Point of View and World-Building in Fantasy


Fantasy writers have a major obstacle to overcome when telling their stories and that obstacle exists because of the thing we all love so much as fantasy fans: World Building. As a fantasy writer you’re not just telling the story and giving a few clues about the setting to orient your readers. You have to immerse your readers in a completely different world. At the same time, you can’t bore them or overwhelm them with the details. It’s a fine line. And there’s not really a recipe for this. What might work for one writer and one world will not necessarily work for another, especially once a hundred different writers and books have used the same method. It can start to feel derivative after a while.

I used to be ok with and enjoy portal fantasy where someone from the normal world is flung into a new one and the reader can discover the world through this outsider character’s eyes. As I read more and more in the genre this started to feel annoying, especially in Epic or High Fantasy settings. Now of course, there are subtler ways to do the portal thing that are less annoying than, say, having a random kid or university student stumble upon a portal to a different world. For example Bilbo and Frodo are pretty much these outsider characters in Middle Earth because at the start of their journeys they know pretty much nothing about the world outside the Shire and so they’re discovering it as they go along and we get to discover it with them without feeling like they don’t fit in that world.

Harry Potter is kind of the same, he’s just a normal kid who has weird things happen to him and we get to experience the Wizarding World as he does but he feels like a part of this world. The main problem with these types of characters who are from the world, but also don’t know much about it, is that they can, eventually begin to seem a little stupid or a little helpless. They’re not experts at anything, they can’t be, because they have to learn about it at our pace and teach us as they go along.

On the other end of the spectrum we have those fantasy works that will throw you in to the middle of a political intrigue or battle or something with a thousand new words and names and terms and creatures and cultures and POV characters so that you feel breathless trying to keep up. And if they attempt to explain some of these things we’re right back at the conundrum we began with - the dreaded infodump. I don’t think there’s really a definitive answer to this issue. I think the fantasy genre will keep evolving and finding new ways to avoid the issue of infodump and it will, in my opinion, always hinge on the use of characters and point of view and how the world can be introduced through them.

My favorite books, the ones I have found to be most immersive, tend to have multiple points of view and as a fantasy reader I’ve developed not just a tolerance, but almost a love for patiently watching a well-built world be revealed through multiple points of view. But I don’t think this works for everyone. I think people new to the genre or people who don’t care as much about world-building as the story itself find the multiple POV method a bit difficult to get used to.

In my own fantasy works I’ve found that I tend to start with one or two characters and then slowly expand the circle of POV characters so that I can effectively show the breadth and scope of the world. I start small with one or two main characters and then, once we’re comfortable in the world I kind of zoom out and start to show more of the world through different eyes. This probably still doesn’t work for a lot of readers, but it works well for me as I am exploring my own world and so I hope that it will work for at least some readers. I am curious about the different ways in which fantasy authors deal with points of view, though, and I often wonder how much of the POV decisions are made for the sake of presenting and portraying these fictional worlds.

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