When we last left off in this worldbuilding series I shared a little of the "why" behind starting my own world.

Today I want to continue onto the how I found seeds of my story and started crafting a narrative. It's one thing to have a desire to create a world, to understand your "why" around building it, but many flounder while trying to find a concrete “something”  to attach their “why” to. This is where narrative and story come in.

The word "worldbuilding" can feel a bit all-encompassing, depending on who you're talking to it can mean a whole set of different things. To me, worldbuilding means crafting a fictional world, including a cast of well-rounded characters, that is believable and inviting.

When I began brainstorming ideas for this first week's topic of "heroes" I kept coming back to the heroes nature and not to one specific person. In many of my ideas and word lists the theme of a hero being someone who protects the innocent, regardless of their own abilities, kept coming back to me and stuck.

I started with a quick sketch of a woman with a child fending off a dragon and went from there. Initially, the woman was going to be a knight but I decided early on that I wanted to make her more vulnerable and also a part of the larger world I have been creating (more on that later).