On World Building

I've tried my hand at writing different types of fiction over the years, with different levels of success. My favorite, however, will always be fantasy fiction. When I was in middle school I was introduced to a book called "Over Sea, Under Stone", a modern day fantasy with a lot of Arthurian influence (it was modern for back in the day it was written, obviously very dated now). Since then, I've loved all sorts of fantasy fiction and will continue to do so until I die.

That being said, I've always found the world building for my fantasy writing to be easy. Or if not easy then not too terribly difficult. The hardest part of world building is always filling in the details, but as my writer friends know my mind is a whirling vortex of madness, genius and anodized steel. I’m always coming up with new ideas, some which work and some which don’t but there is always something new coming up in my head that I can try.

So when I was talking to a friend of mine who’s writing a contemporary fantasy story, I was surprised to learn that she thought me writing a high fantasy story was really impressive because of all the world building I had to do. She confessed to me that it wasn’t something she was really able to do well. I guess, not having spoken on the subject with many other writers, I assumed most people thought like me and just used most of their experience and knowledge to build their fantasy worlds.

So am I alone in this? Is world building a lot harder than I imagined? When I talk about world building, I don’t just mean putting a name to a city, making a few landmarks and things like that. I’m talking about designing a culture, a religion, a military, a government. The small details that may only come up once or twice in a story but are important. That’s world building to me.