I have no new story, so I suppose it must be confession time. Well, sort of. I have been writing, I just haven't finished anything. I'm still working on the next bit for Violetta. I made some major revisions to the Fairy Tale (actually, I'm in the process of expanding the whole opening scene. But it's already longer than all of the original non-story bits put together, and I haven't even gotten to the fairy tale itself).
Really, though, most of what I've been working on is world building.
When most people think of world building, they're thinking of establishing the setting for a speculative fiction world (also known as science fiction or fantasy, but I like the term speculative fiction better, for reasons that I'll save for some other post). But actually, every writer engages in some degree of world building--even if they're writing about the real world. After all, if you're writing a story set in New York City, you have to describe the setting at least a little bit, or assume that your entire audience is as familiar with NYC as you are (and the closest I've ever been to NYC is watching the ball drop on New Year's Eve, so I don't have the slightest idea what it's like living there on a daily basis). So world building is important for everyone.
But there are real published authors whose work I admire that have written much better posts on world building than me, so instead of attempting to duplicate their work I'll just send you to one of their blogs:
Actually, Patricia Wrede's blog is a far better writing resource than mine, so you should just go there.
To this point, all of the story bits that I've posted have been set in the same Victorian Era fantasy Europe. Why? In part, because I like fantasy but I'm attempting to avoid the stereotypical medieval fantasy tropes--armored knights, woodsy elves, dwarven smiths, etc. Not because I don't like the medieval fantasy setting, but because it is (in my opinion) better suited for adventure stories that I'm not writing. Stories like the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, or Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling, which are about how the characters affect the world around them. In those stories, the setting is a living, breathing character all its own. Narnia, Middle Earth, and Hogwarts are characters whose history and destiny we care about as much as (or more than) we care about Jane or Faramir or Ginny. Consider the town of Meryton in Pride and Prejudice, the setting for nearly the entire novel, yet we know nearly nothing about it, save that it is in Hertforshire and near London. Contrast that with the tower of Orthanc, which appears only a few times in the Lord of the Rings, and has nearly a page of text devoted to its description, to say nothing of the history of its construction, the battles fought around it, or its various occupants and owners. Don't get me wrong, I love to read those kinds of stories. But they aren't the stories that I'm inspired to write.
As I've said before, I like stodgy old books from the 18th and 19th century--whether it's Jane Austen or Wilkie Collins or Rafael Sabatini--and I enjoy writing stories set in that time period. In those stories, the setting is mostly flavor. But more than that, that setting is full of strong female characters. And I like writing strong female characters--whether they're snarky, like Elizabeth Bennet, practical mistresses of their fate, like Jane Eyre, or passionate and liberated, like Marianne Dashwood. But I also want to write stories where women can be the witty, sword wielding protagonists, where the damsel can rescue herself, and where the heroine doesn't have to marry the first rich, arrogant aristocrat that comes along.
I could do that in a medieval fantasy setting, but that's not the world I've built.
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