world building Archives

January 6, 2010

World Building for a Paranormal Romance

Have you ever wondered about the process of world building for a paranormal romance? Most paranormal romances are set in the contemporary world that looks an awful lot like our own with a few exceptions. The twist in most paranormal romances is the presence of the paranormal. That requires a certain amount of world building. Understanding the Rules Readers and writers have one thing in common where new worlds are concerned. They need to understand the rules of that world. In Twilight, for example, vampires are created when one vampire bites a human and injects venom. If the human survives […]

August 3, 2009

The Pitfalls of Creating Your World

Writers create their own worlds with every book. The world may be close to our own, it may look very much like our own, but the addition of a fictional character is like metaphorically stepping on the butterfly — it changes everything. Keeping It Straight I love to read alternative histories. My favorite writer of this particular genre is Harry Turtledove. He’ll pose a question, essentially, with his book and then write it out. In the Guns of the South, he asked what would happen if you really armed the South during the Civil War? So he sent some South […]