3 Topics: World Building, Submissions, Community (Part I)

When a world starts feeling surface-level, it needs the depth of lore.

I wrote down this thought on Twitter, mostly because I was ruminating about the addition of a new realm I made to A Desert of Bleeding Sand 3. I’m currently revising the first draft, and since I blew through drafting it, there’s a lot of revising to do. (I’m not complaining though, I love being busy with a project while on subs!) Anyway, I started getting the feeling as I revised that this new kingdom doesn’t feel very corporeal. It feels airy (that’s my way of describing world building or characters that feel shallow/aren’t well-grounded.) I’ve been slipping in details to try to make the new kingdom more solid, but it came to me that the world needs more lore.

Really, lore is a strong component in world building. The deeper and richer the histories of everything, the more grounded the world feels. I hadn’t realized I’d need lore here because the history of all the countries of my book’s continent are tied together. And I’d gone into a good chunk of it from the human pov. So I thought it was all covered and I didn’t have to do more world building when I introduce this other kingdom’s pov.

I’m excited to tackle it though. World building is one of my favorite parts of writing and I’m happy to spend a while on this revision!

This was supposed to be 3 different subjects in one post, as implied by the title! But I’m still on a mission to make my blog posts shorter whenever possible. So I’ll split it into parts and share my other thoughts in individual posts!