Transcription
What makes a fantasy city feel truly memorable? Well, after publishing four fantasy novels, I've spent years obsessing over this question because distinctive cities have often been at the heart of my stories. And I think I have a fairly unique perspective on this topic because before I became a full-time author, I actually used to be an architect. Your cities are such a critical part of your world building. So, in this video, I'm going to be showing you eight principles you can be using to write fantasy cities that feel immersive, unique, and deeply alive.
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Principle one, give your city a whispering message. In Paul Graham's excellent 2008 essay, Cities and Ambition, he explains how different cities send subliminal whispering messages to the people who live there. For example, Los Angeles says you should be more famous. New York says you should be richer. Oxford suggests you should be more educated. We like to think that we are totally independent individuals. But if you're realistic with yourself, the places that you live in, they shape you and they affect what you think about and they suddenly rewire your priorities. So when you are creating your own fantasy city, ask yourself, what is the whispering message this city sends to the people who live there? This will give you a fantastic source of tension. It also makes your cities feel much more like characters in their own right rather than just being these static backdrops.
For example, the whispering message of King's Landing in A Song of Ice and Fire is, "You should seize power before someone else does." King's Landing is a city of backstabbing nobles, whispering spies, and political bloodshed. The Iron Throne casts a long shadow over every interaction, and the Red Keep literally looms over the city, visible from just about every street. Everyone in King's Landing is trying to get closer to the source of power, or at the very least survive long enough to not be crushed by it.
By comparison, the whispering message of Oldtown is, "You should be more knowledgeable and disciplined." So, Oldtown is the oldest major city in Westeros, hence the name. It is home to the Citadel, the headquarters of the Order of Maesters, who are the scholars who advise the lords of the seven kingdoms on scientific, medical, and historical matters. The architecture here is ancient, and the high tower stands above all as a symbol of learning and order.
Then if we look at the whispering message of Winterfell by comparison, which I know isn't really a city on the same scale as King's Landing and Oldtown, but it's still fairly sizable and very memorable. The whispering message of Winterfell is the old ways matter. Winterfell is cold. It's remote. It's built to withstand not just weather, but time. As is often said throughout the series, the North remembers, and that's because the people who thrive here are those who know how to endure hardship with dignity. There's a reverence for tradition, for family, and for honor. And even the Godswood with its ancient weirwood tree reinforces this spiritual sense of rootedness in a place. So when you're building your own cities in your fantasy novels, think about the whispering message they give and how it influences your characters and your plot.
And then the second principle you want to be thinking about here is to explore the social architecture of your city. Every single city tells a story about who holds power and how that power is enforced. Architecture is a silent enforcer of social rules. So, you want to be asking yourself, how does the layout of my city reflect its social structures or magical hierarchies if magic is a big part of your story? Do the nobles walk above everyone else on an elevated bridges quite literally looking down on the commoners below? Are there winding, dangerous underground passageways that go beneath the city that are only known to thieves and rebel groups or oppressed religions? Are there neighborhoods where tourists are subtly funneled into or directed into by the way the roads are built?
To quote from Winston Churchill, "We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us." This is why I enjoyed studying architecture so much at university because it's really a physical fabric of history, culture, and so much more. For example, if you had a great revolution that once swept through your city, maybe its plazas are now wide and open to prevent future protests. That's actually something that happened in Paris. The revolutions of 1830 and 1848 showed how easily barricades could be thrown up in the sort of winding congested streets which allowed the revolutionaries to trap government forces and seize control of neighborhoods. So when Napoleon III came to power in 1852, he was determined to prevent that kind of urban insurgency from ever happening again. He gave city planner Baron Georges Eugene Husman, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, the license to demolish medieval neighborhoods and replace them with really wide boulevards. And this was a very clever move because these wide boulevards prevented the building of barricades and they allowed troops to really quickly move through the city. He also made large public squares and open vistas which again made it much easier to monitor and control the crowds. And this is a classic example of how urban design actually functions as political design in a lot of ways. And that can be incredibly relevant for you when you're crafting fantasy cities that have maybe been shaped or altered by revolt or war or paranoia.
And it's not just buildings here either. You also want to be thinking about the rituals and gatherings that define the social architecture of your city. So where do people come together? You know, are people going to taverns for gossip? Are they going to temples for absolution or markets for deal making and so forth? You also want to ask who's welcome in the city? Who is celebrated and praised? Who's invisible? What do outsiders notice first? And what does the city ignore? These questions are going to help you find and establish the social dynamic of your city, which will make it feel so much more realistic because a city is not just about the buildings. It's about how those buildings affect the psyche of its inhabitants.
And this brings me to the third big thing you want to be thinking about when it comes to writing your fantasy cities, which is to define your organizing principle. Every single city is built according to some kind of core logic. And that core logic is going to define the layout, the purpose, and the overall feeling of the place.
For example, the Romans used military order to lay out their cities with lots of straight lines and grid plans expanding out from a central forum. This makes a lot of sense when you consider that many of their cities began as military garrisons and then expanded out from there. By comparison, if we look at Swahili city states in East Africa from a,000 to,500 AD, they had a very different organizing principle. If you look at a coastal trading city like Mombasa, it very much developed around fluid interaction between Arab, African, Persian and other Indian Ocean cultures. There was no rigid central grid, but instead cities grew organically around ports, marketplaces, mosques and communal courtyards. Here it was trading requirements and commerce, not military order, which define the city's design.
And then if you look at the Kair Empire in what is now modern-day Cambodia, cities like Anchor were organized around massive berets which are these man-made reservoirs and complex canal systems. These were not just for practical purposes of irrigation, but they also had a cosmic and spiritual significance. The central temple of Ankor Watt, which is a really famous temple still to this day, symbolized Mount Maru, the center of the universe in Hindu cosmology and it was surrounded by moes that were representing the cosmic ocean. So you can see here this was a city built around an organizing principle far more rooted in spiritualism.
So when it comes to building your fantasy city, you really want to get clear on asking yourself what is the core organizing principle? And don't be afraid to go weird with it, right? Cuz after all, you and I, we're writing fantasy stories. We have the license to push this in a really creative and fun direction. So maybe you have a city that's shaped by time dilation, where the closer to the center you go, the slower time moves. So, as a result, only the really powerful and influential get to live there where their lives last longer. Or maybe on a different note, your city's buildings and streets are positioned to align with star patterns, eclipses, or or planetary movements. And maybe when specific stars are in certain areas of the sky, you've got different districts that gain temporary magical abilities. So, maybe you have districts that are only even accessible during different phases of the moon. And you can go on with this, right? You can be so creative and you can get so fun when it comes to the world building of your cities here, which is why you can probably hear how passionate I am talking about this.
To give an example from my own ocean punk fantasy novel, The Thunder Heist, the city of Zor is a floating mass of lash together ships orbiting a lightning harvesting tower. It's a precarious place that is constantly adapting to storm, the motions of the sea, and internal power struggles. Its very architecture reflects its principal values. extract energy, consume the weak, and stay afloat no matter the cost. As Grim Dark magazine wrote in their review, rife with alchemic pollution and political turmoil and populated by humans, a secondary citizenry of indentured mutants and the honor boards living richly off the suffering of both races, the seed city ship of Zor is a great backdrop for nautical crime.
And this brings me to the fourth big consideration you need to keep in mind when it comes to writing your fantasy cities, which is how does the poop get out and how does the clean water get in. So, I wish I could say I came up with that phrase on my own. Uh, but I totally stole that from Terry Patchet in his Discorld series. He of course created one of the greatest fantasy cities ever in Ankor. And this phrase is a really funny way to describe something really important, which is the idea that you need your fantasy cities to feel logistically sound. Now, you don't need to rush off and get a PhD in urban planning or anything like that, but readers do need to feel like your city works. Otherwise, you're going to shatter their sense of immersion.
For example, if you're going to plunk a city with 100,000 people in the middle of the desert and there's no farms, no water sources, no sewage system, then readers are going to notice. And unless there's some magical explanation that makes it all work, it's going to ruin the credibility of your whole story. So, what's the fix for this? Well, I like to solve this by using something I call immersion anchors. So, this is where you give small, really specific details that prove worldbuilding competency in a specific aspect of your city. A great resource to do this is The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding Civilization, which is actually sponsoring this video. This is a fantastic book that essentially shows you how to develop every major technology that we've ever invented as a society, including a lot of technologies that are critical to the functioning of cities.
Let's say I'm writing a fantasy story where my characters arrive in a massive city, and I want to drop an immersion anchor that gives readers the sense that I deeply understand how this place works. Maybe my protagonist has only ever lived in small country towns and farming villages before. So, when she sees the process of a road that's under construction, she's completely blown away. Pulling from page 150 of this book, I might describe how she watches the workers digging down to expose the native soil, then layering over a base of compacted sand, followed by a layer of large stones to provide drainage, followed by multiple layers of crushed granite, the finest layer on top, providing a very dense and sturdy foundation before finally finishing the surface with tightly fitted paving stones. Now, I know that's such a small detail and it's probably only going to take maybe 50 to 100 words to get that across in your story, but it is exactly the kind of thing that makes readers believe, hey, this author's really thought about how this city actually functions. And that's really critical because later on when we reach the heart of the city and your main character meets the giant talking frogs who run the place and rule over the humans, the reader is so much more inclined to go along with it. you've grounded their expectations early on with a detail that made the world feel real. And that is the power of a good immersion anchor. And the good news is that once you've proven worldbuilding competence in a couple of areas like this, if you later on off-handedly mention some other worldbuilding or city design detail, readers are going to assume that you've put the same depth of thought into it. So once again, I highly suggest checking out the ultimate guide to rebuilding civilization. It is a great worldbuing inspiration book. I skim through this all the time to get fresh ideas. And if you use my link in the description, plus the code Jed 10, you can get it for 10% off if you grab a copy before May 25th. Thanks again to Hungry Minds Publishing for sponsoring this video.
The fifth big principle to think about when it comes to writing your fantasy cities is what crisis is your city facing. This is a really important question to consider because even in peace time, there's always some conflict or some problem that's affecting a city's psyche. Maybe it's something dramatic like a plague. Maybe it's something that is a bit less substantial like your town sporting team sucks like the West Coast Eagles do at the moment unfortunately. Hopefully that changes. Or maybe there's a political struggle where there's lots of different factions that are wrestling for control.
To give some more specific crisis examples from various novels. In Misborn the Final Empire, the city is under the iron grip of a dark lord who's ruled for a thousand years. In a little hatred, the city of Valbeck faces worker riots, class uprisings, and brutal crackdowns as mechanization and the industrial revolution displaces labor and widens the wealth gap. In the gutter prayer, the city of Gertin is caught in the path of divine conflict. The gods war is raging across the world and the city teeters on the edge of becoming a front line. Meanwhile, there's all kinds of alchemical experiments and heretical cults and ancient secrets buried beneath the city that threaten to awake unspeakable horrors. In my own interactive fantasy novel, The Siege of Trebelin, your city is being attacked by an enemy army, and you, playing as the ruler of Treban, have to make the right decisions to save it.
Thinking about your city's crisis is so powerful because it gives your city a shared struggle. It creates pressure and conflict for your characters. Sometimes in a very direct way, like obviously in Siege of Trevolin, the siege is the whole point of the story and the whole story is going to be built around that. But sometimes this sort of crisis is more of a subtle background tension element that just adds a degree of extra conflict and danger to the story. And as a side note here, I think this is one of the reasons why Gotham feels hugely distinctive and so richly textured. It is always facing a crisis. Whether it's the corruption of the law, politics, and business in Batman Begins, or maybe it's the sort of chaotic violence that's inflicted upon Gotham by the Joker in The Dark Knight, or perhaps it is the isolation and the anarchy that Bane creates within the city in The Dark Knight Rises, where he is literally holding a nuclear bomb over the city's head after sealing the whole city off into its own island. In pretty much every Batman story, Gotham is powerful because it's not just a backdrop. It is a character and Batman is desperately trying to save this character's soul.
This brings me to the sixth big thing to consider when it comes to writing your fantasy cities, which is to try and build a unique relationship between each character and the city. If you want your cities to feel realistic, then you really want to be thinking about how are different characters in my story going to be reacting to the city in different ways. If you can get this right, this becomes so huge because I really like to think about cities as characters in their own regards. And sometimes you'll hear reviewers say this, right? They're like, "Oh, this city, it felt like a character in its own regard." And what that actually means if you unpack that in a little bit more detail, is that because the city is a character, each character should have their own different relationship with it, in the same way that your characters are all going to have their own independent relationships in your story.
So, one character might absolutely love the city and see it as this beacon of hope, but another character might see it as an oppressive prison. A third character might really long to escape and get away from the city, whereas a fourth character might have just arrived in the city and they see it as their means for salvation. Think about where you live, right? Like some people love the place where you live, some people hate the place where you live, some people don't care or they have a completely different interpretation of it. And showing these differing perspectives not only makes your city feel more real, but it also deepens your characters because the way that they interpret their environment will tell us a lot about their own personality. As a broader principle here, this is really the holy grail to be aiming for when you do any kind of world building in your story. when you can use your world building to do the double duty of both developing your characters through showing their interaction and their perspective on the world while also progressing the reader's understanding of that world itself. You're basically killing two birds with one stone and your story will feel so much more cohesive.
The seventh big principle to consider is why was this city built here? Cities don't happen. They're built for a reason and in most cases it's because it gives you access to water via a river, a lake or an ocean, access to resources. Like maybe your city is near a mine or near a forest. Perhaps it's because there is strategic military importance here. So maybe your city is built at a choke point in a mountain range between two countries. Or maybe there's some kind of trade benefit, right? Like maybe your city started as a trading post between several cultures and it gradually built up from there into its own thing. Those are just some real world motivations. And of course, your city can and often should sprawl out and grow from that initial reason because cities are never static. they are constantly growing or decaying or evolving into something else entirely.
For example, if you look at modern day Cairo, which has millions and millions of people there, it actually began as a small Roman military port that was built on the Nile around the year 300 AD. And the reason for its location is because it had very strategic importance. It was there to protect a canal that basically linked the Nile with the Red Sea. And if you go to Caro today, you can actually see some remnants from this fort inside the city. There's like this big circular tower that was part of the gateway into that Roman fort and it's still there almost 2,000 years later. Isn't that just mind-blowing? Even if you never spell it out in your book, just knowing the origin story of your city will make it feel so much more real.
And of course, because you're writing a fantasy novel, you can get so much more fantastical and creative and outlandish and wild with your city's founding. So maybe it was built because this is a lay line of sacred magical energy. you kind of get some benefits from being built along that lay line. Or maybe the city was built inside the skull of a dead god so that its inhabitants can experience its residual magical power and maybe even shave off little bits of this god's dead bone so that they can see into the future or something like that. Or maybe your city was built at a point where the lines between two realms are blurred so that when you fall asleep, your spirit shifts into this other reality. You get the idea, right? Like you can be so creative and so fun here with the reason for why your city was built.
Now the eighth big thing to be thinking about when it comes to writing great fantasy cities and this is really really important is to immerse us in the sensory experience. So one of the most overlooked ways to make your city feel more immersive is to think about the nonvisual experience of the place. In other words, I want you to be thinking about how can I write descriptions of this place that involve taste, touch, sound, and smell. Because most riders, they over rely on sight. And there's nothing necessarily wrong with that, but when you get into some of these other senses, it opens up such deeper opportunities for immersion.
So, for instance, consider what is the soundsscape like of the city? What does it sound like at different times of day? So, in the morning, maybe there's the clang of temple bells or the crackle of explosions coming from the alchemist quarters as they begin to experiment with different chemicals. In the afternoon, you might hear the roar of marketplace haggling or the clanking rhythm of blacksmiths that are hammering away at steel in their foundaries. And then at night, maybe there's a soft humming of whispered prayers drifting from various shrines or the loud laughter from a nearby tavern.
You might also want to ask, what does this place smell like? Because smell is one of the most evocative and primal senses, but most writers barely ever tap into it. I've actually done this analysis on books that I've edited in the past and smell tends to be the least used sense when it comes to describing things in a story. So perhaps you might want to be thinking about how can I describe the the spice laddened air of the bizaar near the docks or the sweet smell of citrus groves in the city or the foul stench of dung littered horse stables. All these little details add a great degree of immersiveness to your story, especially if you can show us how different districts in your city smell and sound different.
So consider this amazing description of Ankorport from Mort by Terry Patchet, part of the Discorld series, and you're going to notice here how effectively he uses sound and smell to describe the chaotic sprawling city. Poets have tried to describe Ankor. They have failed. Perhaps it is the sheer cessful vitality of the place. Or maybe it's just that a city with a million inhabitants and no sewers is rather robust for poets who prefer daffodils and no wonder. So let's just say that Ankor pork is as full of life as an old cheese on a hot day, as loud as a curse in a cathedral, as bright as an oil slick, as colorful as a bruise, and as full of activity, industry bustle, and sheer exuberant busyness as a dead dog on a termite mound.
One thing you'll note there, and this is really important to keep in mind with your cities, is that good city descriptions are not always about getting the precise architectural blueprint that's in your head into the head of your reader. In many cases, the best descriptions like this one here of Ank Mo are simply about accurately describing the emotional quality of a place and then the reader can come along and fill in the specific visuals in their own mind.
Now, if you want to take your world building even further, you might want to watch this video next. Inside, I cover the nine most common world building mistakes that new fantasy writers make, along with how to fix them.