The frame of the picture
When building a world in a written work, the setting is very important. Particularly in works of fiction, where the reader needs to be able to immerse themselves into your story. Naturally many different universes already exists, ranging from claustrophobic underwater adventures, over vast expanses of space with myriads of planets, to a world very similar to your own, except a grizzly murder have just been committed.
As a first-time writer, the framework of the story may seem like a massive piece of work in front of you. You begin to worry about the amount of detail, does it hold up, is this world interesting and so on. In my experience, when you begin to worry about the writing rather than just letting it come to you naturally, then it’s time to take a break. Even if you haven’t even started writing yet. It doesn’t have to be a long break, sometimes even stepping back from your keyboard for a minute, (or even switching to a different tab, if you’re really lazy, I know that I can be.) and empty your mind. You don’t have to go all out and join a yoga-class to meditate, but, and this is important, do NOT RETURN TO WRITING UNTIL YOU FEEL LIKE IT. Obviously it’s much easier to say the phrase “don’t worry, just empty your mind”, than it is to actually carry the phrase out.
One of the advises to work past this worry, is to select an already existing universe, the more expansive the better. Instead of having to worry about how a brand new universe keeps itself together, when choosing an already existing franchise as your framework, you take that worry away. Sure, there isn’t the exact same pride in building on something you did not make from the bottom, but it is a great writing practice for you to use later on in your writing career. The ability to alter your writing style, narrative angle and genre, can boost your later works with the experience, that comes from putting a particular style of writing into practice. Early on in your writing career, perhaps before it’s even a career, you can also use the practice of writing in other existing universes, to start building your own writing style. For example, you’ve read George R.R. Martin’s “Game of Thrones” series, and while you liked the characters and the way the story moved, you found that Martin’s style of describing environments and scenes, was lacking something, despite not being able to put an exact finger on what that something is. Keeping that experience in mind, you can onward from here avoid making the flaw that, in your mind, Martin made in his writings.
Changing the setting
Rarely will you find a story changing it’s setting completely, though it has been gaining some more popularity, with movies and computer games affecting authors and writers. More and more stories have the story start out in the “real” world, only for the story to enter a fictional universe, within it’s own fictional universe. I would personally argue that this isn’t so much changing the setting, as it is adding a secondary and minor setting, a sub-setting if you like, to the story. The major point in my argument is that the story almost always “returns” to the “real” world either just once, or multiple times during the story. C.S. Lewis’ “Narnia” series is a great example of this. J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series is as well, though, admittedly, it’s less obvious than Narnia. The sub-setting, despite that I’ve just called it “minor”, can easily take up a larger percentage of the story than the “major” one. The reason for this, is that a story with more settings, is always remembered, when retelling it, as starting in it’s major setting. Allow me to put this into more graspable terms, using my two examples. The “Narnia” series is about a group of English kids, who discovers a gateway into a different world, where fantasy creatures of all kinds live and dwell among each other. The “Harry Potter” series is about an English boy, who lives with an unfriendly foster-family, until he learns that he is actually a wizard, and journeys to another dimension, where witches, trolls, potions and broom-based sports are common.
Did you notice something just now? In case you didn’t, because it’s not often something you think that much about, let me clarify. The word “English” is occurring in both examples. Now you could argue that I am just paraphrasing the examples to get my point across, and you would not be wrong in that assumption. However, if you ask anyone (well, almost) to retell these stories by memory, you’d almost certainly get summaries resembling what I’ve just written here. In other words, it is not only me, but also several other people. This proves how a “major” setting is significant to a story, even when, taking “Harry Potter” once again, we, as a reader, don’t spend much more than around 15 % of the entire story in the “major” setting.
The main reason you don’t find a lot of stories with a 50/50 major and minor setting, or a full-on actual change of the setting, is that it requires more work. Putting a setting in, when starting the story, you’re building up a world, with locations, details, weather and other natural phenomenons. To change the setting, you have to abandon the previous one, and, essentially, build a new one up, only keeping scraps of the old one as reason for comparison and inducing flashbacks amongst characters. Writers generally do not mind scrapping a setting, but there needs to be a good reason to do so. Otherwise you’re essentially doing double the work for a single written piece, and having multiple story-settings going on at the same time, can quickly become an obstacle towards finishing the overall project.
Upholding the setting (don’t break the canon)
Once you’ve assigned something as “a rule” for your story, as part of the setting, most characters and events needs to follow these rules. If you find that events and characters more often than not, are breaking these rules, you need to change the rules to fit. Why not change the characters or the events to fit? That can work too, but unless you’re looking to create a plot-hole, especially if the event, or character, is reoccurring, I wouldn’t recommend it. This is where already existing universes restricts the writer, dictating typical means of transport, how advanced the technology is, fauna and flora as well as ethics and acceptable behaviour. Even in universes that are “potentially” unlimited, in terms of what COULD be existing in the universe, this restrictive setting is still active. For example, the “Star Trek” universe includes a multitude of different races, each with their own technological know-how, nature and ethical views. Because it, like many sci-fi stories, takes place in space, where the number of planets and other objects that have actually been discovered, is very, very low. It doesn’t take much logical thought to reason that there are so many more planets, even civilizations out there. But when writing in existing universes, we often have a tendency to build extreme “bubbles” within the already existing story. A bigger bubble, as in a more extreme setting, makes a bigger “pop”, and the bigger the “pop” the more your story is “heard”. But these bubbles also press against, and often through, the “rim of canon”; what actually exists within the universe already.
If you are writing your own story, with your own setting, you are also the one in charge of placing the “rim of canon”. YOU decide what goes. Can people fly? Does magic exist? Is the air polluted to a point where everyone needs to wear a gas-mask, or risk undergoing horrible mutations? Only your mind sets the rim of what is “acceptable” within YOUR world, YOUR story. However, just as in an existing story, you have to be consistent and follow the rules that you’ve stated for your world, otherwise you’ll create plot-holes, which makes your story seem rushed or even poorly written. Here’s the good news though; because it’s your setting, you can add rules to the setting at any point during the writing process. This is handy, as you can write up a rule to suit an event or character, so they fit into your setting, when they occur.
Going back to the writing practice that is trying to copy someone else’s writing style, another part of the “practice” is also to have an opinion on as many things as possible in the writing style you’re working with. Transitions, flash-backs, character introductions and so on. Essentially you’re going through someone’s story like a shopping center, when you stop to look at a “ware”, you look to your shopping check-list and ask yourself “Does this work, why/why not.” Eventually you’ll end up with a list of things you like about a style, and things that you might not like. And thus; you’ve taken the first step towards creating your own writing style.
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