Wonders & Woes of Writing: World–Building

            Something that’s an ongoing challenge for me as a writer is world–building.  By world–building I mean the background details and information that help the reader come to know and understand the setting of the story.  A lot of the information that goes into it isn’t actually used in the written story, but it’s still necessary in order to convey many of the nuances that would otherwise be lost.

My problem is that I tend to focus more on the inner workings of my characters and their interactions with each other than I do on the setting in which these things take place.  (All that arguing with myself gives me great material for my brainchildren!) That’s not to say that I don’t have a mental picture of their surroundings, I do, but I fail to convey that.  I feel the need to build things to the point, that if one of my characters asked me for directions, I would be able to tell them:

“Oh, that place?  It’s located on this street.  From here you’ll take the first right, past the fishmongers, but not the docks, then a left into an alley.  It zigs back and forth, but keep following it and you’ll end up just down the street from where you want to be. The building will be on your right."

            Tragically, I have yet to reach that point in the architecture of my world.  I do have the basic geography of the planet mapped out, but humanity has this annoying habit of changing the face of the land, even in fiction, so it does me little good.