A Whole New World

            The setting of my current WIP (a YA Fantasy) is something that I’ve come to think of as “vaguely medieval.” By that I mean there are some elements of magic set in somewhat medieval times, but I took some liberties with styles of speech, etc.

            Creating your own world can be both exhilarating and terrifying. What do people eat? How do they dress? I filled my world with some things most people would probably expect to see in YA Fantasy – castles, kings and queens, spell-casting wizards, knights, travel by horseback.  

            Then there were some things that popped into the pages that I hadn’t thought through.

            Throughout the story, characters reference angels, hell, etc. Not a lot, but enough. I hadn’t even thought about it when I was writing the story. But after reading a few chapters, one of my friends pointed out that if I had created a new world, how would they know about the Christian faith?

            Well. I guess they probably wouldn’t.

So do I leave the references in? Make up a different religion? But religion isn’t really central to the plot of the story. I don’t want to spend five pages explaining the religious beliefs of a people I made up. I’ve got a story to tell! So do I not mention religion at all? But all cultures have some sort of religion, right?

This friend also told me I kept describing the passage of time in terms of hours, seconds, minutes.

            Guess what? Not a thing in medieval times. Gotta figure out a different way.

            This is what I struggle with.

            Turns out that the excitement of creating a whole new world is counteracted with the difficulty of putting something together that’s consistent without turning into just a bunch of stuff I cobbled together. I don’t want to get into such crazy world building that my story gets lost in the details of the setting. I’m not writing high fantasy. This is not an epic journey requiring the aid of four maps, a translation guide, and an index on the history of the kingdom in order to understand the story.

But I don’t want to lose credibility with my readers for not looking like I at least tried.  

The words I use will (hopefully) conjure clear pictures for my readers. If I write, “A princess sits on her throne,” you’re going to be able to picture that in your head. If I write, “A snarthox sits on her gammawatts…” well, nobody knows what that is because I just made it up. It’s so much easier to use the first description if that’s the general idea I’m trying to get across.

            Obviously I’m not going to say “everything about this world is exactly like medieval times, except there are flying cars and everyone addresses each other as “bro.” No one heats up a Hot Pocket for lunch, goes to happy hour, or asks the king if he knows the score of the Yankees game. But I’m having trouble finding that happy medium. Little pieces of modern times keep managing to sprout up no matter how hard I try to weed them out.

            And maybe there is no happy medium. At the end of the day, I have to do what is true to my story. Just writing out my feelings on the subject has been very therapeutic (as writing seems to be quite often!)

            What I’ve been doing so far is trying to keep things as consistent as possible. I don’t want my dialogue to be exactly the way people talked in medieval times – obviously I want to keep it clear of modern slang, but it would change the whole tone of the story. I’m trying to keep it light. But I don’t want people to read it and think ‘light’ means ‘the author is too lazy to do her research.’ If I don’t know something, I try to research it as best as I can and then move forward with the story.