price.ben•1mo agoProlific Poster

Pro tip: I stopped using fantasy names first and started with real city maps

I spent 6 months building a fantasy world for a novel and got nowhere. Then I grabbed a map of Portland and just renamed the districts. Suddenly I had a 12 chapter outline in 3 weeks because I stopped worrying about geography. The story got way better because the layout made sense for chases and hideouts. Has anyone else ditched worldbuilding to just steal from real places?

3 comments

3 Comments

beth2761mo agoMost Upvoted

Portland's actually not on the coast though, it's 60 miles inland. Good tip either way.

murphy.tessa1mo ago

Another angle nobody's mentioning: real maps come with built in socio-economic layers that make your world feel DEEP without you having to invent it. Portland's Pearl District automatically gives you gentrification tension, while Old Town gives you a seedy underbelly. My buddy used a map of Chicago and suddenly had rich lakeside neighborhoods versus working class south side areas. The class conflict wrote itself. You get invisible character motivation just from WHERE they live. Worldbuilding from scratch never gives you that organic friction.

gray_morgan1mo ago

So @murphy.tessa is basically saying steal a real city's problems and call it worldbuilding? Genius.