Building a fantasy world should be a fun way to stretch and express your imagination’s wildest limits. It can be very rewarding for you AND everyone else, but to get everyone else into your fantasy takes a lot of work. Creating believable characters, weaving a story that draws in the audience, it can all be very hard. But I’ve found that reading up on it, like you are now, can make things a little easier.

After I read an article about fantasy world-building, I was put to words by the concept: "the fantasy world must be our world only slightly altered, and the differences must be so small as to be hardly discernible." He supports this argument in two very compelling ways.

One, it's easier for us to wrap our head around, and get into, a fantasy world similar to the one we already know. Two, people want to believe that the fantasy world could be real. It's an argument I have a hard time shooting down while supporting my own approach. But! In the movie "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" they show us that the world is flat and that there's a way to get to the afterlife by looking at a sunset from underwater. Or! Or! Harry Potter’s fantasy setting is set in modern day normal-town, but the Wizarding School is a pretty fantastic setting.

"But that's just magic!" you say, "And magical things are important to fantasy." Agreed, but there doesn't have to be a clear distinction between what is a characteristic of the world or an effect of magic. People are already willing to buy that, with a flick of a wand, a wizard can do nearly anything. Then why would they not buy a world where everything is spinning around in a massive tornado? What did the Potter books and Pirates of the Caribbean do that allowed them to break this "rule?"

Well… They didn’t really break the rule, but they could have. Both examples establish a very similar world initially and save the weirder elements of their setting for later. Letting the plot, characters, and promise of fantasy get the audience on board so that they’re already on the ride when things get wacky.

And that’s what people want! They yearn for an escape for the banality of reality. While "it is easier to satisfy that yearning if the fantasy world is as close as possible to our world." That doesn’t mean the effort would go to waste. If you want to create a bizarre setting, you can and should. It just means that you have to tell your story in a way that transitions the audience from reality into fantasy. It’s easier to make the gap between worlds as small as possible, but it’s more rewarding to make the gap wide and tell an entrancing tale.

How? Well consider the source, I have yet to produce famed works of fantasy, but you can create a wildly unique setting and still relate to the audience. First, create your wacky-land. Second, (and this is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING) create realistic and believable characters. People will want to put themselves into a character because characters are how they ‘interact’ with the fantasy. The character’s should still be as fantastic as ever, but think out how people would actually react to them. Or how a person would behave if they were really like that.

Say you have a statuesque fighter, clean shaven with a tribal tattoo on his face and crystal blue eyes whose glow cuts through the snowed air. OK. Now consider how you would react upon seeing this man. Now what about if your mum saw him, or the clerk at the mini-mart? It would probably bring them to pause, scare them, or maybe intrigue them. It’s something very different from reality, and they’d probably notice.

"But that kind of thing is common in my world." Then it should BE common. Don’t only give your heroic main character the luminescent crystal eyes. Make an entire race have them. And make that race common. (Not common like D&D’s Common race; common like you see them all the time) Otherwise, have people act like it were a psychotically abnormal thing to witness. Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ had a bunch of people with VERY blue eyes, and it was a common side effect of consuming Spice. And you see all sorts of people with the eyes. So stop being so Mary Sue.

This way of thinking should carry over to how your characters interact with your wacky-land. Now, two things:

• One, do you gawk at the grass under your feet? No. Neither should your characters if the grass in your world happens to be fields of the tiniest office buildings built by even tinier, yet common, gnats.


• Two, would you react to seeing fields of the tiniest office buildings being stepped on like grass? Yes. So you have to take time to transition from your reaction to the reaction of your characters.

Potter accomplished this transition with the main character, Harry Potter. The first movie begins with Potter in regular old reality, but then takes him to the bizarre world of the Wizarding School. Harry’s reactions are how we, the audience, would react to the fantastical reality of wizards. The other characters show how this fantastical reality is commonplace. And poof! We’ve been pulled into an awesome fantasy that’s generated its author about a billion dollars. How’s that for considering the source.

So make your world as fantastic as you can. But keep in mind that your audience comes from reality and will want to personify your characters. The stranger your world, the harder it will be to get people on board. Characters should be realistic, but still fantastic, and having something very recognizable in the beginning can help carry the audience to the far away place of wacky-land.

On a final note, if you mean to make something of yourself, then do it and do it right. That is as much a message for myself as it is a message to you.