creating intriguing places

In my quest to be more descriptive, I've made lots of changes to the places Luna goes. Kinda thinking that some of these places are like characters in the story and thus require lots of thoughtful details. For the most part, all great fantasy & science fiction books have interesting and memorable places.

Even before the movies and theme park, you could totally picture Hogwarts, with its Great Hall and House Dormitories and Owlery. Stephanie Garber's Caraval is such a lush and vivid world FILLED with magical intrigue and dark mysteries (EAGERLY dreaming of a Caraval theme park / game).

So, great books generally have great places. And the places are GREAT because they've been written with enough specific details to visualize clearly (with plenty of room for imagination). Here's what I've been thinking about as I'm making these edits:

1. Maps are AMAZING visual tools in stories. I am not a talented artist, but I do think there is a huge benefit to drawing, mood boarding, and/or Pinteresting for your world so you have something to look at while you're writing. Side note: I'd love to create a Map for Star's End, the Silvis and the Game world.

2. A quaint small town is charming with quirky stores; a forest is a density of trees. Those types of places aren't that interesting, and don't require too much effort to describe, because most readers can picture them. But, in a fantasy world, you're building the world piece by piece. What makes it different?

3. Example: The Silvis began as a spooky forest (snooze), that was created by someone or something (still snooze) with a tremendous amount of power (slightly less snoozy) to trap a Door to other worlds (interested yet?) but the Door became unstable and also a valuable resource is trapped inside too (hmmmm). As the Silvis has evolved, I've added different regions of it (a low gravity Training Ground, a Compound where the Protectresses meet that's a small village, an Obscurum Traveling Fog + MORE). And, I think this has helped make the Silvis into several distinct places for Luna to visit on her various journeys while also making the entire concept more interesting.

4. Another example: The Game world has gotten quite the revamp, and is now a world in flux: the moon is waxing and waning, flowers re blooming and dying on an endless loop, the forest is budding and shedding leaves and petals so that walking through it makes Luna feel like she's in a strange snow globe.

5. All of these additions tie into the overarching plot too. WHY is this happening in the Game world? WHY is the Silvis like this? Questions that I get to answer later, yay!

Thoughts to share on your favorite places or creating some of your own?! Share away, please!