The Thing About World Building

I have seen a lot of people on various fantasy writing and world building forums get worked up about whether or not a world is sound in its creation according to the real world. In other words, whether or not a mountain range would geographically and geologically work in a certain location, or certain biomes make sense to be where they are. This is not an incorrect approach to world building, but it is certainly not how I do it.

When creating the world of Aethtea, I focused on three things:
1. Make the world interesting
2. Make the world real within itself
3. Make the world feel alive

Number one is easy. I would much prefer to see mountains that stretch upside down into the sky, starting with the point in the ground, than a geologically correct range of hills. You want an evergreen forest under the sea? You put that there. Go crazy, be creative.

Number two, is the trickier part. However, it is different to my earlier statement of making the world work according to real world physics, geography etc. It is to make the world consistent. I believe it is cheating to create a rule and then disobey it when the plot needs. If you say the flying elephants explode when they fly under a half moon, flying elephants have to explode when they fly under a half moon. This makes no sense in the real world, but in your created world it does.

Finally, number three is making the world feel alive. In other words, when reading a fantasy novel, I want to believe that world would continue to exist if the story was not happening. Novel series that do this well are, of course, A Song of Ice and Fire by G.R.R. Martin and all of Robin Hobb's work (but especially Liveship Traders). The people that populate your world need to have lives outside of the page, routines, jobs, loves, friends, relationships, everything real people would have. Events need to have happened before the story begins. Have people talk about tax problems, complain about their husbands, joke and swear and sing old songs. My interest is quite often in relations between towns, especially in terms of trade, so I spend hours planning trade routes from place to place that may not even make it into my novels, but having them there makes the world alive beyond the story.

So that's my thoughts on world building. I know it's been two posts today, but they were relatively linked and I wanted to get down my thoughts.