Starting a Worldbuilding Project
In my spare time I’ve been writing a little fantasy/adventure story. This story will likely end up just being a very long google doc that stays locked away in my drive, never really being seen by anyone except myself and maybe a few friends. And that’s okay, because my hope is that what I’m writing will help me flesh out a larger world with interesting characters, creatures, cities, governments, and so on. And through making stories like this one I've found that worldbuilding can actually be incredibly fun.
There’s something special about creating a world that you can truly call your own. Now that I’ve started writing and thinking about this project a little more consistently, it’s given me something to look forward to that feels purposeful somehow. Not only do I feel invested in what I'm creating, but in a way this project has also made me increasingly motivated to look deeper into subjects such as history, geography, religion, and any other topics that can aid me in creating a place that feels real. In order to create a map of my world that makes sense geographically, I’ve been looking at guides which teach you all about how you can use tectonic plates to make natural looking rivers and mountain ranges, why certain biomes form in certain areas, and so on. The whole process of creating my own world has made learning about geography 100x more enjoyable than how it was in school, which I appreciate as someone who values curiosity and continuous learning.
I've had many different ideas for stories I could write, from me initially wanting to do horror, and then something more action/adventure-y, and then Sci-Fi, and then eventually landing on what I have going on now. It’s mostly been a process of narrowing down what kind of story I actually want to tell until I find something I’m happy with. Right now I’m pretty happy with the direction that some of my ideas are going in, and hopefully in later posts on this blog I’ll get around to sharing bits and pieces of my process of crafting this world.