High fantasy is a subgenre of fantasy wherein your story takes place in a world different from our own. It has different peoples, customs, religions, places and things. Sometimes it also involves magic, but it doesn’t have to. Writing high fantasy is a challenging task because not only do you need a story, you need a world too.

Worldbuilding can seem like an extremely daunting task. It takes a long time for someone to come up with a detailed, well thought-out universe for their story to be set in. The world I’ve set The Forsworn Cycle in, the Forged Lands, took me a whole two years to fully create, and even now, I’m still patching up missing parts of it whenever I find something that isn’t as detailed as I’d like it to be.

Now, before I say anything else, keep in mind that building a world doesn’t mean you need to create every single tiny detail. If you don’t need to do that and you don’t want to do it, then by all means, only create the parts that you need. Novel series like Deltora Quest are massively successful even though the worldbuilding isn’t as detailed as series like Lord of the Rings.

So: building a world. As I said before, it can seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. Don’t put it upon yourself to create a beautiful world and all its’ lore all at once. Let it come to you over time. Whenever you have an idea, write it down. Doesn’t matter where or when you have the idea, just made sure it’s written. Eventually, you’ll find ways to merge those ideas together to make the basis of a coherent universe.

That’s really all there is to it. That’s the basics. Of course, later on I’ll write up more about specific parts of the worldbuilding process, because obviously it’s not as easy as “get idea, write down,” but that’s the core of it all.

As a side note, you don’t have to make your world completely and utterly unique in every single way compared to our world and all other fantasy worlds ever created – it’s entirely possible to overengineer your world, so to speak. There’s no point putting something in your world if it doesn’t add anything. By all means, create a language, but have a reason for creating the language. It won’t do your world any harm to just have the citizens speak a common tongue (which just so happens to be English). By all means, create a new form of currency or economic system, but have a reason for it. It won’t do your world any harm by simply using copper and gold coins. So on and so forth. Make sure everything in your world has reason and purpose.