So I’ve been unhappy for a while with the ‘world’ ive chosen to explore in this studio, I feel like I fixated on a story I wanted to tell rather than a specific world I wanted to explore. I was tossing up whether or not to stick with the story/world that I’ve already invested so much time in and gotten feedback on or cut my losses and start thinking about a new world. I hadn’t come to a concrete decision when I was walking home listening to one of my favourite podcasts, ‘My Brother, My Brother and Me’. This particular episode their ‘Guestspert’ was an expert in writing, Patrick Rothfuss. Patrick is well known for writing the Kingkiller chronicles, a fantasy trilogy, so a question that was asked him was how to write a good fantasy setting. His advice was so spot on to my situation I started to feel the level of coincidence was like I was in a movie where they turn on the tv and theres an ad for a competition where the prize money is the exact amount of money they were just saying they needed.

He talked about how people are looking for a recipe when it comes to writing. How a lot of fantasy writers look at popular novels like Tolkiens and try to imitate that recipe:

A FANTASY WORLD

1 large villain

4-6 plucky heroes

30 factions of different races

7 languages made from scratch (if you cant make it from scratch store bought is fine)

Take your heroes, give them a bit of adversity until they develop nicely. Add the villain to make things nice and tense and give the story some conflict. Follow the three act structure then stir. Add the factions to bulk things up and sprinkle the languages over the top then serve.

Of course this is how we end up with a whole bunch of mediocre and stale imitations with no innovation. His advice was to write about what you geek out over, what fascinates you, incorporate that into your story. His novels have a lot about economics, because that is what fascinates him and so he built his world around it. Tolkiens novels have so many made up languages in them because hes a glossophile and polyglot, he spoke to some extent 22 languages!!

With this in mind I think its time I went back to the drawing board and start looking at creating a world that incorporates more elements that I can geek out about and have fun researching.