It depends on the story, but I always do a certain amount of research and planning before I write a book – enough for me to build at least a skeletal world, and to have a good idea of how things work in it. So for Priory I had to do a fair amount of research into the legend of Saint George and the Dragon, and to get to grips with the basics of sixteenth and seventeenth-century history, before I could begin. But I always need to put a character into a world before it really begins to come together.
The character becomes the engine of my worldbuilding. They direct my research and guide my descriptions. For example, let’s say I have a character walking down a street and they see a vendor selling food. At that point, I know I need to research street food in whatever place and era I’m trying to evoke. Without a character to act as a kind of rudder, I’d end up researching for ever and never actually writing the story.
It depends on the story, but I always do a certain amount of research and planning before I write a book – enough for me to build at least a skeletal world, and to have a good idea of how things work in it. So for Priory I had to do a fair amount of research into the legend of Saint George and the Dragon, and to get to grips with the basics of sixteenth and seventeenth-century history, before I could begin. But I always need to put a character into a world before it really begins to come together.
The character becomes the engine of my worldbuilding. They direct my research and guide my descriptions. For example, let’s say I have a character walking down a street and they see a vendor selling food. At that point, I know I need to research street food in whatever place and era I’m trying to evoke. Without a character to act as a kind of rudder, I’d end up researching for ever and never actually writing the story.