Bring Your World Alive | EelKat's Guide To Worldbuilding For Fantasy Authors - The Squidoo Series



By Wendy C Allen

Things You Can Do To Bring Your World Alive

The most important thing you can do in creating your world, is to write it in such a way that you can convince your readers to believe in it with you. Making your world realistic to your readers involves you relying on your writing skills to tell the reader everything you know about your world. First however you much create a very clear image of your world in your own mind, before you can write about it. Many authors, need to see their world in order to write about.

There are many things you can do to make your world more realistic in your mind and thus help you to write a better world. Here are a few things you can try:

  • First off: draw maps. It easy to do. It requires no drawing skills. Only very rarely will a map of the world be printed in the published book, so there's no reason for you to worry about your drawing skills.
  • Drawing a map allows you to visualize where things are. This helps you to write better and ensures that you don't say Mt Demontooth is in the East, and than send you characters West to get there. Making maps tells you where places in your world are which helps you to keep your writing consistent.
  • Build a diorama. Dioramas are great for really visualizing your world. Dioramas take your world and put it together in a 3-D picture so you can look at it from a different angle.
  • A diorama could be as simple as a shoe box with cardboard cutouts to something as elaborate as devoting an entire room in your house to building scale models and everything in between, including building your world out of Lego blocks.
  • There are two basic forms of dioramas: a 3-D map or a scene brought to life.
  • A 3-D map can take two forms: a topographic map or a scale model with houses and plants.
  • A topographic map, is you taking your drawn maps and build up a 3-D map: paper mache mountains and train set trees perhaps? Building one of these allows you to take tiny dolls or even chess pieces and *walk* them through your world, thus giving you a better look into what they have to move through to get from point a to point b.
  • You can make your diorama as a scene from your book, say a fight scene between a wizards and a dragon. You build models of the room or land around them, create tiny dolls.
  • Some dioramas go on a grand scale with 1/24 dollhouses, cloth dolls, and bonsai trees. I've gone this extreme with my own Twighlight Manor series.
  • Drawing/painting movie posters. Writers who are also artists often do this one. This is two fold: One you take a scene from your book and draw/paint it up in a manner to draw in your readers, the way a movie poster draws in viewers.
  • Secondly, this same exercise can be called: creating cover art. Creating cover art for your book is something many authors spend weeks doing. Rarely does the author also illustrate their book, however their drawings can be sent to the illustrator to help him/her to know what the author had in mind for their world and how it should look.
  • Either way, wither your book will be illustrated or not doesn't matter and should not affect your decision to draw pictures, posters, and cover art. All of which help you to get a clearer visualization of your world and thus help you write it better.
  • Creating a scrapbook. This could be done either with a real bound blank book or you could do it online via building a website. Either way it involves you collecting up photos and drawings of various things that look similar to things in your world. Has your world got glacial ice? Than start collecting up photos of Alaska and Antarctica. Does your world have a lot of flower faeries? Than send for seed catalogs and start cutting out flower pictures. Of course you can add your own art/drawings as well. And don't forget to grab a camera and take pictures of local things that inspire things in your world: a weeping willow hanging over a brook, a rose bush, a sunset, anything that inspired you to write about it in your story.

Are Maps Necessary?

Must you create maps, dioramas and other such things for your world? No. Only if you feel it will help you in creating your world. There are just as many authors who will tell you to NOT draw maps as there are those who tell you you must draw maps. The thing to remember about maps, is that they are only a tool, and like any tool, using the wrong tool for the job does more harm than good.

You would not use a screw driver to pound a nail into the wall would you? No. You pick the right tool for the job at hand. For some stories, a map will be just the tool you need to keep your story on track. But for other stories a map may distract from your story. How do you decide wither you need to create maps or not? Will, that is not an easy thing to answer, because there is no right or wrong answer here. Every author is going to feel differently about this issue, and in the end only you can decide wither or not drawing up maps is going to help or hinder your writing process.


EelKat's Guide to
World Building For Fiction Writers
The Complete Article Index

The list below are the original pages written in 2003 for a WordPress Blog, and republished on Squidoo in 2007:



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For help in creating characters in genre fiction try:



Even more articles have been written for this series since then:

As there are now more then 100 articles for this series, it now has it's own index page on which to list them all, as there are just too many to keep adding them to this end of article list. You can find the complete listing of all the World Building articles here now:

Fantasy World Building...Writing Fantasy Books 
| World Building For Authors |
My Answers To The Zaharam-Chapelle-Parunas 
Ethnographical Questionnaire and More...

More on Worldbuilding In Fantasy Novels:

Books I Use When Creating Fantasy Worlds:

*UPDATE: ADDED November 7, 2013 - I suppose one thing I should point out at this point, before we go any farther, is my use of the word fantasy throughout this series. The bulk of this set of articles was written 7 years ago in April of 2006, parts of it appearing on EK's Star Log and other parts of it appearing on my personal Squidoo account. In the 7 years since writing this I've received hundreds of emails regarding it. A common question asked being: "Why do you talk of building a fantasy world if you don't write Fantasy?"

ANSWER: Fantasy with a capital "F" is the name of a type of fiction, in other words Fantasy is a genre. I do not write Fantasy fiction of the Fantasy genre, that is correct. I do however create fantasy realms for my Science Fiction and Horror works. I write Dark Fantasy, which is a sub-genre of Horror and Space Fantasy which is a sub-genre of Science Fiction.

Did you see it? No? Let me point it out: I write about fantasy worls as the exist in Horror and Sci-Fi but I do not write about fantasy world as they exist in Fantasy Fiction.

If it is not real it is fiction, if it exists only in fiction it it fantastical, if it is fantastical it is a fantasy item, because it is not a real item, however being fantastical does not make it part of the Fantasy genre, just as not everything in the Fantasy genre is always fantastical in nature.

The word "fantasy" with a lower case "f" is a word that means "not real" and has nothing to do with the Fantasy genre (capital "F") at all. And therefore when I say "fantasy realm" I mean a world that is NOT the Earth on which you and I live on in the real world, and am in no way, shape, or form referring to the Fantasy genre.

The methods I use to create my fantasy realms can be applied to ANY genre: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Horror, Romance, Western, etc.


2013 World-Building Series UPDATE:

Due to issues with content scraping, outright plagiarism, some of my articles appearing on OTHER Squidoo member accounts without my permission, and many of my "Squidoo articles" being stolen off Squidoo and posted without my permission on various  blogs and sites including Wikipedia and Helium; all of my articles are in the process of being removed from Squidoo.

This series of World Building articles in one that has been heavily plagiarized over the years and as of September 2013, it can only OFFICIALLY be found here on EelKat.com - if you find it posted elsewhere, know it was stolen and I am not receiving royalties for it.

2014 Update:

As you know, or not, Squidoo owners Bonnie and Kimberly-Dawn stole thousands of Squidoo articles from Squidoo members, and tried to pass them off as their own, resulting in the lawsuit against Squidoo owners for the theft of tens of thousands of articles.

More than 100 of my articles were transferred off my Squidoo account and moved to Bonnie's account,

while my authorship and writing articles, including this world-building series were deleted off my Squidoo account and transferred to Kimberly-Dawn's account!

!!!!!!!

I am shocked and flabbergasted at what these 2 women have done. That they thought they could get away with stealing so many articles from so many authors! Buying Squidoo from Seth Godin, did not give then the rights to our articles and these two horrible women had no right to delete them off of our member accounts and republish them on their own accounts, trying to pass them off as their own.

More then 100 Squidoo authors have gathered together in lawsuit against Squidoo owners, Bonnie and Kimberly-Dawn. The result of that is, Bonnie and Kimberly-Dawn, to avoid their asses being sued to hell and back, have now transferred the Squidoo lenses back to their original owners and deleted the entire Squidoo website.

Squidoo is officially gone. It exists no more. Squidoo is dead. Most Squidoo writers have opted to move to Hub Pages as HubPages has bought the remaining shambles of what is left of Seth Godin's Squidoo after Bonnie and Kimberly-Dawn massaquered it in their article stealing frenzy.

While I do have a HubPages account and my remaining Squidoo Lenses can be found there temporarily, they are being moved here and deleted off HubPages as I move them

April 2017 UPDATE:

As of now, all on my 600+ Squidoo pages are now moved here to EelKat.com and no more are remaining on HubPages.

It's hard to believe, Squidoo has been gone for 4 years now. It was such a big part of my life for a decade.





While there are around 20k pages on this website, most of them are blocked from search engines, with only around 800 of them available for appearing in Google/Bing/etc search results. The remainder can only be accessed via the various links found throughout this site. This was done deliberately on my part, and I did it because the bulk of the pages on this website are chapters from 138 novels and 423 novellas, so only the first page of each novel and novella indexed by search engines, and the remainder are linked in order, one page at a time, via clicking "next page" at the end of each. So if you are looking for a specific page from a specific novel, Google can't help you.



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