Worldbuilding Wednesday – How to build a world

Or, How to make stuff up in many relatively easy steps
While pulling some threads together for a new piece of Airthai-history, taking place between two stories, I read some of the old ‘articles’ and short stories I wrote about the world and the changes which has come about as the world expanded from a forest (Jungians would probably have a field day…)  to a city called Brenoth and now many kingdoms, some of which are still undiscovered. I can’t give a done and dusted how-to list about how to build an instant fantasy world, but I can explain how I go about it. I’ll also be posting some extra short stories*  about some of the events and people which have shaped Airthai. 


Early days
When I started writing about Airthai, it was with a story idea which popped into my head: a great house of learning in the centre of a great wood. This would become Holt Haliern and it would be inhabited by “Keepers” or “Guardians” coming from the different surrounding kingdoms. Soon the ‘bad guys’ showed up from a place called Brenoth… If you have read “A Dragon’s Freedom” or “The Price of Freedom”, you’ll probably ask where this ‘Brenoth’ is. Well, it’s a couple of centuries in the future, waiting to happen!


Build it, and the stories will come…
What I am trying to show is that I didn’t sit down with a blank WikidPad file (O, WikidPad, how I love thee) and typed “The Creation of the World”. Perhaps it would have spared a lot of rewriting and re-invisioning, but it would also have spoiled the fun. And that what it is supposed to be, after all. As the story I was writing at the time grew, I wrote extra stories, extra ‘articles’ and answered many questions posed, like “Why are these guys bad/evil?” “Why doesn’t kingdom A trust Kingdom B?” 
I had a vague idea of what the world was like, but I only really found out about the world as characters and stories grew. ‘Seat-of-pants’ worldbuilding, if you will. Slowly pieces of the world fell into place. Some were big and ‘mythical’ pieces like ‘The Creation of the World’ and some were ideas I thought was just cool at the time. For instance, ‘dragon tears’ were just supposed to be cool stones which glowed. Only later, when writing a fairy tale-like story (Aune and Everard), did a real dragon show up and I realised that I needed to find out how dragons fit into the story of Airthai. And so, Skáhag and the dragons of Airthai were born… and kind of took over for a while.


Next week: The Midland Wars, part 1


Ps. Next week I’ll also have more info about Secret Project 1: Kammastories**

*Real short stories, not the kind you plan to be about 6,000 words long and end up almost 32,000 words long.
**And I will save my maniacal laugh of glee for next week as well.