How The Enchanted Realm Brings Fantasy Worlds to Life

A fantasy world comes alive at the moment a reader believes somebody has to do the dishes in it. Everything else — the pantheon, the prophecy, the war — sits on top of that belief and falls over without it.

The Enchanted Realm took four years partly because I spent the first two building things no reader will ever see. I want to describe that work honestly, because the advice usually given about worldbuilding is either “just write” or “make a language”, and the useful territory is in between.

Start with the boring economy

Before I knew what the plot was, I knew what bread cost in the three cities, and why it cost different amounts. That single fact generated more story than any amount of map-drawing.

Bread is expensive in Vell because grain has to cross a toll bridge. The toll bridge exists because a family bought the right to it two centuries ago. That family is now poor and furious, which is chapter 12. The toll is resented, which is why the riot in chapter 30 starts at a bakery and not a palace.

None of that was planned. It fell out of a number.

The questions I ask about any invented place

• What does it eat, and where does that come from?
• Who cleans it, and are they visible?
• What is the most annoying part of daily life here?
• What did it use to be?
• What does it lie to itself about?

The last one produces theme. The third produces texture, and texture is what readers actually remember. Nobody quotes my cosmology at me. Three or four people a month write to me about the queue system at the Vell water office.

Maps are a trap

I drew a map. I drew several. They were beautiful and they made the book worse, because a map invites you to move characters around on it rather than through it.

What helped instead was a travel table: a plain list of how long each journey takes, in what weather, at what cost, and what you can carry. Distance you can see on a map. Distance you can feel only as time and money.

If your characters can get anywhere in a chapter break, your world has no size. Size is inconvenience.

I keep the table as a flat file next to the manuscript — literally a journeys.txt with one line per route — and I check it every time somebody leaves a room. Twice in the final draft it caught a character arriving three days before they could possibly have set out.

Magic needs an accounting department

The realm’s memory-magic works because it has bookkeeping. Somebody records what was given up. Somebody audits it badly. Somebody has an incentive to falsify the record, and that incentive is the middle third of the novel.

Here is the sequence I use when designing any magical rule:

1. State the effect in one sentence.
2. State the cost in the same sentence.
3. Ask who administers the cost.
4. Ask who profits from administering it.
5. Ask what happens to people who cannot pay.
6. Write step five. That is your book.

Steps three and four are where most invented systems stop, and it is exactly where the interesting material starts. A power with no institution behind it is a special effect.

Let the reader do half the work

The strongest paragraph in the novel, by reader mail, is nine words long and describes a shuttered window. It works because of two hundred pages of accumulated context, not because of anything in the sentence. Density is earned, not deployed.

So the practical rule I would give anyone building a world: research widely, plan obsessively, then put roughly five percent of it on the page and trust the rest to leak through in the shape of the choices your characters make.

The dishes get done offstage. But somebody has to have thought about who does them.