I have a bad tendency to wait until the last minute to write down the history of my worlds, races, etc. I'll be going about a chapter happily and then stop... and realize that I'm having one of my characters explain the history of a world I hadn't even come up with yet...it's rather strange when history just pops into your mind and you don't even have to think about it. So I was pondering a few questions;

Do you think up the history of your world before or while you are writing it in the book? Why? What is the best method for you to write the history of your world?

Bethany Faith

Long ago in a galaxy far far away... Yet somehow in the future.

I normally create a historic outline before I set out to write, but when an instance comes up in the book, I may make something up on the spot, probably because it will be very relevant to the story. I do, however, have some ideas for details in my mind...

*copies and pastes her reply from the sci-fi side*
*modifies the smilie*

That tends to be how I write history...on the first day of November I discovered that there used to be some powerful empire in the history of my NaNo world, and that ended up being incredibly important to the whole story.

I don't usually sit down and world-build, and that extends to the history. Either I had an idea for a story in the past of the world or it happened to come up while I was writing.

World-building, especially history, is often something I don't do enough of. My personality is very present-focused, so often my stories are as well. As such, there usually isn't a lot of history beyond recent events and character backstory. Most of the other history, if there is any, gets created when I come to a point and realize I need it...

However, since having more history helps build a realistic world, I'm making an effort with FADED to sit down and focus on world-building, including history. It's progressed better than I expected, and it's been fun!

No comment... (Paradox)

I have been writing history for my world for more than 5 years and haven't started writing the book yet.

I write history. Voluminously, even. I think it is crucial to developing a world even more than descriptions of various plants/animals. That being said, I don't generally go to in-depth, huge, timelines of my world. Instead, I write stories about events that have happened in the past. Gradually, I'm crafting mythologies, legends, and actual events.

IMHO, timelines are less helpful because they don't give details of the history, and they aren't really used all that much (in our world; when was the last time you saw a timeline of our world history?). That being said, they still probably are useful.

But for me, history is stories.

eruheran

Good one!

Timelines really only help me on lineages.

This is why I don't do much history. I did that for six months on a book and couldn't get past chapter one because I didn't know enough about plot and character.

I try and focus my history building on what matters to the story, such as what affects my characters past, present and future and leave the rest for creative freedom later.

This is exactly my problem. If I think about the history of my worlds, I find more stories and more people. I actually used this to my advantage when I was first starting my sci-fi series. I had this world and a story to match, but I wanted to know how that world got to where it was. History? Yes, but also the rest of the series. Currently I have 12 books stretching 200 years planned. I hope they'll all be written, because each is so interesting! But if you think about it, I plotted the last book first. The downside to that backwards-going is that I want to keep going. . . I could probably double the projected size of my series if I wanted to just by continuing going back in time to more stories.

It had better sell well.

On the actual subject of this thread, I usually have let my history stem so long in my mind that by the time I sit down to (plot, develop characters) write, I'm writing within the history, leaving no room for my characters to tell me more. They do, however, like to tell them I do NOT know the specifics of the past or present for them. They'll do all sorts of wild things within the bounds I set for them, but no "oh, there was this huge empire so many years ago" plot points coming out of my characters' mouths.

On a random note. . . I just saved for posterity the fact that Eruheran cross-usernamed today.

I like writing history even more then the actual book, so I write my book for a few days, and then write history for a few days, and so on. So I like writing history while I write my book and so far it's worked out for me.

In my first flop... I mean...er...book.
I prepared nothing and developed nothing. No developing in the characters, plants, animals, races, religion, magic, history, physics, culture... nothing! I just randomly started writing!
But alas, I have learnt better! It is way better to write out history before you write the book!

History is what I've done the most work on; my series-in-preparation, the Shine Cycle, is intended more as a telling of that history than of a series of stories set in it. (More like the Silmarillion etc. than the Narnia books.) I had to force myself to work through a set of worldbuilding questions to get myself to think through something besides history, and the idea of fleshing out characters (other than by writing the scenes in which they appear) didn't really occur to me until a few years ago, while the basic shape of the outline of history I'm working from (and making more detailed) took something approximating its current form (except for the dates) over a decade ago.

Generally speaking, I will come up with a combination of Cobha/plot first, and then history. However, I hesitate to write until my history is well written.

What I would like to do is develop a strata of chronicle, folk lore (akin to urban myth), legend, and mythology that will ultimately form an endocosmic description of the history of my world. I would like to, like Tolkien, try to avoid any excocosmic chronicles.

I think the best way to do that is to figure out what your cultures believe about their history, and then flesh that out into legend, myth, and chronicle. What I want to avoid is an impression on my readers that there is an absolute account of history...since it isn't humanly possible to create one. I would rather they see the history of Eartea the way we see our own history...certain, with a large degree of uncertainty, ultimately grounded on a common sense acceptance of that which we cannot truly, absolutely know.

In other words, I aspire to the unachievable greatness of Tolkien.

I have recently created a world and plan to write a short story about it. Someone asked about the history of the world so I strung it together. I thought it was pretty good, but I might have to go back and make a few changes.

I love writing all the history/back story for my novels... For me it's kind of a mix. History develops somewhat like my plot--I have a lot of the basics down at first and a good many complexities in it, but history, like plot, can change and fluctuate as I sit down and write. I generally like to write/have in my head a lot of the background history before I write, but a lot of it I also "discover" while I'm writing the first half of the book... less history is made up on the spot in the second half of the book, as by then I tend to have a lot of the history already worked out in my mind...