Wattpad 101: Your guide to the world of Wattpad

World Building 101

Not every author has to tackle the concept of building a world. If you write in the present-day Earth, it becomes a lot easier to avoid talks about geography, the geo-political climate, or culture. However, if you're a fantasy or science fiction author, you might find you want to write a story with a world you built. (Any genre can place the protagonist in a fantasy world, so don't feel like I'm only writing to fantasy enthusiasts)

In fact, there are a lot of people who enjoy world building fantasies. They like to imagine a world built unlike their own. They're willing to forgive quite a bit of exposition and expositional dialogue in the name of filling out a new universe and watching your characters interact with that universe.

However, world building isn't easy. There is a significant difficulty in knowing what to write and how to write it, leaving a lot of people scratching their heads. You might end up with a world that is boring, because three chapters of exposition has kept the story from going anywhere. On the other end of the spectrum, you might end up building a story with an incomplete and hard to understand world, and accomplished nothing as a result.

So the best way to learn how to write a world building novel is to read world-building novels. Example after example of how other people do it will quickly help you learn how to do it too. You can first learn by emulating your favorite authors, then finally, after you know what you're looking for, you can develop your own style.

That aside, what I can offer you is a handful of tips to help you get on your way. Like all of my advice, they aren't set in stone, but some of this stuff will probably help you start world building. At the very least, it might help you translate what you've already experienced into a few key points that I think are important for you to know. Things such as...

Start Small

There is a reason almost every fantasy story starts with a hobbit. No, I don't mean a literal hobbit, except in the case of LOTR and the Hobbit, but you probably get what I mean. The protagonist is almost always completely unfamiliar with the world. Maybe they are a prince/princess who has spent their entire life under their father's deceptions. Maybe they are a country bumpkin, or a person caught in a secluded village. Usually they are young, and when they are not young, they still manage to be inexperienced.

The reason they all start out this way is because you (the reader) start out that way. You know nothing about this world, and you must experience this world through the eyes of your protagonist. If your protagonist knew everything about this world, then the reader would be confused and have a hard time following along. Thus, in a way, the protagonist of a world-building story must always be innocent, young, or at the very least in a completely unfamiliar area (like being teleported to another world).

In this way, your protagonist is able to relate to you. His confusion is your confusion. The few terms he IS familiar with (unique places, names, skills, and people) will be limited so that you, the reader, can handle them in bit-sized chunks.

However, when I say start small, I don't just mean make the protagonist a naïve child. I also am talking about the setting and the story. Most of these stories don't just start with a country bumpkin, but they have that country bumpkin in the country. They start in one village or city. For the first ten some chapters, all of their story and experiences take place in that town.

Of course, they eventually leave the town, but only after the story has progressed to that point. If you throw the entire world at them in one go, any reader would become confused and lost. Thus you start small, and you grow, little by little. First, it's the city. Then it's the next city over. Then it's the dukeship, then it's the kingdom, then its multiple kingdoms, then it's the world. The story grows, the characters grow, and the world grows, but only as fast as the readers understanding of that world grows. Of course, you can only accomplish that if you...