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Your World: Water | EelKat's Guide To World Building - The Squidoo Series



By Wendy C Allen

Your World: Water | EelKat's Guide To World Building - The Squidoo Series


Water is a part of your world's landscape, but it deserves special consideration on it's own, because water is very important to all forms of life. Where there is water there is life. Without water there can be no life.

A realm without water, has to explain how it can sustain life in either a very scientific or extremely magic can to anything manner, otherwise no reader is going to believe that life can exist in a realm with zero water.

Did you ever look at a population density map? The areas in green means there is little or no population there, while the areas in red mean that place is extremely compacted and over populated. Orange and yellow areas cover the spot between the red and green.

Looking at one of these maps you will quickly notice a pattern: dessert, Savannah, and tundra areas have little to no population, while lakes, rivers, and coastlines all have red spikes.

The answer to this is simple: where there is little water, there are fewer people. Where there is plenty of water, there are lots and lots of people.

People gather at water.

People are attracted to water.

People need water to survive.

Make sure when creating your fantasy world you take this fact into consideration, because real or fictional, people are always going to settle down in a place where they have access to a good water supply.

Since the 1940s, meat has moved front and centre into the primary staple of most modern diets, and because of this, few authors consider the fact that BEFORE the 1940s, meat was scarce, rare, and difficult to come by. Large scale farms producing meat, would not be invented until the 1950s. Before then, if a farmer had livestock, it was not for meat production: cows and goats were for milk, chickens for eggs, horses and ox for plowing and transportation, and pigs... pigs were an evil taboo that no Christian, Jew, or Muslim would dream of touching, considering the Bible, Torah, and Koran all commanded not to even look at, let alone touch a pig, and eating a pig was a one way ticket to hell on many levels... all three scriptures put eating pig as a worse sin than murder - a murderer can repent, eating ig, was absolute blasphemy. Few modern Christina even know what the Bible says and even those that do rarey obey it, so today only Jews and Muslim avoid pig, thus modern authors forget that from Bible times until the 1940s Christians also did not eat pig.

In the 1300s, chickens were so hard to come by that merchants sold them for 130 silver coins - the 2017 equivalent of $1,000. Even kings could rarely afford to buy a chicken. It was because of the exorbitant price of chicken, that mythical tales of golden eggs surfaced.

What does any of this have to do with water?

Fish.

In Bible times, in Medieval times, and all other times right up to the 1940s... fish was the primary staple food of most populations. And this was a major factor in WHY such huge populations/cities rose up around so many rivers, lakes, and bays.

For most of the world, rice was and still is, the most important staple of diet, and rice grows under water. Rice can only be grown in flooded fields, river deltas, and estuaries.

Papyrus (paper) until recent years was made out of tall swamp grassses including papyraus, pammus, cattails, and reeds. Wood did not become a popular paper making material until the 1700s when mils began to surface more often. These plants only grown in water.

Wheat, corn, rye, and oats are all primary food staples, all require irrigation to grow, and a large, fast river to power the mill wheel to turn the grind stone to produce the flour.

Without water, humans have no fish, no grain, no paper, and no flour; and while people can survive without paper, for centuries it was not possible for humanity to survive without fish and bread, the two food the formed the near entirety of the Human diet for almost 4,000 years.

Perhaps all of this is a history lesson you did not expect to find here, but remember, the goal of all of this is to create a believable fantasy world for your characters to live in.

All too often I fins myself reading novels where the author took no consideration for how the land affects the people.

Even people who live in a forest, live near a creek or mountain stream, people in deserts seek out oasis to live on. Always near water. Always.

And yet so rarely does an author locate their characters near water, making the story incredibly difficult to get into, because of the extreme unbelievability of where the characters live in relation to their world..

Water brings life, and it takes it. Water is beautiful and deadly.

Writing about water can evoke peace or dread. The quiet ripple of the ocean can lull you to sleep, while it's crash waves can shatter your skull on the rocks.

Water is one of the few things that can so deeply effect so many things and evoke such a wide variety of emotions.

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:



<<< Back To


Or Head To Another Article In This Series:



























































































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.





What Is This Site?

I'm an author. This is an author home page. It's about me, my life, my books, my hobbies, my home town, and anything else that applies to me and my life. 

Since starting my writing career in 1978, I have written 130+ novels, 2,000+ short stories, 6,000+ non-fiction articles (ALL are found on this site), a few dozen stage plays, 12,000+ blog posts, and a few comic book scripts for Disney's Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck (I only worked for Disney one year (in 2005) and only wrote a few stories for their Danish comic books).

NOTE: I ONLY write the Quaraun series (aka The Twighlight Manor series aka The Adventures of Quaraun the Insane). In recent years there has been an issue with impersonators trying to pass books off as written by me, notably several non-fiction and Erotica books. I write neither nonfiction nor Erotica.

ALL of my books and their cover arts are listed on my website here. Beware of any books you find claiming to be me. If the books are NOT listed here on my website, they are NOT my books.

In fiction works, I specialize in Weird/Bizarro Tales set in 40th century CyberPunk-Quasi Medieval, Cozy Dark Fantasy and Science Fiction worlds featuring an intersex Elf and his Faerie husband main characters.  I DO NOT WRITE ANY OTHER SERIES - THIS SERIES IS THE ONLY ONE I WRITE.

Non-fiction (found ONLY here on my site) is daily updates of events in my life, and how-tos on how I write my novels.

I DO NOT write Erotica.

I DO NOT write books with HUMAN characters.

The Erotica books and books with Human characters, that you are finding, are written by scammers trying to impersonate me.

There is an ongoing FBI investigation into this matter. If you find any such books, please report them to FBI Agengt Andy Drewer @207–774–9322

The FBI believes the people behind the impersonation accounts showing up, are relatives of the woman who murdered my son.




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