Creating Worlds - Jeanette O'Hagan

By Jeanette O'Hagan

For me one of the joys of reading —and writing— is being transported to another place and time. Maybe to encounter ancient or not so ancient societies and cultures (Medieval, Egyptian or Incan). It might be to a strange dystopian future or across the universe in a FTL spaceship. Or it might be the streets of New York or Sydney, the vast Australian Outback or the green hills of England. Books have whisked me away to all these places – and fired my imagination.

Creating Nardva

I changed schools in the middle of grade one, the first of many such shifts. The playground became a lonely place until I discovered the school library. My imagination was already fired up as each night my parents read from the pages of Narnia. Enriched by story-worlds, I began creating my own and this world grew and grew and grew. The result was Nardva – a planet in many ways like our own, but with two moons, strange cultures, shape-shifters, special magical gifts and epic and every-day challenges.

As a teen, I moved from recording my world-building (maps, languages, genealogies, customs, art, images) to writing down the stories. Most of my fiction, from the underground adventure of Heart of the Mountain, to courtly the intrigue of Akrad’s Children to my futuristic cyborg story in Project Chameleon (Quantum Soul anthology), happens within this fictional world.

Worlds with Depth

Even the most fantastical world draws inspiration from our world. As writers, we walk in the steps of our own Maker who spoke the cosmos into being. I find this thought both inspiring and very, very humbling.

Setting is important. Stories without sense of place result in ‘white space’ and ‘talking heads’ — boring, paper-thin worlds and characters. Just as we are shaped by our environment, our ‘where’ and ‘when’, so too are our characters and so are their motivations and the challenges they face. For me, the best stories have a sense of history, the sense that the world stretches to the horizon, the sense that if you peeked behind you’d find more than two-dimensional set pieces of plyboard and badly applied paint. A fictional world should be complex, dynamic and interactive. History, geography, ecology, economics, cultures all interact, yet are rarely monolithic, and are always changing. A fictional fantasy world, even more than the real world, needs to be consistent and coherent, with believable conflicts and power struggles.

Engaging Worlds

On the other hand, as my editor reminds me, I need be careful not to clutter my story-telling with too much detail, too much back-story, too much description, too much history and legend. I’ve spun and woven my world into existence over many decades and, as a result, my Nardvan stories are interconnected and occur in different time periods, geographical locales and among different Nardvan peoples. Writing whole scenes of tangential backstory or lengthy description of customs and architecture is a temptation that must be resisted.

We live in an age where readers become inpatient with huge slabs of description or information dumps. Our fictional worlds can be woven in through telling details in the narrative, fused with the point of view of our character, through their thoughts and reactions, through their interaction with the world, and through their speech. We need to make descriptive detail work for us.

Here Ruhanna (from Ruhanna’s Flight, in Glimpses of Light anthology), waits for her father to arrive at her island home.

From the little kitchen came tantalising smells fit for the palace in Silantis. Mariam had surpassed herself with Baba’s favourite dishes—turtle and seaweed soup, baked fish, baby tomatoes and sea-sage, oysters and rock crays with a creamy dill sauce, stuffed quails and fresh wave-berries with yarma cheese to finish off. Everything was ready by late morning. Ruhanna sank down on a cushion in the reception room, stroking the carved albatross on Baba’s box, and waited.

In contrast, the twins Retza and Delvina (from the novellas Heart of the Mountain and Blood Crystal) live deep under the mountain, their diet and perception of the world is very different from Ruhanna’s or indeed, Zadeki, a young shapeshifer whose people live in the forests.

Though Delvina’s stomach grumbled with hunger at the savoury fragrance, her fingers hovered over each bowl offered to her. Some looked like cooked leaves or roots, others held rolled up balls of white stuff sprinkled with seeds. Only when she saw the snails in a green tinted broth and a bowl of fried mushrooms, did the tension release in her shoulders. At last, something she understood in this strange land.

Whereas, Dana (features in Space Junk, Mixed Blessings: Genre-lly speaking, and Rendezvous at Alexgaia, Futurevision anthology) lives in Nardva’s space-age.

Dana snatched a food packet and shoved it into the rehydrator, keying in the sequence. Red lights flashed as the mechanism whined. She gave it a brisk shake. A sharp hiccough, it hummed, green lights winking on.

A close point of view and telling details help conjure world setting even in a few words.

I firmly believe that desire to create reflects the image of our Maker and Saviour. Writing immersive fictional worlds with stories of hope can fire the imaginations of our readers and open their minds to His grace.

Jeanette O’Hagan first started spinning tales in the world of Nardva at the age of nine. She enjoys writing secondary world fantasy, science fiction, poetry, blogging and editing. Her Nardvan stories span continents, time and cultures.

Recent publications include her debut Novel Akrad’s Children and novellas Heart of the Mountain and Blood Crystal. She also has over a dozen stories and poems published in different anthologies such as Glimpses of Light, Futurevision, and Quantum Soul.

Jeanette has practised medicine, studied communication, history, theology and a Master of Arts (Writing). She loves reading, painting, travel, catching up for coffee with friends, pondering the meaning of life and communicating God’s great love. She lives in Brisbane with her husband and children.

Find her at her Facebook Page, Goodreads, Twitter, Amazon or on her website Jeanette O'Hagan Writes.