Building Worlds, Building Characters

The Grace of Kings was one of the best books I read last year. It’s an incredibly well-written fantasy with an incredibly deep world and characters that leap off the page. Ken Liu recently revealed (via twitter) his process for creating characters – drawing the map first.

Draw the map, and you see the chokepoints of conflict, the passes of betrayal, the bays of passion and coastlines of conquest.

— Ken Liu (@kyliu99) January 5, 2016

I’ll be the first to admit that I did my character-casting before I did the worldbuilding in A Test of Honor, but I did run into an interesting dilemma during the worldbuilding phase. As I jotted notes about Caledonia and making decisions regarding customs, cultures, social strata, and everything in between, I would have to revise my characters to suit the world they lived in. I think the end result is very good, but only because I bent those characters to their surroundings rather than the other way around. All of us, after all, are products of our environments and it makes sense that characters in a book would likewise be products of theirs.

As Aidan’s War nears its finale, I am grateful for the lessons I have learned through its creation. I think its strengths are greater than its shortcomings and in fiction, that’s pretty much the best you can hope for.

While “We’re Not Heroes” takes place in a comedically standard Fantasy world, even its central idea revolves around place. The city where the protagonist and his friends live is at the base of a mountain range and its entire economy revolves around a steady flow of adventurers who come through town on their way to fight the various dragons and monsters that live in those mountains.

A future as-yet-unnamed Fantasy series already has a map, religious and cultural tension, several ethnic groups, a few different military philosophies, and one hell of a catalyzing event. About a month ago, while jotting notes on the world, characters started emerging quite naturally and I’m now at the point where I can start plotting their individual arcs.

Putting setting first has helped free me of the need to create interesting characters. Rather than finding archetypes, I find myself thinking about the people who perform certain rituals or worship certain gods or work certain jobs. I find myself asking whether they are good at these tasks and why they do them. When I focus on worldbuilding, the characters seem to write themselves.