Welcome to part two of our worldbuilding series! For our July 2022 Short Fiction Contest, our theme is Unmoored: Worlds of Pure Chaos (link to submit below). In other words, worldbuilding a realm of contrasts.
As you probably already know, worldbuilding is vital to your story, whether you’re writing a novel or a short fiction. The world is not just the setting where the action takes place; the world affects and shapes your characters, and even propels the plot in some cases.
Here are some more tips for to help you create immersive, believable worlds with some LOTR references for your enjoyment!
Make the setting vital to the plot
To make your world the most immersive for your readers, you want to make the world itself vital to the plot. It needs to affect the events of the story, as well as the characters. Without Mordor, there would have been no quest. Without the Shire, there would have been no stakes to propel Frodo to go on the quest. Think of how the Shire and Mordor, though two separate settings, influence the action of the entire narrative.
“The remainder of that journey was a shadow of growing fear in which memory could find nothing to rest upon. For two more nights, they struggled on through the weary pathless land.”
Here, you can see how Frodo and Sam are affected by their surroundings—they become despairing and fearful, weighed down by the immense presence of Mordor itself. Tolkien uses Frodo’s senses to add detail to the world of Mordor.
Use names effectively
Names can be very effective and symbolic. To get the most out of your settings’ names, try using a baby name website and search for meanings of places in your world. For instance, if your characters live in a world with no light, search for “dark place”, and names like Coleridge and Grimshaw will appear. Or, if you’re looking for genre-specific names like steampunk or wuxia names, a name generator site would be best!
Some great sites for finding names:
Name generators:
Baby Names: Very extensive; search by name or name meaning
Fantasy Name Generator: Names for everything you can imagine, complete with names in your subgenre; even includes Star Wars and Dune inspired names!
Other generators:
Roll For Fantasy: Sister site of FNG; create everything from space bases to currency for your new world
Ran Gen : Creates planets, worlds, characters, etc. Not just for names!
World Map Generator: Generates, you guessed it, vector maps of your world
While Tolkien didn’t have name gens at his fingertips, think of the names he used and the feelings and connotations they evoke. He uses names that are elvish in background with specific meanings, which conjure certain feelings. Lothlorien, one of the elven lands, means “land of blossoms dreaming”, for example. The name sounds beautiful, mysterious, and a little frightening, like Lothlorien itself:
“…He saw no colour but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful. In winter here no heart could mourn for summer or for spring. No blemish or sickness or deformity could be seen in anything that grew upon the earth. On the land of Lórien, there was no stain.”
Other names like the Dead Marshes and Fanghorn Forest, while easier to pronounce, also sound like foreboding places no one would want to visit. The name Mordor itself carries a negative, dark connotation just from hearing it spoken.
Use detail—both small and large
This is where worldbuilding gets down to the nitty-gritty. As the old saying goes, the devil is in the details. It can be hard to strike a balance between too much detail and too little.
First, make a checklist of the places in your world that will be most important to the story like cities, villages, government bodies, peoples/races, etc. If a detail isn’t vital to the plot or your characters, cut it.
Also use small details, not just overall features of the world. While we can get caught up in describing the world itself, you also need small details. Besides describing your setting and its social and historical nuances, be sure to include small details that help build your world, like what your characters wear and what they eat, as well as day-to-day occurrences. In LOTR, we know not only what the Shire and Mordor look like, we also know that Gandalf and the hobbits love their pipe-weed, and that hobbits have hairy feet and love their taters. It’s little details like this that really make your world come alive for readers.
This small yet important detail about hobbits not only gives us more insight into their species but also into the Shire at large:
“Where our hearts truly lie is in peace and quiet and good, tilled earth. For all hobbits share a love of things that grow.”
From this one sentence, we know that the Shire is a quiet, fertile place, full of growth and life, unlike Mordor, its polar opposite. We also learn that hobbits thrive in rural, untouched places that are quiet and peaceful.
Utilize the senses
Another aspect of adding detail to your world is to allow the reader to experience it through their senses. Don’t just use visual descriptions of your world. What does your character hear, smell, taste, or feel? When Frodo is in Mordor, readers can smell the burnt ash, feel the sweat on their brows from the heat of Mordor's infernos, and even taste the ash in their mouths.
“Mists curled and smoked from dark and noisome pools. The reek of them hung stifling in the still air. Far away, now almost due south, the mountain-walls of Mordor loomed, like a black bar of rugged clouds floating above a dangerous fog-bound sea…the air, as it seemed to them, grew harsh, and filled with a bitter reek that caught their breath and parched their mouths.”
Instead of simply saying Mordor stinks, Tolkien uses his characters’ senses to explain their surroundings. Here, he utilizes sight, smell, and taste, seamlessly blending details into the narrative without feeling like exposition.
Learn from other authors
On the Fictionate social pages, we’ve been sharing some great books you can read to help you build your own world.
One of the best ways to learn how to worldbuild is to read your favorite authors. Think about settings that have stood out for you, like Hogwarts, Tatooine, the Shire, Mordor, etc. Reread your favorites and take note of how they build worlds. Speculative fiction authors are masters at worldbuilding, as the settings are as vital as the characters themselves, as in the case of Mordor:
"The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomitted the filth of their entrails upon the lands about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowly revealed in the reluctant light."
Use contrasts
Utilizing vivid dissimilarities in your world is a great way to further immerse your readers and show, not tell, about your settings. You can use a contrasting setting to worldbuild (rural vs. industrial, for instance) or contrasting ideas (magic vs. technology).
J.K. Rowling uses the disparity of Harry’s horrible home life with his aunt and uncle vs. his life at Hogwarts to show (not tell) the differences between the everyday lives of muggles and wizards. George Lucas includes ancient sorcery in his space opera adventure full of technologically advanced droids and spaceships.
Tolkien employs contrasting settings of course (Mordor and the Shire), but he also uses character development as a contrast to build his world, even at the end of the story when we see how much the quest to Mordor has changed Frodo. He shows a contrast between Frodo at the beginning vs. Frodo at the end of the series. In the beginning, he’s sheltered, naïve, and happy; in the end, he is beaten, despairing, and knows he’s changed from his adventure into Mordor, even though it was successful:
“There is no real going back. Though I may come to the Shire it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same. I am wounded with knife, sting, and tooth, and a long burden. Where shall I find rest?”
We can see here how the world of Mordor itself, and all its evils, fundamentally change Frodo forever.
I hope these tips help you build your own “unmoored” world full of contrasts! Stay tuned during July for more worldbuilding and other writing tips to help you craft a winning short story.
Submissions for the July 2022 Worldbuilding Contest end August 5, 2022, at 11:59 PM EST. Click here to view the submission guidelines and submit!
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