Creative writing: Creating characters in fantasy

Award-winning fantasy author RJ Barker explains why he believes worldbuilding is less important than character creation as you bring a fantasy world to life for readers

I should preface this with my belief no one can teach you how to write.

They can teach you about writing, about theory and character creation and story arcs and all that whizzy sounding stuff – but the actual act of writing? That thing that goes on between the folds of your brain and the keyboard? No, that just needs you, a screen and time.

A lot of time.

Which begs the question, in that case, RJ, what are you doing writing an article about writing for Writers Online?

Well, because I possess a very important quality for a writer, I love to write. And to talk about writing and think about writing and quite often, by doing stuff like this, I find out things about my own process I’d not really thought about.

So, worldbuilding, eh? Let’s get to it.

You can’t really mention writing Fantasy without someone bringing up worldbuilding. There are forums dedicated to it, countless books and articles (like this one) about it. People will talk about it for hours and hours. It is a thing that you must do, that you should be sinking huge amounts of thought into before you consider putting finger to keyboard.

Well, friend, I am here to tell you that’s not the case. Although, I am not here to tell you that you shouldn’t do it either. Just that you don’t need to.

Mortedant’s Peril, my latest fantasy book, appears to the reader to be a complex, thriving and living world: a character in itself. That’s part of the reason my editors, Bella and Stephanie at TOR, bought it.

It’s all made up on the fly. Well. That’s a slight exaggeration. Unlike my other work, Mortedant’s Peril contains elements from an older work that had just refused to leave my mind; the tiered city of Elbay, the hulking non-human mercenary Whisper, Niofa, the ruler of the city and an unwilling, disagreeable detective. With those in mind, I sat down to write a book.

There are reasons I don’t do a lot of worldbuilding. I’ll put aside that the main one is I am an incredibly lazy human and concentrate on the ones that make me look better.

Firstly, once you have created a world, especially if you’ve gone really in depth, it’s very tempting to tell people about it and writing, like jazz (which I hate) is often about what you don’t say. People think they want answers, but there’s diminishing returns when they get them. The more you explain the less magical a fantasy world tends to become.

Those spaces left for the reader to fill in really matter.

You see, I don’t think it is the depth of world that makes it real to a reader. In fact. I think that is way, way down the list.

What I think matters is that the characters you create live in that world. What is fantastic to the reader is normal to them and they should act like that.

Irody, the titular Mortedant, lives in a very odd world. He can hear the dead, strange creatures scurry round his feet, the city houses a God within it and is full of machines no one understands. But he never bothers about these things. They are normal and everyday and mundane to him and to not bother about everyday stuff is really normal.

Some people reading this will understand how an internal combustion engine works. Most won’t, but they will drive because we live between gaps in our world and making those gaps exist creates realism.

Like most of us Irody is not interested in the world around him until it directly affects him.
From there, he moves in a fog, like we all do. We see what he sees, we gather understanding with him.

Do I know how a God ended up within Elbay? Well, yes, I do in this case. Does Irody? No, and so my knowledge is unimportant to the story because it’s about what he knows. And as he learns things, they build up in my head and the world is created around the character and the story, as opposed to me forcing a story and character onto a pre existing shape.

So in short, you don’t need to world build in depth, or have reams of notes to write a book. You can just go at it and as long as it sticks to its own interior logic it’ll work. But, if building a world helps give you the confidence to sit in the chair and do the thing, then that’s great too.

The greatest and most freeing thing I ever learned was not how to write, but that there is no wrong or right in art.

There is only what works for you.

Mortedant’s Peril by RJ Barker is published by Tor (£22)

Read more about unlocking the magic in your fantasy fiction with Dead Ink publisher Dan Coxon