World building is not just used as a guide in building the world of your story. Basically, it is the essence and the foundation of science fiction or fantasy story and also, basis of other genres. Well thought world building can help in adding richness to the writing while providing valuable information to your readers, which makes them feel more attached to the plot and characters. This then raises the question of how the writers must carry on in their world building? To be able to know more about this subject, we are going to break it into 3 main categories and these are imaginary worlds, alternate reality and actual locations.
With imaginary worlds, the construction of the entire fictional universes is primarily found in fantasy genres, in alternate reality, it re-imagine the details of our world, which is more popular to writers whose focus is in science fiction and lastly, actual locations is the invocation of real place of our world that is used in novels without using any fantasy elements.
Believe you don’t, among the different types of world-building for authors are being able to create an imaginary world. Most of the times, it is used in science fiction and fantasy in which the writer is conjuring the details of his/her world from ground up including the geography, lore, language, history, characters, politics, religion and social customs.
It does makes sense that creating these said elements to build the fictional world can be hard and challenging as well and being able to decide where it should start is sometimes impossible. If you want some inspiration, you can look at some of the universes built by famous authors such as J.R.R Tolkien, J.K. Rowling and many other great writers/authors.
Needless to say, not everyone has the capacity or ability to create a fictional and functional language but budding world builders can at least take their lead. One great place to start in building your world is by pinpointing one aspect of your imaginary world to which you are most interested in. Work first on this element and then, concentrate on how you would build up the story and world from there.
Once you get the hang of it, starting to work out the details and other information will become easier. One way of doing this is by asking a set of question related to different elements of your world. This may be done as if you are describing your country or home to a person who is totally clueless about it.