BookCon 2018: World Building With YA Authors

Renee Ahdieh. Leigh Bardugo. Marie Lu. Sabaa Tahir. Scott Westerfeld. If you’re a fantasy or sci-fi YA fan, then you’ll know how exciting it is to have all of these authors together on one panel. They are each brilliant at their craft, and each have created immersive worlds readers love to fall in to.

If you missed their panel at BookCon, “The Magic of World Building,” then check out these highlights!

Renee Ahdieh, author of The Wrath and the Dawn, The Rose and the Dagger, The Flame in the Mist:
“Food is such an integral part of world building.”

“I like to take the scene that I’m writing and put half of it on the page….You have to have faith in your readers and you have to have readers along with you on the journey…let readers’ imagination fill in the rest.”

“I grew up, for the first couple of years of my life, in South Korea. My mother is South Korean and my father’s of Scottish descent. It was interesting to me, my first language is Korean, I was never ‘Korean enough’. I didn’t look Korean. I didn’t have the right set of parents. I came to the U.S. and didn’t speak English. So, obviously, I was never ‘American enough’….It really is disheartening to me when people say ‘You’re not Asian enough,’ or ‘You’re not the right kind of Asian,’ ‘You’re not the right amount of black to write this book.’ Everyone’s experience is unique unto themselves…I truly think write whatever you want to write. That being said, be responsible. [Author] Jackie Woodson has a beautiful thing that she loves to say: she’s like, ‘If you are going to write about my experience, I hope you’ve sat down at my table and broken bread with me and my family. And, [that] you have some sort of understanding of where we’re coming from, even if it’s not your experience.’ Because there’s almost a bigger responsibility when you’re writing about something that’s not your own.”

Leigh Bardugo, author of The Grisha Trilogy, Six of Crows duology, The Language of Thorns, and Wonder Woman: Warbringer:
“I feel like food really does build the world. I like to take something familiar and add something that’s a little bit unfamiliar.”

“Whether it’s nonfiction or fiction you have the same challenges as a world builder. You need to introduce someone to that place.”

“[With] the experience of writing Shadow and Bone, a lot of people came at me at that for my world building and use of language. If you don’t like my world building, that is fine….but if you’re going to say, ‘You’re not Russian enough to write this’ then maybe step back for a minute and think about the fact that my [Jewish] ancestors were chased out of Russia…think about what it’s like to be taken out of your culture and divorced from it. I don’t want to write a fantasy world based on a girl living in, you know, the Valley in the 1980s…When you come from a culture that you’ve been torn out of and you’ve had this experience and your ancestors have had this experience, it really puts you in a very peculiar position as a writer.”

Marie Lu, author of the Young Elites series, the Legend series, and the Warcross series:
“I usually start off building characters more, but in Warcross it was almost all world building….I had to go back in and add layers.”

“Writing Warcross, the earliest drafts had Anika as a native Japanese person. She was living in Tokyo…but as I was writing it, I started to realize that something about it wasn’t gelling….I was canceling out my immigrant experience…so I moved her to America and had her go to Japan.”

Sabaa Tahir, author of An Ember in the Ashes and A Torch Against the Night:
“When you speak a second language, it’s helpful in world building…You take your mother tongue and alter it a little, but just enough so a native speaker is like, ‘Is that what I think it is?'”

“With Ember, so much of it is about being an outsider. But, for me, even though I’m an immigrant, I never felt like I should be treated like one because this is my country, and I grew up here. A big part of what I try to do is bring that feeling of ‘This is my land. This is my country, but I am told that I do not belong, and I shouldn’t be here. We’re not worthy; we’re not good enough.’ I grew up in a very small town, super racist, and I’m Muslim. So this combination was was not great. That is what I try to portray and bring to Ember. It was less about creating a world where I fit in and more about creating a world that mirrored the struggle that I went through because that’s what created a lot of the internal conflict for the characters. It was easier to write because I related to it. I would get angry writing it.”

Scott Westerfeld, author of the Uglies series, the Leviathan series. and the Midnighter series:
“Anytime you can include senses that aren’t sight and sound, the world comes off the page.”

“When you start building a setting, if you build it like a character, suddenly all these things start opening up….Once your setting wants something, it gives your character something to struggle against.”

“I left [America], and I joined another society. There’s a saying ‘Separated by a common tongue.’ When you leave a country to go to another country that largely speaks the same language, it’s weird thing where they think you’re speaking English, but you’re speaking a different English. So, rather than learning a new language, you’re trying to graft bits of a different version of that language onto your own language. That to me has been really stimulating to me in terms of [writing]. That’s what I do in Uglies.”

For more info on BookCon 2018, click here.