Tuesday, June 29, 2010

World Building - Outside In or Inside Out

Taking a look at the prior posts on Creation Myths made me pause a minute. I'm up to the Imperial creation myths but, while I could create one whole cloth, it would spring from nothing. I don't know enough about them to really build that sort of thing. I know their customs, their manner, even a little of their architecture, but my novel has yet to really deal with them and so I can't do a creation myth justice just yet.

So perhaps a person can't simply do 'Creation Myths of my World' and knock them off one at a time. Perhaps world building has to be a bit messier where information on the local town causes a person to look up at the bigger picture and then come back down to Earth (figuratively speaking) again.

So I think I shall try from the bottom up. I will take it from a character perspective and from the perspective of the settings that are visited in my first novel: Port Vedic, Rosentia Island, and Port Saburo. I will take a look at the foreign characters and consider the places, customs, and peoples from where they sprang, rather than simply trying to understand everything at once.

What do you think?

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