The individual process for world building for a paranormal romance novel is unique to each paranormal romance author.
When I present workshops about revisions, I suggest evaluating the manuscript with an eye for where you’ve put the spotlight.
Spotlighting starts with knowing what matters to you in the world you’re building for your characters. But it expands to how the world building engages your characters and what aspects of your world will have the most impact on your readers. Correct spotlighting will add depth and dimension to your world building for paranormal romance novels or any other genre.
Think about what’s most important for the reader to ‘get it’ and really escape into your story.
One of my favorite examples of how spotlighting helps world building is from my own treasure chest of writing errors. My hero and heroine were in his kitchen and the heroine, having dabbled in feng shui, was troubled by a withered ivy plant. The way the scene was originally written, the reader didn’t see the concern and confusion between the characters – the reader saw a basket full of dead ivy.
I had the spotlight shining on the wrong thing and eventually I got the scene to work – when I showed the reader why the dying ivy bothered the heroine and why having the heroine mess with anything in the kitchen bothered the hero.
World building for paranormal romance novels can be like that, even in a complex world sprouted from your imagination. Showing that world to best advantage might be simply a matter of emphasizing a key item or element that brings it all to life for the reader.
Sure, the world you’ve built for your sexy, heroic werewolf is amazing, but are you putting the spotlight on the fantasy world’s twin moons when it should be on the moonlight shining in the heroine’s eyes? It all depends on the scene and the relevance to the story at that moment.
Live the adventure!
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