(My apologies for the lateness of my reply. :/ I didn’t get a notice of your post, but saw it when I came over to delete a piece of comment spam.)

Angie

Google just alerted me to your post mentioning me. Thank you for the kind words about my Sime~Gen Universe novels. Some are still available on Amazon and fans are still writing new stories in the Universe.

There are more millions of words of Sime~Gen fanfic posted than there were words professionally published.

I attribute the flexibility of Sime~Gen that lets it include all these different writers to the original Worldbuilding I did, even before starting to write.

I blog a lot about Worldbuilding on the shared blog
http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/ where I post on Tuesdays.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/

It really bothers me when a city survives in a place where no food can grow and there is nothing abotu caravans hauling it in.

Yes, definitely. [facepalm] You need massive agriculture, massive trade, or both at a slightly-less-than-massive level. And relying on imports can cause a lot of headaches in other areas, as it did the Romans.

Angie

As for just making it all up, well we all bring our own backgrounds into it, of course. I have a fair background in history so it helps me alot. I don’t mind, however, when fantasy writers tend to mix elements together that might not normally be found together in the real world. I kind of like that complexity and it offers interesting twists for stories. I do want to see things like the local economy definitely taken into account though. It really bothers me when a city survives in a place where no food can grow and there is nothing abotu caravans hauling it in.

Angie

Jess @ 2:35 — if you have the beginnings of a degree, you can keep going on your own. Whether or not you have the piece of paper doesn’t matter when you’re writing fiction, and it’s the raw material, the body of background knowledge a writer can draw upon which is important here.

And fairies and gods sounds interesting, not the sort of thing you see in every other book. Good luck with it!

Chrysoula — I wish it were just one person. [wry smile] I’ve seen that attitude over and over for many years, and it usually leads to really bad fiction. :/

Without having read your story, I can’t offer an opinion on whether just making it all up worked or not in your case. I’ll certainly grant that it’s possible, that you might’ve had the background knowledge you needed without really realizing it, or that your story might’ve been structured so as not to need or show much background detail. I will say, though, that after many years of both discussing and workshopping with authors who are trying to write fantasy and SF (especially when it’s not their primary field), and reading the results after they appear in the bookstores, my experience is that the vast majority of the time “just making it up” out of the air doesn’t work well. I’m absolutely willing to grant that there are probably exceptions, though. [nod]

Of course, the fact that some of this stuff does appear in the bookstores means there are also editors who don’t know any better — it’s not just a writer problem. That’s a whole ‘nother issue, though. [wry smile]

Chessie — I think a lot of people assume that their own body of knowledge is the baseline, and that if they personally wouldn’t know the difference then neither would anyone else. It’s not even a conscious assumption, either; it’s just a subconscious assumption we make about how the world works. There’ll always be someone out there who knows better, though, and quite possibly a lot of someones. It’s worth doing the research to get things right, whether that means real-world research on a specific place or system research so you know enough to make up something that sounds realistic; there’s always someone out there who’ll know that that piece of ground should be marsh and not forest. Or who’ll squint and realize that your world’s economy doesn’t hold up, or that the land you’ve described on page twelve wouldn’t be able to feed the population you described on page thirty-seven.

Shauna — thanks.

While you might not’ve had to do the work of looking up every detail to make it true to a real-world historical time and place, you did have to come up with those details and make sure they fit together and that all the pieces did their jobs. It’s really easy to make mistakes here. If you have enough background to be able to put things together and make them hum without doing a lot of research for each individual story, then that’s great. Not everyone has the background knowledge to do that, though, and I’ve suffered through some painful results, both in manuscript form for workshops and in forms I’d unfortunately paid for. [rueful smile]

I think what’s “easy” or not depends on the writer’s background. Someone who’d have to look up reams of details to construct a particular historical setting is likely to think that’s difficult, whereas that same person might have the background knowledge to “just” make up a fantasy setting that holds together, and believe that that’s easier. But someone else who has all those historical facts in their head but doesn’t have the comprehension of how the systems work under the hood and would have to do a lot of research for that to write a fantasy novel, and might think the historical is easier.

My point is that all that knowledge and data has to come from somewhere at some point. What feels easier to Writer A or Writer B will likely depend on what sort of knowledge they already have and what sort they’d have to go acquire, special for this particular writing project. For some people it’d be the historical detail, for others it’d be the info on how government and economy and technology and belief and legality and geography and whatever else all function and fit together. It’s just as much work to do the one as the other, if a writer is doing a good job. But some writers will have done part of the work — possibly a pretty large part — while reading and learning and studying and whatever all else in the past.

It’s like, if you want to buy a house, having $100K in savings, or having a condo to sell, makes affording the house you want feel a lot easier, because you already have a big chunk of the resources you need. You had to acquire those resources from somewhere, though; you just did it in the past, over some period of time, so it feels “easier” to save what you still need to buy that house than it would for the person next to you who just got out of college and is starting out with $3.92 in change plus a McDonalds gift certificate. But you were probably at the $3.92 + gift cert. stage at some point in your life, and you had to work to get from there to where you are now. The work of accumulating the resources you need has to be done, whether now or earlier. If you did a lot of it before, then what’s left will feel “easy,” although looking at how you got to that “it’s easy” stage makes it clear that there was a lot of work involved at some point. Does that make sense?

Angie

I still think that writing fantasy is easier. Take, for example, the novel I wrote set in a society similar to Renaissance Europe. Although I stayed fairly faithful to the household technology of the time and chose crops and food animals suited to the climate I chose, I did not need a detailed knowledge of law codes, military ranks, geneology of the rulers and upper class, currency, costs of various items, potability of various rivers, and other things I would have needed to know to write an accurate historical novel.

It is just not right. I can tell that the author hasn’t been there. I laugh it off, but it does bother me. I keep thinking about the natural details I would have focused on if I had been the author, and how I would have described them.

The fact is, the area simply doesn’t get enough rainfall in certain areas to grow the forests she keeps talking about. The trees in the forests that are there don’t have the limb structure for what she uses them for, etc. Where she has forests, there would be open marsh wetlands and grasslands spotted with groves of native trees.

Sorry, I’m going off. But with those books, I can tell that the research done was not “personal experience,” but mostly secondhand and based off of assumptions.

And you’re right, it bothers me.

I HAVE encountered the kind of writer you’re talking about, and it’s like nails on a chalkboard to hear somebody say, “Well, I’m writing fantasy about voodoo, but since it’s fantasy, I can make voodoo whatever I want!” But that was just one person.