A few months ago I had an interesting conversation with a staff member at work. I finally plucked up the courage to tell her that I was writing a novel. When she asked what genre I was writing and I told her fantasy, the first question out of her mouth was: “Is this a story that you’ve been working on since you were in high school?” My answer, of course, was yes—and I’ve been out of high school for ten years, which is more than a third of my life.
That conversation came back to me this week when I was putting the final touches on the Fantasy Writer’s Library. What is it about writing fantasy that makes people assume you have been working on the thing for years? And what is it about writing fantasy that means I have spent countless years working on this world and these stories?
After some thought, I’ve come up with a hypothesis that I’m going to call ‘The Tolkien Effect’.
The hypothesis goes something like this: “To write in a fantasy world that feels as tangible and deep as the real world, you will likely need to spend a significant number of years—even a lifetime—sub-creating.”
In my case that happened to be true, although I don’t know if it had to be true. (I suspect it isn’t always true, but that doesn’t necessarily invalidate the hypothesis.)
I’ll use my story as a case study. As far as I can recall, the initial seed for the story world that I am now writing in began when I was in my final year of high school. It started with two things: a question and an image. I’m not sure which came first. The question was: “What if someone unexpectedly started to hear a voice inside their head, and that voice turned out to be the voice of God?” The image was of a young woman in a forest with her hunting cat. I did write a scene at some point, although it is absolutely unusable now. But those two things were enough to plant the seed of a whole world.
In the years that followed there were four key events that helped to fuel my worldbuilding and writing efforts. The first was a six week course about Fantasy Writing run at a local short-course provider in my city. The course itself wasn’t fantastic (looking back now) but it did lead to something important in my worldbuilding journey: the creation of a map for my world, and a desire to expand my fantasy reading repertoire beyond Tolkien. (Enter the amazing Robin Hobb into my reading world.)
The second event came as a direct result of reading Robin Hobb. After venturing into the world of the internet and to Robin’s website, I ended up in a discussion about writing with other fans and thus the Fantasy Writing Message Board was born in 2003. Through the board I met and made friends with an amazing group of writers. One friend in particular showed interest in learning more about my world, and we began exchanging emails. Thus began an intense period of worldbuilding where my friend’s questions helped me to refine and expand my world at a rate that I haven’t repeated since (until the past six months). I will be forever grateful for that period of creativity because it was the foundation for the novels on which I am now working.
The third event was the opportunity to participate in two speculative fiction anthology projects run on Scribes’ Message Board (which was hosted on Runboard, as was FW). Both of these projects, run in 2004 and 2005, provided the impetus for me to develop two short stories based in the world I had been slowly adding to since 2000.
The first anthology resulted in the story Silent Songbird, about a young girl who has the ability to sing what is in someone’s soul. The second resulted in the story Winter’s Eve, about a young man who must choose between killing the woman he loves and seeing his kingdom fall into the hands of the enemy. The latter is now the basis of one of my current projects.
In the years between the original Winter’s Eve and the present, a number of key features of my world changed significantly, which is something that I did not anticipate. In the early stages of worldbuilding I thought that every inch of my creation was sacred and could not be changed. But as my knowledge of writing craft increased, I realised that some elements of the world could be changed—should be changed—and that it would make the stories that arose from the world better.
Example: I completely changed the map for my world when I discovered the program Fractal Terrains Pro. I also altered a number of the names of my main characters for my original story idea (which I still intend to write)—including the name of my protagonist—to bring it into line with the orthographic (sound-spelling) system that I developed, once I had enough linguistic knowledge to do so. I changed—no, refined—the magic system so that it was much more elegant.
Although it felt difficult, even wrong, to make such changes at the time, I now realise that it was all part of the creative process. When someone is first learning to draw, they might wish to make their artwork perfect the first time around but in reality that will not happen. One must misstep in order to learn how to create more effectively—in essence, to become an artist.
The fourth event was my signing up for a writing course last year. It was something I had always wanted to do but had put off in order to put my energy into developing my teaching skills and career. Being in an environment with other writers was enough to get my creative juices flowing again, and the result in a little over a year is that I am now in the middle of two novels.
I used to feel like I had to build the whole world before I could even begin writing. To an extent that was true: the worldbuilding I did early on taught me as much about the process of worldbuilding as it did about the world itself. However, I realised over time that the true purpose of my worldbuilding was to create a living, breathing world where my stories could sprout and grow and blossom. I do have a special relationship with this world, a love for it as my baby and as a product of my sub-creative energies, but at the end of the day it is the characters whom I care about more. I create the world, and love doing so, because it provides a place for my characters to live and breathe and have their being.
So back to my original hypothesis: à la Tolkien, in-depth fantasy worldbuilding takes years, (and can continue for an entire lifetime).
In my case it was true. The authors whose books I love most, and who show incredible depth in their worldbuilding, have admitted to spending years creating said worlds. Sherwood Smith’s Sartorias-deles (the setting of the Inda series and numerous YA novels) and Brandon Sanderson’s Roshar (the setting of The Way of Kings) are two examples.
I don’t think that every fantasy novel is (or needs to be) a result of the Tolkien Effect. But I do find that the stories that resonate with me most deeply are those rooted in worlds that have taken years to create. Why is this? Possibly because such worlds are rich with all the little things that lift a created world from the intangible to the tangible.
As I have grown as a writer and a human being, so my world has grown with me. I hope it will continue to grow and that the stories buried within it will slowly but surely be unearthed. That doesn’t mean I will always and only write in the world—my collaborative project is entirely unrelated, and I love writing that story as much as I write my own.
I imagine that I will continue to inhabit this world for many years to come, and that all the places that feel like uncharted areas of the map will slowly but surely be filled in. My world may be a result of the Tolkien Effect, but the thought of spending a lifetime creating a world no longer makes me feel overwhelmed—it thrills me. There is something about the act of creation that is numinous, and I think that is part of what Tolkien was trying to convey when he wrote the poem Mythopoeia.
man, sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with elves and goblins, though we dared to build
gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sow the seeds of dragons, ‘twas our right
(used or misused).The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we’re made.
There is something inherently satisfying in the act of creation, a sense of joy that raises one’s awareness above the norm. My satisfaction when I finally nutted out the details of the orthography of one of the languages of my world was deep, and now that it exists that detail is adding layers to my stories as I write.
Tolkien himself expressed this idea of never-ending layers of worldbuilding in his story Leaf by Niggle. This passage is particularly pertinent:
There was one picture in particular which bothered him. It had begun with a leaf caught in the wind, and it became a tree; and the tree grew, sending out innumerable branches, and thrusting out the most fantastic roots. Strange birds came and settled on the twigs and had to be attended to. Then all round the Tree, and behind it, through the gaps in the leaves and boughs, a country began to open out; and there were glimpses of a forest marching over the land, and of mountains tipped with snow. Niggle lost interest in his other pictures; or else he took them and tacked them on to the edges of his great picture. Soon the canvas became so large that he had to get a ladder; and he ran up and down it, putting in a touch here, and rubbing out a patch there. When people came in to call, they seemed polite enough, though he fiddled a little with the pencils on his desk. He listened to what they said, but underneath he was thinking all the time about his big canvas, in the tall shed that had been built out in the garden.
…One day, Niggle stood a little way off from his picture and considered it with unusual attention and detachment. He could not make up his mind what he thought about it, and wished he had some friend who would tell him what to think. Actually, it seemed to him wholly unsatisfactory, and yet very lovely, the only really beautiful picture in the world.
This is exactly the feeling I have when I think about the world that I have inhabited now for ten years: its as if there are always glimpses beyond what is immediately in front of me, vistas hinted at through a fragrant breeze or a splash of colour, and no matter how much I tinker with it, I never seem to catch the true essence of what I see in my minds’ eye. Yet there is still a sense of wonder that I have managed to catch any of that essence on a page, with words, and it is that same feeling of something unexplored just beyond my vision that keeps me creating year after year.
For me, the Tolkien Effect is not just a hypothesis, it is a fact. There is something sublime about worldbuilding, and I love the thought of spending the next ten years painting even more of this tree, one leaf at a time.
And if you want to know what happens at the end of Niggle’s story, you’ll just have to read it for yourself.
Saturday, May 26, 2012 at 12:24 AM 
As of tonight I am the proud owner of a beautiful piece of design.
