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Born in 1977 in Mowbray, Cat spent her early childhood in Cape Town before her family relocated to Johannesburg. Since then she’s bounced back and forth between the two cities, with occasional stays in Knysna and Nottingham.
After dropping out of numerous graphic design courses, she finally realised that design held no real interest and she took up waitering while trying to figure out what, exactly, she should be doing.
As it turned out, the service industry sucked almost a decade of her life away before she finally worked it out. Luckily she had the Sea Point library to see her through the pain.
Now she lives and plays in Cape Town, doing the things that make her happy: writing, hooping, reading, belly dancing, and hanging out with the sprogs.
World-building my Way.
-or-
How to fake it good.
By
Cat Hellisen
In a moment of insanity I offered to do a blog post on world-building. (It was that or an interview....um yeah.)World-building was pretty much the only thing I could think of writing about with even a smidgen of authority. Actually, this is a lie, I went to my writer friends and said “HALP! Blog post – what should I write about?” They patted my head and said world-building. Just apportioning blame here.
Then I realised that I don't know how I do it. Trying to dissect what I've done with the Hobverse is odd, but three things did spring out at me:
1: That old adage of write what you know.
Yeah. I do not live in a world where I can't use iron and I get high on magic dust that makes me able to control air-molecules, but I do live in a sea-side town, in a country with a long history of racial disharmony and colonialism. So I fed that all into the world I made.
2: Sensory detail.
You know what makes a place real? Close your eyes and think of your favourite watering hole. The long high counter-tables, the dark wood scarred with age. The super-kitsch Tretchikoff prints, the smell of fresh coffee and draught beer, the clang of enamel plates coming from the kitchens, the dark cool bricks a sanctuary when outside the sun is burning a hole right through the sky like a dropped cigarette, the call to prayer sounding over the retro-electro the barman is playing?
Yeah, that place. That's real. Immerse me in the small details of your world, and I'll believe the larger ones.
And it's not just sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing that build depth. There are also those intangibles they evoke – memory, nostalgia, emotion. They all feed off each other.
3: No explanation necessary.
In Real Life, you don't know everything and you don't need to. If someone mentions the name of an opera they went to, it's unlikely they'll stop to give you a description of plot (unless you ask for it). The same thing in your created world. Characters really don't need to explain anything. They can say things like, “you remind me of that stupid girl in The White Oak Princess,” and the other character will be suitable pissed-off/happy/whatever, and that's all the explanation you need. Build your world with detail and reality, and it will fold itself around your characters and be as layered and interesting as they are.
Research what you need to know, but don't worry if all those pages of reading up on the fauna of estuarine wetlands in a Mediterranean climate provides you with no more than a single line about what someone was having for lunch. As god of your world, only you need to know everything. And honestly, your readers would prefer it that way.
The more research you do the more authority you bring to your writing, and you'll find you need only the smallest details to create a believable world because those details will be the right ones.
Setting is a character. It needs the same level of attention to depth and layering and plot as your MC. Your world informs you, even if you don't think about it. The same thing should happen in fiction.
And that's how I build my world – from smallest to biggest. I start with details that are familiar to me and I explore outwards, learning the city and the world as my characters do. I know of many SFF people who start on a macro scale and work their way down, and I've been told it's the correct way to do it. It's not interesting for me because my brain doesn't work like that. Tackle your world-building in a way that makes your brain fire off questions about WHAT IF? and WHY? and you should be able to build something fascinating and logical.
If all else fails, do what I do and steal from your home-town.
In sixteen-year-old Felicita’s world, magic is strictly controlled—or so those in power like to believe. After her dearest friend, Ilven, kills herself to escape an arranged marriage, Felicita chooses freedom over privilege. She fakes her own death and leaves her sheltered life as one of Pelimburg’s magical elite behind. Living in the slums, scrubbing dishes for a living, she falls for charismatic Dash while also becoming fascinated with vampire Jannik. Then something shocking washes up on the beach: Ilven’s death has called out of the sea a dangerous, wild magic. Felicita must decide whether her loyalties lie with the family she abandoned . . . or with those who would twist this dark power to destroy Pelimburg’s caste system, and the whole city along with it.
I can't wait to read this!
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