Megan E. O’Keefe lives in the Bay Area of California and makes soap for a living. (It’s only a little like Fight Club.) She has worked in arts management and graphic design, and spends her free time tinkering with anything she can get her hands on.
Megan is a first place winner in the Writers of the Future competition, vol. 30. Steal the Sky is her first novel.
You can find Megan online at meganokeefe.com and@MeganofBlushie on Twitter.
The Importance of Worldbuilding
by Megan E. O’Keefe
I love character-driven fiction. Give me a strong voice, solid motivations, and a protagonist willing to act, and I’m on board. But no character exists in a vacuum. They, like us, are products of their world and their upbringing. In genre fiction especially, characters are inextricably linked to the world you craft around them. For a character to be compelling, so too must be the world in which they inhabit.
It was worldbuilding that first lured me into writing fantasy. I found the idea of secondary worlds (worlds created from whole cloth) to be absolutely fascinating. You can create anything at all; the only limit is your imagination and what your readers are willing to believe. A well crafted world can transport you to fantastical, impossible places. Through internal consistency and vivid imagery, a well built world can also increase a story’s verisimilitude to make the reader feel as if they’re really there. Possibilities abound, but unfortunately writers too often fall into the trap of re-imagining medieval Europe, or perhaps the Renaissance. Continue reading →
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