution is what makes it yours and yours alone. Ignore the self-doubts that seek to stall you and write the story you want to tell.

I would certainly never claim to be the first person to write about mermaids. My retelling in Fathomfolk (and I use it in the loosest of terms) looked at The Little Mermaid as an immigrant story. A literal fish out of water, who does not have the verbal language, who is laughed at because she doesn’t know what to do with a fork, and who is homesick and yet determined to give it a go.

Ideas don’t appear in isolation – they are sparked by what has come before. Like a tap on a pinball machine, suddenly the ball is ricocheting off all the bonus-point bumpers but you could not pinpoint or replicate the exact conditions by which you got there. It’s all part of the process.

Falling down the rabbit hole

The thing I love best about the planning and research phase of writing is that browsing the internet can become work.

Let me explain.

Children are naturally inquisitive. They want to take things apart to see how they are made, they drop objects to check if gravity still works, they ask ‘why’ and are equal parts delighted and confused when an adult cannot provide an immediate and comprehensive answer. At some point, this curiosity is often forced into a curriculum that relies on test scores and standardisation that can often take away our love of learning.

The most interesting facts I’ve learnt as an adult were not the ones I was taught in school, but those which I’ve chosen to learn by going down an internet black hole of my own choice. Use that very human desire for knowledge to world-build.

For Fathomfolk, I read articles on hydroponics, vertical farming and salt-water resilient crops; I looked at stilthouses and boat-faring communities in Asia; I learnt about coral reefs and brine lakes. Not all of these made it into the text, but they informed and inspired a cityscape that could survive being semi-submerged.

Give in to the random childlike desire to learn. Delight in it. If you are going to build a world, it should most definitely be around a topic you love, because you will be working on it for months, if not years ahead.

If you are all about boats, find that obscure boating expedition and see what it sparks. If you are into computer games or anime, visualise your world in animation. There’s nothing stopping you!

It is all too easy to get into your own head and say ‘someone else has done that already’, and call it quits. Even if the spark idea is not new, the execution is what makes it yours and yours alone. Ignore the self-doubts that seek to stall you and write the story you want to tell.
—Eliza Chan

Building fantasy worlds: how to make it easier

So, congratulations! You have read and pondered and have the glowing embers of an idea. But now you must build an entire world around it. A daunting task – but there are several ways to make the world-building process easier. Like everything, these are suggestions more than hard and fast rules.

Some people world-build from the ground up. They consider all of the details, from economies to geography, and build a vast encyclopaedia of knowledge before they start drafting. What is on the page is merely the tip of the iceberg of the vast repository of what they know about their world.

Others, myself included, prefer to start from the inside and spiral out on a need-to-know basis, like a character at the centre of the map who cannot see beyond the four walls of their immediate surrounding. World-building evolves as the story needs it to, and is often solidified in later edits rather than in the first draft.

Our world with a twist

Take a familiar country, city or location, but change one thing.

• What if women had wings?
• What if dinosaurs still roamed the earth?
• What if there was a secret underworld of demons beneath the streets of Edinburgh?
• Are you changing something that has always been, or something that occurs at one point in history and then alters everything going forward? Consider the ripple effect.

Take a leaf from history

At some point, we have probably all imagined jumping in a time machine and being a tourist somewhere in history. That’s what makes historical fantasy such a fun wheelhouse to play in, whether you ground your story in the real world or use it to inspire a secondary world. History books are great for sparking ideas and immersing yourself in a sense of setting. And rewatching Pride and Prejudice is now research. Perfect.

Secondary world

You want to build it all from the ground up? Good for you. Consider aspects such as the geography and weather, culture and societal norms, economics, religion, politics. You do not have to talk about all these things in your story, but you need enough for it to be believable and immersive.

It might be worth compiling your own ‘fantasyland’ guide with the world’s timeline, geography, different creatures, magic systems and items, as well as characters. I regret not doing this much earlier in my drafting.

Give in to the random childlike desire to learn. Delight in it. If you are going to build a world, it should most definitely be around a topic you love, because you will be working on it for months, if not years ahead.
—Eliza Chan

There are no rules except believability

Some people like to tell you that fantasy has to have certain things: magic must have a cost, protagonists must be active rather than passive... If these things are important to you, by all means do it. For me, what you need most is internal consistency.

Within the world you establish, you need to maintain the believability you have established, enough that whoever picks up your book will continue to read rather than be thrown out of the story. Get the balance right and you can have as many dragons as you want and never have to face the decimation of livestock numbers. Unless, of course, that’s an angle you’d like to explore!

In summary, I don’t want you to be disheartened if you have to work for your ideas. I certainly do. For me, they grow the more I work on a project, the more I think about it or end up noticing it in random articles or conversations my non-writer friends are having.

Sometimes ideas and worlds need to percolate, and I have come to enjoy that as part of the writing process. There is no right way to build a fantasy world, so just enjoy the ride.

Tideborn by Eliza Chan

A dragon queen, a vengeful sea witch, and a mythical titan converge on the underwater city of Tiankawi in the sequel to the international bestselling epic fantasy Fathomfolk.

A tsunami and a dragon’s wish have wrought changes upon the city of Tiankawi that have never been seen before. But shared experiences have not healed the rift between the city’s fathomfolk and human citizens, and scars from years of oppression still remain.

Mira, a half-siren and activist, fights politicians and her own people to rebuild her city and to uncover a deadly conspiracy. And Nami, the dragon princess, undertakes a daring ocean voyage alongside friend and foe, in order to convince a mythical Titan not to destroy Tiankawi for its crimes...

Members of The Novelry can enjoy a live writing class with Eliza Chan in their Catch Up TV library now. Find out more about Eliza at her website, and be sure to order Tideborn, the second novel in the Drowned World duology, in the U.K. and in the U.S.!

‍

Wherever you are on your writing journey, we can offer the complete pathway from coming up with an idea through to ‘The End.’ With personal coaching, live classes, and step-by-step self-paced lessons to inspire you daily, we’ll help you complete your book with our unique one-hour-a-day method. Learn from bestselling authors and publishing editors to live—and love—the writing life. Sign up and start today. The Novelry is the famous fiction writing school that is open to all!