The Worldbuilder Diaries: History

This probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has followed my blog or read my books, but I put a lot of time into developing the backstories of my fictional worlds. I have notebooks full of stuff, and some of it never makes it into the published pieces—but it’s there, and it’s a key element of my stories.

Everyone expects a character to have a backstory, but I believe the world itself needs that too. Building a fictional world’s history a bit before writing a story helps me convey why certain things are as they are (for example, laws or cultural norms.) It might not be directly explained in the story, but knowing the world’s past helps me better define its present, and subsequently, create better characters and storylines.

My best example of this history and lore building comes from my Relics of War series. I originally planned to start the series at a different point in time, one a few centuries prior to where the finished piece begins. Arianna Janis was the main focus of that story (if you’ve read The Talisman of Delucha, you’ll recognize the name and its significance), and it started as the typical coming-of-age/chosen one fantasy novel that the fantasy genre was (and still is) pretty saturated with.

While I enjoyed the writing and my first foray into that specific world, I never finished writing that book. At this point, it’s unlikely that I will. But that aside, it helped me flesh out the history of that world to a greater extent than random ideas in a notebook ever would, and it became the springboard that eventually launched The Relics of War.

Building the history and lore of The Caein Legacy followed a different path. Over the span of about fifteen years, I started and stopped a number of fantasy stories. Some were related to one another, some were second or third (or even seventh) attempts at the same story, and some weren’t even planned to be connected. But when I got the idea to meld all of these stories together, I suddenly had a very rich world with a lot of history that worked well together (with some minor modifications.)

Cue the need for a new notebook to combine all of those ideas! It was another year and change later when I finally started writing Exile, and to date, it’s my best-selling title/series. (I get a lot of readthrough, which is really, really cool.)

Wraith and the Revolution followed a similar history-building track to The Caein Legacy, it just took me twice as long to get a finished story cobbled together.

I guess the point of my post today is this: Keep all of your worldbuilding ideas, no matter what point in time that idea might fall in your world’s history. You never know when it will be useful, and having that backstory gives your book a depth and fullness it wouldn’t otherwise have.