The concept of Lore is mostly thrown around in the fictional sphere of literary culture. It represents the historical aspects of a given culture, society, environment, usually encompassing all facets of a given work.
For you in your own works, is lore important to you? Do you enjoy expanding it, whether it be through expanding in your own written stories, or even through jotting down notes? What does Lore mean to you?
For whatever reason, I can’t effectively create my world without exploring it through the eyes of my characters. It’s almost like I don’t know what is real until I experience it with them. That’s when the lore for me gets established. I really want to sit down and write out histories and characters, but I can’t seem to most of the time. What is your methodology? Do you have any suggestions for worldbuilding/lore?
For me, when it comes to making worldbuilding apart from what characters encounter in stories, my focus is on trying to present the lore in a fashion that is still narrative based. All of it should come from a characters perspective within the world that you are building. If you're writing to explain things, it shouldn't come from you or at least should seem like it's written by a Historian in your world.
For example, in the CORE, Sages are prominent throughout and their belief system says that they can ascend to what is known as a Writ. Writs in the CORE are equivalent to a Loremaster, which is anyone who writes content for the Anthologies. Therefore I use Sages & Archivists, as well as myself as a Writ by explaining theories, beliefs, cultures across different regions in the CORE. It's what I did with the submission for the S6 contest, by telling the story like I was the God watching over it all, which technically I was 😆
I agree that to make the lore of a world feel real and tangible, it needs to be experienced through a character’s eyes. Gore Vidal has this wonderful novel called “Creation” about a Persian nobleman descended from Zoroaster. It takes place in the 5th century BCE. The character travels through Greece (where he meets famous people like Herodotus), India, where he meets the Buddha and the founder of Jainism, then he goes to China and meets Lao Tzu and Confucius. The character is curious about these other people’s customs and traditions and you get to see how these are filtered through the character’s mind. Separately, Tolkien does a great job building the lore of Middle Earth by having characters like Tom Bombadil describe them in stories. I think that’s an effective way of getting these ideas across to the reader. If you just describe the lore, it reads like prose and it’s not as captivating. If the lore is “related” or “described” by a character, it’s much more effective and feels less like a lecture.
For whatever reason, I can’t effectively create my world without exploring it through the eyes of my characters. It’s almost like I don’t know what is real until I experience it with them. That’s when the lore for me gets established. I really want to sit down and write out histories and characters, but I can’t seem to most of the time. What is your methodology? Do you have any suggestions for worldbuilding/lore?
For me, when it comes to making worldbuilding apart from what characters encounter in stories, my focus is on trying to present the lore in a fashion that is still narrative based. All of it should come from a characters perspective within the world that you are building. If you're writing to explain things, it shouldn't come from you or at least should seem like it's written by a Historian in your world.
For example, in the CORE, Sages are prominent throughout and their belief system says that they can ascend to what is known as a Writ. Writs in the CORE are equivalent to a Loremaster, which is anyone who writes content for the Anthologies. Therefore I use Sages & Archivists, as well as myself as a Writ by explaining theories, beliefs, cultures across different regions in the CORE. It's what I did with the submission for the S6 contest, by telling the story like I was the God watching over it all, which technically I was 😆
I agree that to make the lore of a world feel real and tangible, it needs to be experienced through a character’s eyes. Gore Vidal has this wonderful novel called “Creation” about a Persian nobleman descended from Zoroaster. It takes place in the 5th century BCE. The character travels through Greece (where he meets famous people like Herodotus), India, where he meets the Buddha and the founder of Jainism, then he goes to China and meets Lao Tzu and Confucius. The character is curious about these other people’s customs and traditions and you get to see how these are filtered through the character’s mind. Separately, Tolkien does a great job building the lore of Middle Earth by having characters like Tom Bombadil describe them in stories. I think that’s an effective way of getting these ideas across to the reader. If you just describe the lore, it reads like prose and it’s not as captivating. If the lore is “related” or “described” by a character, it’s much more effective and feels less like a lecture.