by Elton Gahr

Created on: May 04, 2009

World creation is fiction can be a great deal of fun. Most often associated with science fiction and fantasy the real truth is that every fiction story is creating a world. Some of those worlds are very close to our own and some are not, but even if it is meant to be our world exactly the truth is that it is only one man's interpretation of our world.

Knowing that every story creates a new world we should consider the world before we write just as we would consider the characters and plot of our story. If it is a world based on our own world then the world building should be relatively simple. Ask yourself a few basic questions and you will have what you need. Is this set today? Is the perception of the world important to the story, and are there any major differences that need to be highlighted.

It is far more obvious now than it has been in the past that the world of today is not the same as the world of five years ago. Consider just the cell phone and how it affects your story. The same story written now and twenty years age. A woman has a flat tire on the side of a lonely country road. She has no spare. Today she takes out her cell phone, dials her husband and help is on the way, or at the very least the story explains why her cell phone did not work. The same story twenty years ago begins with the woman on her own. She begins to walk up the road, sees an old creepy home. She doesn't want to approach, but what choice does she have? Sometimes adjusting the time of your story can make it much easier to tell.

Next is the question of perception. A fictional world written from the perception of a bipolar person is likely to be far different than the same story with a more stable protagonist, but not all changes have to be that dramatic. Perhaps the story is from the point of view of an average housewife, or a businessman who just found out he has a fatal disease. Their worlds are considerably different than ours though technically they are describing the same world.

Finally, you must consider how this world diverges from ours. In many stories this is unimportant but it is important to think it through if you want to have major differences in your world. There is very little in the world that doesn't affect everything else. Consider a world where the only major difference is that twenty years ago they cured Alzheimer's disease. This alone feels like a minor change, but now consider that Ronald Regan lived until 2004, but was suffering from Alzheimer's disease and

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