I was talking to a young girl who is a very big Harry Potter fan. She was half way through the first book in another fantasy series. It’s a book I’m sure you’ve seen in the hands of fantasy fans, particularly females. It’s called Fourth Wing. I asked her how she liked the book. She shrugged her shoulders and said it was OK. It was an odd response given that it is a large book and she was half-way through it.

“So what do you like,” I asked.

“The dragons,” she quickly responded and when I asked her what she liked about the dragons, she replied, “They have personality.”

So why the ambivalent response?

Let me preface this by saying, this is not a review of Fourth Wing. I simply want to use it as a point of comparison with another highly popular series, Harry Potter. I read Fourth Wing imagining I had grown up with Harry and gang and was now looking for a slightly older version of that same sense of a fantasy world I could get lost in. The end result was that Violet, her friends and the training academy at Basqiath lacked the same immersive quality of Hogwarts and its inhabitants.

I re-read the opening chapters of Harry Potter. The descriptions of the Dursleys is minimal and yet by the end of chapter one I know they are ordinary people. Chapter one also introduces Dumbledore, Professor McGonagall and Hagrid. They are anything but normal. Without describing Harry, except to say that he is a baby newly orphaned, the conflict is already established. It is a brilliant opening that immediately pulls the reader in so if you want to write fantasy I strongly encourage you to study it. In a few pages it clues the reader into the two worlds Harry inhabits; the ordinary world he has been placed into for safe keeping and the magical world he must grow into.

Back to Fourth Wing. The voice  of Violet dumps on the reader a whole bunch of information. We know that her mother is a general, that her sister is a brave and talented fighter but that Violet is more studious and unfit for the task of becoming a dragon rider. By the end of the chapter, I felt defeated. Why was Violet being forced to be something she didn’t want to be and wasn’t suited for. I kept thinking that Yarrow, the author missed a great opportunity to immerse her readers into Violet’s world. Rowling drops me into Harry’s world and I’m ready to accept it. Yarrow tells me about Violet’s world but I had trouble feeling it.

That I think is the secret to world building. We have to experience the world. Rowling does this through Harry. Like the reader, he comes from the normal world. Yarrow’s character has grown up in the world she inhabits which means the writer must find another way to introduce the reader to the world of the fourth wing.

Let’s consider another modern fantasy series, George R. R. Martin’s A Game Of Thrones. Like Violet reporting for duty, there’s a young recruit, Will who acts as our eyes and ears. His age is never mentioned so how do we know he’s young. Martin clues us in by saying he’s been on the wall only four years. What’s the Wall. We don’t know but we know it’s important because beyond it, things happen. Bad things. And by the end of that chapter, without ever describing the undead, you know all that you need to know. They are the enemy and the Wall and the troops patrolling it are the only protection the kingdoms have from this un-named, unseen, threat. Martin, like Rowland, ends chapter one with a mystery. The book references the Wall and what lies beyond but the story is not concerned with that – not yet. Just as Harry is not concerned with Voldemort. They are the real threats but the hero has not yet passed enough tests to face them.

Fantasy, more than any other genre, relies on world building (hang on sci-fi fans, we’ll get to you) because worlds are more than physical places. They can be a source of conflict, they can establish boundaries and they can hold secrets. In Harry Potter, the school teaches would be wizards not only what they can do but what they shouldn’t do.

Ged, the wizard in Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea Trilogy, is born into a world that contains magic but he needs to learn, not only how to do magic, but how to control it. Magic is power and learning how to use that power is an important lesson.

Power is also an essential element in Game of Thrones. The balance between the seven kingdoms, loosely held in place by King Robert, is disrupted by his death. Suddenly there are alliances made and broken. Wars break out but the critical balance is that delineated by the Wall. While Martin distracts us with the pettiness of the struggles within and without Westeros and the other kingdoms, the real enemy introduced in the Prologue, lurks in the background like Hitchcock’s bomb under the bed. (Google it)

Finally, how could we talk about world building without mentioning (no not Tolkein) Ray Bradbury.

I’m about to start the Fourth book in my series and I must tell my young friend that I owe a lot to her for opening my eyes. As a writer we get so excited about telling the reader everything about the world we’ve created that we don’t allow them the thrill of discovery. If what I’m saying sounds like gibberish, think about your favourite books. What was it that you truly enjoyed?

If you have your own insights on world building, drop a note in the comments below.