When I first asked for potential topics I could cover during Furry Book Month, the first comment I got was from @SapphyStarr. Her suggestion was world creation/development. As far as my writing goes, I am not the best at world-building.
My philosophy when it comes to developing a setting is just to write and let the world form itself. Take my novella, Phantom Janitor. When I wrote that, I started with a vague idea of the world I was working with. Our world, but with furry characters. As I wrote, settings started to form, like the school, the theater, the burger joint. They were all smaller nudges towards trying to establish a visual world.
Then you have authors like James Patterson who take the time to build their universes and establish themselves and their stories there and you just want to stare and wonder “Oh my god! How the hell did they do that?” I can’t speak for super famous author James Patterson, but my guess is that he planned it out.
I am not the best at this, so I called in some help from a fellow writer. Tempe O’Kun @TempoWrites is a fellow member of the Furry Writer’s Guild community and the author of several books. Several titles to his name include Windfall, Sleep for Gamers, Sixes Wild: Manifest Destiny, and Sixes Wild: Echoes.
When I asked for his help on this post, the husky went above and beyond and actually wrote a full post that he posted to his Furaffinity. I will link the full post HERE so you can read what he has to say in full.
According to Tempe, the best way to figure out how to world-building is to know what kind of story you are writing and who you are writing the story for. Who is your target audience? What is your target genre here? How old is your audience?
There are three possible questions you may need to consider here. Is this for others to read or is it just something you are writing for yourself? Is this story you are working on for a younger audience or a more adult one? The ideas of these questions will help a writer build up what they want to do with their story. And if you’ll allow me, I’d like to add a fourth question to Tempe’s. What type of writing are you doing?
I’ll touch briefly on the first three questions, but if you want the full scoop go check out Tempe’s post that is linked above. As most seasoned members of the FWG and writers in general know, there are markets for more than just novels and short stories. Research Papers, poetry, script-writing, games, screenplays. All are possible ways that furry writers can go when writing. Most writers in the FWG lean towards the short stories or novel departments, but a lot also are involved in those other types of writing. For example, Tempe is a script-writer for the YouTube channel Culturally F’d! Now seeing as this is Furry Book Month, I am going off the assumption that most of the people reading this are leaning towards a novel or short story (or possibly poetry! I am not clairvoyant.) But as a writer, you should be aware of the other possibilities, especially if you are more comfortable with those types of writings.
Obviously, this fourth question won’t have much to do with building a world, but it is still useful information to have for any writer. So what about the other questions. In a short summary of Tempe’s wonderful post, (You should check that out!) Knowing your purpose and your audience is the most important part of starting to build your story’s world.
Let’s take my project, Sunnydale, for example. Normal readers of this blog know that Sunnydale is an idea consisting of horror-comedy in a small town full of monsters and one angsty teen German Sheppard who has to navigate it all. Following the notes Tempe made, I would first need to establish who this story is for. Myself or others? Considering how much I have shared with others and how excited I am about it, I would probably be safe in saying both. As far as the audience, I am aiming towards a Young Adult audience, and if it wasn’t obvious from the causal mentioning of my main character’s species, it’s for furries. Asking yourself these questions, in the beginning, starts you down the right track to a story.
This is where my fourth question comes into play. Or as Tempe phrased it, “What is your final outcome?” Since this is a work of fiction, most of the other ways of writing I mentioned are off the table. All except for novels, short stories, and games. As I have no experience with games, I do understand that is more complicated than a straightforward novel, so I will defer to Tempe’s knowledge here and instead share my thoughts on the other two.
Novels are a great way to write a one and done story (or the start to a series) and it gives you room to describe and explore the world of your story and its characters. Novels usually have larger casts than short stories and since they are bigger, you need to make sure that not only is every member defined, but that the world they live in can be clearly imagined. You will need to explore the possibilities that all of these different characters are traveling to or from different paths than each other and be able to explore the facets of their different characters.
Short stories seem easier but to a writer who’s more experienced in longer works, it can be tricky. You need to focus more on driving the plot forward than details about the character’s backstory or world that don’t matter to the plot. You need to make sure every detail fleshes out the characters in respect to the story's main purpose. However, some short story writers can choose to try and expand certain aspects or characters by writing multiple short stories and combining them into a collection.
As far as my preferred way to write Sunnydale, I am leaning towards a collection of shorter stories.
After this, you are ready to start doing the serious world-building. As I said before, I can’t cover all of Tempe’s tips here, because that wouldn’t be right and there would be no point in reading both posts. In the second half of his post, he shares some of his own personal tips on how he does his world-building! So after this, please make sure to check his post out. It’s linked above and also right HERE.
To close this post up, I want to remind every writer out there. Even if you follow all of these tips at the start, writing is a fluid practice. Things can change at the drop of a hat. You need to remember that as you write, you may think of a way to enhance your stories world that you might have missed or didn’t plan to encounter. But don’t let any roadblocks like doubt or possible holes in the story stop you from continuing. If you were able to implement through all these steps we mentioned in our posts, you’ll be able to accomplish great things and are well on your way to being able to share something amazing.
Thank you so much to Tempe O’Kun for lending his paw in this post on world-building. His Twitter is @TempoWrites if you want to follow him there, or you can read some of his other writing-related posts on FA while you are there. And since it is #FurryBookMonth, make sure to check out his works that I shared above!
