There’s no wrong way to build a world. Oh, there are lots of ways to build a world that is wrong (Why are these rivers flowing uphill? How did this illiterate warrior culture write so many guidebooks?), but the specifics of the actual world-building process itself doesn’t matter so long as it gets you the results you want.
Some folks like to start small (“Here’s a village of minotaurs”), then expand the scope (“In a nation of minotaurs”) until they’ve built out the world (“On this planet of minotaurs”). Others prefer to start with broad strokes, like continental shorelines, and work their way down to the nitty-gritty.
While thinking about what approach I want to take when introducing world-building to a classroom of 5th-7th graders (NEW DATES! April 25 – May 16, slots are still available), I decided to attempt a third path: focusing on features.
“Features” are those people, places, and things that make the world unique and fascinating, elements that excite the world-builder and intrigue the audience. They can be literally anything: Living spaceships fueled by junk food, flying castles ruled by skeletal princesses, competitive astral projection leagues, a courtroom where you can sue death, or lava giants whose singing brings the gods to tears. (Okay, these are Adventure Time levels of weird, but you get the idea.)
Once you’ve got your features figured out, then you extrapolate the rest of the world by answering two questions:
- How did these features come to be?
- How do these features affect the world around them?
Now, you still have to make sure the world makes some sense. Rivers still flow from the mountains to the sea and illiterate cultures don’t run publishing houses. But you’ve got more freedom to break the rules so long as it justifies your awesome features. Folks won’t mind water running uphill so much if it lets them have singing lava giants.
