Quotes About World-building

If you're creating a whole universe, even if it's a universe squeezed into a solar system, you have to use a little bit of sleight of hand.

After all, you put a lot into creating a universe and everything that goes with it, and it seems a shame to use it only once.

Shall I project a world?

Novels give you the opportunity to create a whole world. Because you create people, you make them talk... You decide who they are, whether they live or die. It's the closest thing to feeling like a god that you can come to.

With a fantasy world, it's like, this is my world. I literally made it. So if I tell you something, you do have to sit back and observe more. You need to sit back and listen more to understand what is going on or what's happening in the world. And I think there's a lot of power in that.

In my view most authors do not write to reflect reality but to invent a second world with a complicated set of rules - the more complicated the better. Though this second world is derived from the first, it is somehow more meaningful, more satisfying than the real world.

Perhaps every writer who thoroughly creates a fictional world will inevitably create a mirror of his own time and yet also create a world that no one else but him has ever visited...

Yet in your stories, you must imagine all these things, not just because it will make the world of your story more complete, but also because the very completeness of the world will transform your story and make it far more truthful. As your characters move through a more complex world, they will have to respond with greater subtlety and flexibility; the constant surprises they run into will also surprise the reader - and you!

The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.

On my long list of hates about RPGs, one of them was, I always felt it was an unnecessary chore to make you care about a world when, in fact, what most players care about is their own personal experience.

Of course it would be great to sell lots and lots of copies of The Beast of Cretacea. But the bottom line for me is to sell enough copies to convince my publisher to let me do a sequel. I spent three years creating the world of Cretacea and the personalities of all the characters who inhabit it. All I want to do now is go back.

To present a whole world that doesn't exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we're polymaths. That's just the act of all good writing.

There were no characters or events written in, which was a shame—considering the work he did on the world itself, this might have been a bestseller.

When a writer is already stretching the bounds of reality by writing within a science fiction or fantasy setting, that writer must realize that excessive coincidence makes the fictional reality the writer is creating less 'real.'

The more you can create a structure by which people live in a fantastical situation and by which they will act, and the more you lay that out for the audience, the more they will feel at home in it.

I've always felt more comfortable in fantasy. Fantasy has felt more real to me at times. Drawing was an immediate outlet for that: to create. It's been my ability to create my own world.

One of my fave TV shows is Into the Badlands because martial arts staged well and magically and saturated colours and eye candy and coherent plot and world building. It has a strong diverse cast.

Every film should have its own world, a logic and feel to it that expands beyond the exact image that the audience is seeing.

Science fiction writers create all sorts of futures - that comes with the job. But it's not the type that matters - hopeful or dark - it's the variety we see as readers. It's nurturing the imaginations of those who will go on to create the world around us.

I think with world building, it's important to create a sense of culture even if it is just a fantasy, and the best way to do that is to look at a real human culture and see what makes it cohesive.

The male author unthinkingly creates a world in which every single member of society is male except—hey presto!—when the protagonist feels like getting laid. Especially common in science fiction; apparently many writers assume that in the future women will die out.

Stories don't always reflect the world; they make it, too. A book is a world inside the world, and sometimes there are worlds within that.

You can do all of the world-building you want; at the end of the day, what's important is the heart and the drive of the story and the heart and the drive of the characters.

Director Gary Ross has created an adaptation that is faithful in both narrative and theme, but he's also brought a rich and powerful vision of Panem, its brutality and excesses, to the film as well. His world building's fantastic, whether it be the Seam or the Capitol.