Pro Tips on Fleshing Out Your World
If you're developing a story with characters where you know their world doesn't exist such as the distant future or an alien planet, then it might seem like a very ambitious task to create a world for your characters to live in. However the support and level of depth this can give your characters will make them feel far more real, give them a sense of purpose and motivation.
Tip 1 - World soup
You might imagine a mind bending world beyond anything anyone can imagine. however the sad truth is we humans who want to explore your world, still need a sense of familiarity, a set of rules that we can understand. The most successful world builders, always find something from our own world and history to base their world from to ensure they maintain the illusion that this could possibly exist. Try to imagine everything in our world and throughout history are all soup ingredients, our blank page is a soup pot, waiting for you to add in all the veggies, meat, spices etc .. it takes a perfect balance to really find something that has that distinct originality and when you find it, it's like nothing you've ever tasted before, however it's still based on the same ingredients as chicken noodle soup! So find those special ingredients and see how you can turn them into something unique.
Tip 2 - Contrast
This is a concept that exists throughout art and creation itself. Contrast always appeals. If you have something slow next to something fast, it suggests an interesting dynamic, if you have two contrasting colors, it excites, if you have a soft appearing character who is internally very strong, it surprises. This same idea can apply to world building too.
Tip 3 - Draw a map
This is the most fun part for me. I love to create fictional maps and imagine these worlds and how civilization would evolve and adapt to the geological features and climate of the world. There's many fun ways to create a map without breaking your mind. One way, is simply to squiggle random continents on paper, the classic method! Another way I've seen people create interesting fictional maps is by allowing ink, coffee stains and such to flow around paper, then scan this in and clean it up in Photoshop, you get some interesting archipelagos this way. My preferred method is to cut up parts of our own world, move them around and stitch them back together again in unique ways. I'm told this last method is how Westeros was created. If you rearrange the Game of Thrones map you end up with England. You can see some interesting comparisons for Westeros Here.
Tip 4 - Planetary System
Think about our own star system, and the relationship between our planets and the sun, how each environment is extremely diverse, from the extreme cold to the extreme hot, Planets covered in Toxic gases, others like a baron wasteland. How does this proximity to the sun effect a civilization? If they're very close to the sun, maybe their skin would be very leathery and lizard like, with very small eyes. If they're the further planet away from the sun, then they will likely have very large eyes or use echo location, and their biology might be adapt to a climate of extreme cold and they might live far under ground to get close to warmth of the planets core. The position of the planet will heavily influence their biology, means of surviving, and so forth.
Tip 5 - Religion
What events occurred in your world that can be the seed for religion beliefs. How would those events be distorted over time to make them seem more fantastical to future generations. What rituals would arrive from these beliefs. Maybe there's multiple belief systems and different interpretation of the same events, maybe this would be a cause for conflict and wars, division of society.
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