Worldbuilding in relation to novel planning

[rhiannon]

Hello, Fantasy Forum! You're looking a little lonely. I guess I'll get us started; I can't imagine that I'm the only fantasy genre writer here. (:

My question to drum up some discussion is this: when you first embark on your novel, about how much of your world do you have hammered out? Do you know, in detail, the daily lives of the average person in your world? The way your magic works, if you have any? Or do you only have a vague idea of how your alternate universe differs from this one? I'm curious to see how detailed or vague other writers are when it comes to making other worlds.

My own specificity varies depending on the world or story. For the most part, I am anything but meticulously detailed in my ideas. I prefer starting out with chunky, general building blocks and letting the details chisel themselves in from there. How about your guys?

[Elizabeth Sabourin]

I have a few fantasy novels in progress (none that I'm doing for 6Mo, 6No).

For one story I have thought quite a bit about everyone. For example, the main characters are a family of witches, so I have the magic thing pretty much planned out there. I know how the covens work, I even plotted out all the creatures. Vampires, werewolves, trolls, five types of fairies. I know how they're created and what their abilities are. I've even created a map with all the countries and towns they'll be visiting.

This is my most detailed fantasy novel. The other two have yet to be planned out completely. One of them has a few details, as far as characters go, whereas the other one only had a map. I guess it really depends on the story and characters and how much I like it, if that makes sense.

[C]

I start extremely vague, but I start everything pretty vague -- over time things get hammered out to varying detail (for example I still don't know if sai'da could develop gunpowder but I know exactly what effect magic has on a human body, because my characters are mages so that I have to know/they tell me) but starting it's just whatever I can run with while no one's looking.

(My main specialty for figuring out/finding out fast seems to be magic, though. I really like designing magical systems.)

Then again, most of my answers go somewhat like this, that I do everything by the seat of my pants...

[Zora Malfoy]

I'm writing fantasy for January, and I'm starting out sort of vague. I've always had an extremely hard time with prewriting for anything (when we wrote essays for school that had to have an outline turned in with them for the final draft, I wrote the outline after I finished the essay). I wrote an original fantasy a couple years back (most of my experience is with Star Wars fanfic) and I tried to go in-depth into the world. I drew maps and came up with cultures and everything. I didn't quite finish all the details, but I did a lot more prewriting than I ever do. In the end, I wound up with a girl who sounded a bit too much like a Mary-Sue and a world that kind of reminded me of Final Fantasy XII. It would have been salvageble, but I was too frusturated at the time to do much with it. When I finally wanted to go back to it, it was too late - my computer had crashed and I lost my only remaining copy of it. I was so frusturated with it, I had deleted it off of my flashdrive.

I think for me, I need to focus on character building and figure out the world and everything as I go. I know the basics about it, but some of the finer details I need to work out in the revisions. I prewrote for this one, but my focus was more on the characters and the plot this time. I also didn't prewrite nearly as much. Part of my problem is that outlines and stuff have kind of always felt restrictive to me. I know that I can change things, but I feel like since I outlined it that way it has to go that way. I'm just a rebel at heart, and don't really like feeling like I'm being held back.

That's just me personally, and I'm very unusal, lol.