What Makes a World Feel Magical?
Last week, I talked about some of the fictional worlds I’d love to visit — The Wizarding World. Velaris. Crescent City.
And it got me thinking.
What is it about certain imaginary places that makes us want to step inside? Obviously, magic helps. Give me a castle, a few ancient beings, some mysterious powers and perhaps a dragon flying overhead, and I’m in. But I don’t think magic itself is what makes an imaginary world feel magical.
I think it’s the little things. And lately, I’ve been discovering that those little things don’t only matter when I’m writing books.
It’s the Stuff Nobody Needs to Explain
Think about the fictional places I remember best.
I remember what people ate.
The shops they visited.
The clothes they wore.
Maybe there’s a particular food everyone knows, a superstition children grow up hearing, or an old ruin outside town that locals barely notice anymore.
Those details don’t necessarily move the story forward. But they tell us something important: People lived here before we arrived. And they’ll probably keep living there after the story ends.
That’s when a setting starts becoming a world.
What’s Beyond the Edges?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because of something completely different I’ve been creating for 12 Angels Publishing.
If you haven’t seen them yet, BinderScenes are printable backgrounds I create for trading card binder displays. Instead of having an empty pocket beside a favorite card, the artwork extends the feeling of that card into the surrounding binder space.
And creating them has turned into a different kind of exercise in world-building.
I look at a card and start wondering: What’s beyond the card? What’s beyond the edges?
Maybe we can see a little snow behind the character. Okay. But what kind of snowy place?
Are we high on a mountain looking down into a frozen valley? Is there a village somewhere below?
Is it morning? Sunset? Is a storm coming? Maybe the card shows a peaceful patch of grass.
What’s beyond it? A meadow? A forest clearing? A picnic basket sitting beneath a tree?
Suddenly I’m doing the same thing I do when I’m writing a story.
I’m imagining the part of the world we can’t see.
Tiny Details Change Everything
That’s where it gets fun.
A background can simply be a forest. But add sunlight filtering through the trees, wildflowers growing along the edge, and a forgotten picnic basket nearby, and suddenly I start wondering who was there.
A city can simply be buildings, but add laundry hanging between windows, warm lights glowing from apartments and little signs of everyday life, and now it feels like a neighborhood.
A snowy landscape can simply be snow. Give the sky soft pinks and oranges and suddenly it feels peaceful, almost magical.
The same thing happens in books. The details don’t always need an explanation. Sometimes their only job is to make us believe there’s more beyond what we can see.
Give Me the Hidden Places
This might be my favorite part of world-building. I love the idea that every world has places most people don’t know about.
An alley that leads somewhere unexpected.
A restaurant where everyone seems to know more than they’re saying.
A perfectly ordinary city street where something very unordinary might be happening just out of sight.
Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to stories, and artwork — where our world and another one seem to overlap. I like the possibility that something extraordinary could be sitting right beside the ordinary and we’ve simply never noticed it.
A Whole World Doesn’t Have to Be Huge
That’s something BinderScenes have reminded me of. You don’t necessarily need hundreds of pages to create the feeling of another place. But if the right details are there, our imagination happily fills in everything outside the frame.
Books do the same thing. A writer doesn’t have to describe every building in a city or every tree in a forest. We give readers enough pieces and trust them to build the rest.
Maybe that’s why two people can read the exact same book and imagine its world a little differently. That’s magical.
Maybe Magic Isn’t the Magic
The more I create, the more I think world-building isn’t really about creating something enormous. It’s about noticing something small.
The smell coming from a kitchen.
Laundry moving on a clothesline.
Stars appearing over a quiet field.
The way the light changes before a storm.
Those tiny details begin stacking on top of one another until somewhere that never existed starts feeling strangely familiar. Whether I’m writing a story or creating a little world around a trading card, I think I’m chasing the same feeling:
I want you to wonder what’s beyond the edges.
What makes an imaginary world feel real to you?
Is it the big magical moments — or the tiny details that make you wonder what else might be hiding just outside the frame?
You can explore the different worlds I’m creating at 12 Angels Publishing — including my books, coloring pages/books, and BinderScenes — at iggylife.com.
