Thank you all for my warm welcome to the interwebs! It mean a lot, especially with a story that has been marinating in private for so long.
My fantasy world is inhabited primarily by shapeshifters and humans, bound together by a precarious magical truce on a small island. Their gods are inspired by the Norse pantheon, and frankly, aren’t great at boundaries.
What’s the first thing a shapeshifter novel needs? Spies! Check.
Next up? Research, obviously!
My favorite fantasy world are the ones rich with detail. When an author has spent months or more meticulously doing the research to give their world its texture, it shows. They can insert a throwaway comment about a cut of fabric, a style of bookbinding, and instantly their world pops into 3-D.
This attention to detail is beautiful for its own sake, but it also has a practical function. Nothing pulls me out of a story faster than skimpy locations or an accidental anachronism. (Intentional anachronisms can be great fun)
One English author, whose name I have thankfully forgotten, wrote a book in which a pint was spilled on a woman’s skirt. Being a wool skirt, he explained, the liquid soaked in immediately.
Sir, I am reporting you to British Wool and if they do not summarily banish you to live in an H&M for the rest of your life for your glaring material ignorance, it is because they were feeling merciful. Wool, rather famously, repels water. Especially after it has been tightly woven into fabric. Especially in an old-fashioned plaid skirt of the type this matronly woman was wearing, because the fabric would have been fulled.
It’s a good thing I don’t work for British Wool, I would be sending you straight to a woolen mill to clean the machinery with your toothbrush.
All of which is to say, getting the details right is essential. And it is work. I love a little National Geographic article about the latest Viking discovery, but they are not book-research fodder.
Also, reprints. Reprinting a myth (re)told by the Victorians without explaining where they found it and whether–how–they bowlderized it gets me nowhere.
The result has been a treasure hunt for current, critical resources. Bookstores and book sales are routinely scoured, and I am particularly grateful to Phoenix Public Library for their dedication to collecting books from academic presses.
Downside: you cannot make notes on your library books.
Another downside: I have a very tall, possibly dangerously tall, stack of books permanently installed on top of my bookshelf.
But for the world building, it’s all worth it.
Which details do you swoon over in fantasy novels? Do you like to know precisely which trees are casting dappled shade, or is it more important to know the style of lace lining the heroine’s bodice? Names of favorite world-builders welcome: if you have a tale of detail fail, I want to hear it, but we shall leave the guilty nameless.
Allison Ringness 