How I Made My World: The Journey of Creating a Fictional Universe

I didn’t start to make a world. I didn’t realize I was laying the groundwork for a world, feature by feature, with each story I wrote. I had no plan as such, no design, let alone a detailed blueprint complete with charts and graphs. I came into writing fiction without any formal training in fiction writing. I learned the ropes of this new world thanks, initially, to my critique partners, and subsequently, to reading.

Maybe if I had set out to build a world, I could have done a much more professional job about it. As it is, the world is still a work-in-progress.  

For example, I’m still trying to figure out how to fix my world’s calendar. The week has nine days, but I’m yet to decide how many days and weeks a month has and how many months a year. And what to call the days.   

Fortunately, these are not major matters. Once I figured that I was building a world and decided it would be a secondary world, the rest sort of fell into place. I gave my world three moons to make the demarcation between it and our world easier and clearer. In my short stories, I mention the moon early, as a way to clue the reader in. To make the point even sharper, my moons are of three colors – red, blue, and yellow.

One of the main problems I encountered in making my world was the flora and fauna. Of course I could make everything new, but how could a reader navigate such an alien terrain? If I say, an oak, many readers would have an idea. But if I say, dentro? If I wrote, She ran to the dentro, would it make much sense?

A glossary is one possibility, but which reader would want to – should be made to – refer to a list again and again? But if my world has only flora and fauna known to us, wouldn’t it look too much like our own earth?

So my way out is to take the familiar and add an unfamiliar touch.  Here is an example from my first novel, I will Paint the Night, the heroine, Allii, lost in a desert, teetering between life and death, remembering her last birthday party given by her beloved stepmother..

My sixteenth birthday was celebrated by Bellizza with a small party in her apartment. She had ordered all my favorite food – frozen sandberries with coconut cream, tiny thorn-pear cakes, lavender biscuit.

When I create something totally new, I try to tag on a very brief description, sufficient to create an image while avoiding the info-dump error. Here is an example:

The messenger-bird arrived on the sixth evening, not a mechanical one but a real bird, a generia, with gray feathers and a pink crest.

Allii is a self-trained herbalist. Plants play a key role in the mystery that is at the heart of the book. In the first chapter, she is preparing a specimen for her herbaria, a snowflake fern and a moth rose. This is how she describes the fern to her stepmother.

“A fern, a green beauty with silver whorls.” I laughed in anticipation of the joy awaiting me.

A few pages later: The moth rose was as big as my palm. I held it to my face, relishing the satiny feel of its grey petals, the musky smell…

Here I was aiming for a double whammy: to say something about the world and something about the character. Have I succeeded? I don’t know. I hope so.

Creating my characters also became enmeshed with world-building, because the world dictates their nature and vice versa. Allii comes into her special powers later, once she begins her journey to discover her beloved stepmother’s killer/s. Spooky, a daemon-dog, becomes her companion during this journey. Allii is born with the power to understand animal speak. As she begins her journey, she tries desperately to awaken this ability. She wants to master the ability of comprehending animal speak both to talk to Spooky and to build a relationship with him. Her efforts fail, and with every failure, Spooky’s gaze turns more satirical. Then it happens.

In this bit, I’ve tried to flesh out the world and the characters, and also say something about the evolving relationship between Allii and Spooky.

One of the best things about writing secondary world fantasy is that you can give your imagination free rein. So I love to take what is old and trim them to my liking. My dragons, love desserts, fashions, and experimenting. They can be dangerous but are also fun to be around. For an early short story, I created an Encyclopedia Magica, to explain and contextualize the two types of fairies that peopled my story:

• Fairies Alba
• Kingdom: Magicus
• Class: Aves
• Family: Paradisaeidae
• Fairies Fusca
• Kingdom: Magicus
• Class: Ambulatorious
• Family: Venȇficuslamiae

Naming things and people is another challenge. When I want a bit of an exotic name for something, I turn to Greek, Latin or Sanskrit. My three moons, for example, got their names from Sanskrit.

But the most important act of naming I did was to name my world.

In February 2019, my oldest dog Peggy was diagnosed with liver tumor. The vet was not optimistic. I did an enormous amount of online reading and the longest a dog lived with liver tumor was one year. Peggy would live for two years and nine months, a life full of all her favorite activities, eating, a bit of gentle playing, car-rides.

When I thought I was going to lose her in a matter of weeks, and I was struggling to deal with that reality, one way I did so (or tried to) was by naming my world after her, for her. Pegala for Peggy, my way of keeping her around.

In the end, building my world for me was an intensely personal act. It is an extension of my loves and beliefs, my hopes, wishes, and fears. It has its share of bad happenings and characters you wouldn’t want to spend a minute with, but in the end, animals are saved, children are protected, the worst outcomes are prevented, and the underdog has a fighting chance and does clock some wins. Why not? It is, after all, My World.

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