What is World Building?

World building is an art form. It is the process of creating fictional worlds and like much art, there is no wrong nor no finite method to its construction. Designing a fictional setting whether it is an entire planet, solar system, galaxy, universe, multiverse or simply a house and its immediate neighbourhood, is a creative passtime.

The end result of World Building can be any number of things. The most common use is for fictional writing, in particular fantasy and science fiction. Films, plays, television shows, poems, cartoons are all tied into the art of World Building. For Hobbyists, world building is something more than just a creative resource tool. It is a passion which will often result in a Geofiction. A geofiction when completed can provide a textual and visual cross section of an imagined world or it can become an ever changing and growing, never ending story.

Writers who use world building techniques to develop the background for their fictional works are often restricted by time in delving too much into the micro level of their worlds. Where as hobbyists are more likely to provide more detail and spend years on creating, recording and molding their geofictions.

Geofictions, Conworlds, Subcreations, Fictional Universes are all by products of World Building.

Many fictional worlds take the form of planets with similar characteristics to our world, Earth. They have at least one sun, and perhaps one or many moons with bipedal intelligent life. The sky maybe a different colour, the air may not be oxygen but the landscapes would be familiar in their shape and rocky structure.

There is absolutely nothing stopping a World Builder from creating a different set of scientific compounds, or from using string theory, multiverse theory or creationalism to inspire the development of their worlds. There is nothing stopping a world from being flat and one dimensional. A world can be any shape and any number of dimensions. It can even be a place that most people could never perceive to exist.

World Builders not only use their imagination to create geofictions but a resourceful World Builder will research many and varied topics to substantiate or give rise to knew ideas for their geofiction. These topics could include the geophysics of Earth, chemistry, ancient history, civilisations and how they developed on Earth, microbiology and astronomy. The amount of knowledge a World Builder can learn about Earth while creating their own fictional world is unlimited.

There are many tools that a World Builder will use to create their fictional world. The most common is creative writing. Maps, pictures, music, models computer generated and handcrafted are all tools of expression that a World Builder will use.