Tag: world-building
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Fantasy World-Building Fundamentals
A few weeks ago, I broke down some of the major trends in fantasy that might affect what elements of world-building a writer might want to focus on to ensure they had the details they needed to create an immersive world. (See: The 3 Tiers of Fantasy World-Building.) However, that was a general overview based off…
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A Deadly Education: A Case Study in Pacing
It is always pleasant to be taken by surprise with a novel, and, a few cultural missteps notwithstanding, A Deadly Education provided just that. (For the concerned reader, I do plan on delving into this in my book review, but this post is already long enough as it is.) The author, Naomi Novik, uses world-building…
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The 3 Tiers of Fantasy World-Building
Last week, I wrote a post about genre writing and it got me thinking about how to know when a book has enough world-building and if it has enough of the right kind of world building. (The post was a setting study for Monsters of Verity if you wanted to check it out.) Rather than…
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Setting Study: Monsters of Verity and the Fringes of Genre
Victoria Schwab’s Monsters of Verity duology is one that walks two tracks: it follows some unwritten rules of genre writing while carving out a completely new niche in the specific subgenre of Fantasy. In today’s post, I’m going to attempt to extrapolate what, exactly, might make a book feel more of a genre book rather…
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Setting Study: Wings of Ebony and Hidden Worlds
To many fantasy readers, there is something alluring about the idea of a magical world hidden from view, the possibility that it could be ours to use if we just know how to pierce that veil of secrecy. You see it in the likes of Harry Potter, Three Dark Crowns (although that is actually high…
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Let’s Talk Tropes: Minions
No, we’re not talking today about the little corndog shaped creatures from Despicable Me. Or, more accurately perhaps, it’s not all that we’re talking about today. When it comes to combat, there are two options for making the protagonist struggle: conflict of wit or conflict of number. That is to say, outsmarted versus outmatched. Is…
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Setting Study: Scythe and Utopias
In the time since The Hunger Games, young adult literature has been mesmerized with dystopias. Neal Shusterman tries to take dystopia back to its more perfect, idealistic roots with the creation of Scythe. Of course, the nature of stories require conflict, and utopias, by definition, shouldn’t, which means that today we’re going to be looking…
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Setting Study: Mistborn’s The Final Empire
The second novel of Brandon Sanderson’s career, The Final Empire, is a high fantasy book taking place in the titular Final Empire, led by the tyrannous, immortal Lord Ruler. Rebellions of the past have always failed, but rebellions of the past never had Kelsier, Vin, or their team of Mistings and Mistborn. As usual, these…
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Making History (WoT Setting Study #4)
Well it’s been over a month since I did one of these. I think we’re due for another while I finish up Rage of Dragons. Today we’re going to inspect the history infused into Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series to see what lessons might be learned. Considering we will be discussing historical figures and…
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Tiers of Fantasy Setting Development
Today I wanted to talk about a topic that I brushed upon briefly in my last post about fantastical entities in Wheel of Time, and that has to do with how much the author allows their world to diverge from the real world, most particular in high fantasy. As is the case with most of…
Katie Bachelder 