Fantasy World Building
As I've been experimenting with different genres I began to realise something I probably should have known all along. When you choose to write fantasy, sci-fi and, to an extent, even paranormal fiction there are two critical factors you have to master... world building and character reality. If you want your readers to truly enjoy and get lost in the story it's vital that they believe in the world you've created. You have to take the time, and it takes a lot of time and effort, to make your world feel like a real place. It's far more than just superimposing a slap of fantasy paint onto what is essentially earth. Every factor of your fantasy world must be real. The different territories, the politics, the religious beliefs, flora and fauna, the variety of species, everything, nothing can be neglected or glossed over. If you can get that right, if you can allow your readers to believe in that world, in its history and its future then you've achieved the first half of your job.
One area I'm still struggling with as far as world building goes, even after all these years, is the map. I'm not an artist, at all. I can see, in my head, what the map should look like but as you can see my vision hasn't translated well into an image in spite of many, many efforts. What you see here is about the best I've been able to come up with given my limited abilities, both artistically and with the available technology. Perhaps it's time I admitted defeat and reached out to a couple of artists I know to see if they can achieve what I've failed to do so very miserably. The essense though is still there. The main continent of the world of Kaynos would roughly equate to something around the size of our own European continent. The black lines are the continents outline with the brown lines being the territorial divisions. The major factor of the map, and the continent itself, to the storyline are the multitudes of rivers, the blue lines. These rivers are an essential part of the story as travel throughout the Kingdoms of Kaynos is frequently made via those 'river roads'. That factor is what allows my characters to travel rapidly back and forth across the Kingdoms as the story plays out. While the map itself is primitive and quite childish it does demonstrate the importance of world building in general and the huge part that has played in the creation of The Witchcraft Wars. How exactly, you'll have to find out for yourself by reading the books :-)
Obviously character creation is vital regardless of genre but it is a bit trickier when writing fantasy. If you create a character like Trunk, for example, a half-ogre, half-troll, he has to be every bit as real as a human. It's not the easiest task in the world, if you'll pardon the pun, and it took me nearly five years of work to create Kaynos and the characters who live there before I could even write the first word of the story itself but I believe those years were well spent. I've had many reviews that specifically mentioned the world building and the depth of my characters. And, to be completely honest with you, I think that's because Kaynos and all the people who live there have become as real to me as the world I live in and the people I know. I've come to call Kaynos the 'other world', one that I get to play in whenever I sit down to write... and sometimes I get a bit lost there as I wonder what will happen next. I hope you'll join me there and that you'll like it enough to want to stay a while.
[Map my own, very poor creation. Picture of Trunk by unknown artist and a fan of the novels that I'm still desperately trying to find. Whoever you are, you are incredibly talented and captured Trunk exactly as I had envisioned him... I would love you to contact me and would love the world to know your name, you deserve the credit.]
