In this abridged version of their article for the Children's Writers' & Artists' Yearbook 2022, L.D. Lapinski advises writers on how they can bring their fantasy worlds to life in a way that engages and absorbs young readers.
World-building is such a strange and magical thing: using just your mind, you are bringing entire populations, places and universes almost to life. I have always created imaginary places and worlds. My first novel for children 9+, The Strangeworlds Travel Agency (Orion Children’s 2020), arrived in bookshops at the start of the pandemic and, though it was a very unexpected baptism, I hope it offered an escape to young readers looking for ways to get away from our world and into others.
However, simply hurling a new world at a reader does not a story make. I designed each individual world to evoke a specific emotional reaction from both the characters and the reader, and in such a way that each reaction would not be deliberately repeated. Even if the name of the place was forgotten, a younger reader might remember that one world was ‘the scary one’ and another ‘the funny one’, because they will relate to the world in the same way that Flick and Jonathan do. The characters’ emotional reaction would be tied to the setting and what happened there, and will be mirrored by the reader, who wants to find out more and find out what will happen next.
To be able to build a world for young readers to explore is a wonderful thing. Whether or not we can ever throw open the doors to our fantasy worlds completely, by writing them down at all we are inviting readers to wander within, to make up their own minds about the potential dangers or excitements – and inspiring them to create escapes of their own.
L.D. Lapinski is the author of The Strangeworlds Travel Agency (2020) and The Edge of the Ocean (2021), published by Orion Children’s Books; the third book of the trilogy, The Secrets of the Stormforest, will be published in April 2022. They have worked as a primary school teacher and have an MA in Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University For more information see www.ldlapinski.com. Follow them on Twitter @ldlapinski.
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