World Building - Creating Nikki Page

It's much different to create a fantasy world than it is to write a story in the "real" world. I had been writing urban fantasy for 11 years when I decided to try my hand at writing a mystery, set in the real world, no magic.

When you write contemporary, no magic, is there really a world to build?

Yes. You still need to create characters, places, and situations that are unique to that story. Or in my case, I wrote about the world I knew. A place I had lived for thirty years. Friends who read Nikki Page Mysteries recognized locations.

Was I building a world?

Yes, I still stay. I was mixing up buildings, giving them new purpose, using locations to set a scene. The world was more background than necessary to this story because there was no magic, no new rules that the reader wouldn't understand.

I was building my world and using it to tell my story, even though it wasn't a story for story, I mirrored my feelings, characteristics of people I knew, and built a similar yet different world from where I live.

I built my world using pieces and mixing them with other pieces until I had something different.

But it is definitely different. I still had to explain jobs, careers, and people, but the rules were familiar. There was less of what I normally wrote when I wrote a fantasy novel.

It wasn't easier. I had to research more. What does a paralegal do? How does police procedure work in the real world? What are private investigators allowed to do on the job?

I did research for my fantasy novels, but most of what I wrote I could make up. I find writing mysteries in the real world harder. I had to be sure what I was writing was real. In fantasy, I have fewer limitations.

While I love the characters and the worlds in both series, I'm drawn to writing fantasy more. I find it works well with my natural writing style as a pantser rather than a plotter. Mystery, I find myself needing to be more of a plotter.

Either way, either series, there's world-building. There's creating a story from nothing, making the locations jump out and become another character.

The biggest change for me had nothing to do with genre and everything to do with the stage in life I find myself. My main character would be older. My age, actually, and in that the story around the main story was different. Rather than writing about a twenty-four-year-old woman at the beginning of her career and the start of several relationships, the main character was now 50 years old, with older children who had lived her life. Her experiences shaped this new world and gave a different perspective on mystery-solving.

Yes. You still build a world in the non-magical storytelling. It's just different.

For my next series... I'm shaking it up again. Join me on the adventure.