If you read enough of these books and watch enough of these movies, sooner or later, you'll start thinking that you'd like to contribute to the Grand Tradition that has nurtured you all this time. You'll pick up a pen and start writing Science Fiction or Fantasy. And that's great. The SF/F community is still relatively small, and it's unusually open and supportive. Geeks stick together even when they go pro.
But that doesn't mean you can just start cranking out stories and they'll be perfect right off the bat. Ideas are easy: writing is hard work, and you have to love the whole process, because it is a process. And one of the first steps is worldbuilding.
In the most basic terms, worldbuilding concerns where your story is set. A planet? A ship? A particular town? One room in a house? But it also concerns the world around that specific place. All of that world. Now, you won't be using every single detail in your story (that's called infodumping and it's a no-no because you're not writing a textbook here), but you need to at least have an idea of what you're doing and what you're working with, so you can portray it honestly and consistently as you tell your story. Consistency is the key: specfic fans know when something doesn't make sense, and acting like it does without a damned good reason is insulting to their intelligence. And you don't want to talk down to your audience.
So here's a few things to get you started on the world your characters will live in:
- How is the society different then the one we live in out here outside the book? How is it the same? What justifies the differences? If women are chained to the wall at all times, there has to be a reason--some ancient feminine overlord that was overthrown, a particularly cruel patriarchy with specific and literal rules, a false (or true!) belief that women can fly, something.
- What other societies surround and interact with the one you're concerned with? A rebel ship needs something to rebel against, a king needs other kings to trade with and make war on. And all of it needs to be set up so it makes sense socially, economically, historically, and logically.
- What do they eat, and why? How do they sleep? Are there laws, religious doctrines, scarcity concerns?
- If you're using magic or science, what are the rules? What can these things do and not do? What does their use do to the people who use them? What does it to do the world? Things are always more interesting when they're hard, when they cost your characters something.
- What is the actual physical world like? What is the weather, the gravity, the plate tectonics, the terrain? If you're inside, what are the building materials, the quality of construction, the artistic flourishes, the requirements and prohibitions that went into making this world? How does any of this affect the people who will populate it? How have they adapted? How have they harnessed it?
As I said, these are just starter questions. General things to ask yourself. As you get into the meat and bones of your new reality, you'll find more specific things you'll have to figure out before you can speak authoritatively about the plants or the animals or the geography or the society. What are the what-ifs that concern you and that you'd like to explore? If a question like "what if we all lived on an asteroid?" bores you, don't write about that. But if it fascinates you and makes you want to figure out how to make it work, that's a great place to start. Then grow your reality from there.
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