So, I've run myself into a corner and I'm struggling to think of questions that I can answer about my characters and what happens in the world. What questions would you ask to learn about character personalities and about the events that happened in history. What would you want to know about characters or events that have happened? This is because I'm writing a fantasy history book based on 61,000 years of events based on the universe I created but it's difficult to structure it out properly and start from the beginning. I have no idea what I should be presenting as information and what questions I should answer to detail my book properly. It's difficult to structure it out mostly though. There's a few basic questions for characters like: - Personality - Appearance - Purpose - Powers/Strengths or Weaknesses For events that have occurred in the history of your world: - What was it about - Why did it happen - Where did it happen But that's not really enough for me to really fill in the details of my characters or events. I need specific questions that helps me think about things in my world in a different way so I can learn about them more. Imagine a real history book but you have no frame of reference to characters or events and have to completely make them up on the spot.
For historical events, I think the most important thing to ask is, how is it affecting the world now, at the time of your story?Even for events that are out of living memory, there will still be ripples extending into the present, explaining why countries A & B just can't get along, why empire C is only a shadow of its former glory, or why wearing an orange hat in city D is likely to get you beaten up. The obvious example is the American Civil War and the fallout, which affects a lot of things in modern America--race relations and inequalities, the way different sections of the country regard each other, political attitudes and voter demographics, economic imbalances, controversies over the Confederate flag, and so on. Nobody's fighting and dying in the Civil War now and nobody now living remembers it, but it's going to be hard to understand a lot of things about modern America if you don't know about it. Also, 61,000 years is a long time! Look at what's happened in our world in 1/15th of that time. It's likely that a lot of your history will be in "shrouded in myth" territory, which gives you a lot more flexibility than needing exact historical records.
History books and novels are very different things. I'm not sure how many people would want to read a fantasy history book rather than a fantasy novel. That might be something to think about before you go too far in what could be the wrong direction.
61,000 years is MASSIVE. I've settled for a thousand, and that's by no means simple--and the relative scope of the world is small compared to a whole galaxy or universe. As for character development; it just flows naturally out of my head. I don't have to think about it to form a general life story, history, and ending for a given character--the tricky part is the present time, as that naturally reshapes whatever initially intended ending they might have had. Of course I ask "what is he doing?", "why is he doing it?", and "what does this imply for later?". However I typically only do so when I am running into misty woods and do not have a clear vision for the immediate future. And for the most part I write things as they happen and adapt the future to the consequences of the present--especially since the general plot points are vague/general enough to permit this. If I were you though, I'd massively shrink the size of the pre-history as well as the "covered ground" since while it's not that hard to create a basic history of what happened for a given place, it IS hard to make that mesh well with the histories of hundreds of other countries. It's easy to create a world in isolation; it's difficult to create many worlds colliding with each other. The main difficulty being maintaining consistency, therefore I suggest reducing the amount of "worlds" (i.e. groups of people like species/races) to no more than 5 and focusing on a given region--and then, should you wish, expand from there. Once you have the "keystone" (i.e. the center that both influences and is in turn influenced by all around it) then it becomes much easier to design the rest. But first, you have to have that core.
There are some people, like me, who enjoy reading the lore of video games or movies like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or Warhammer 40k. We enjoy reading about the history of what happened in that world. When I first started reading about Warhammer 40k lore, I had never played the tabletop or any of it's video games before but I still found it fascinating to read about the world and it's characters/events. There's a market for that kind of stuff but it's so niche that it barely registers on the radar at all, but I want to cater to that market and I don't want to do it for money either. I don't care about money, just sharing my world with others is something I'd love to do.
I also agree with you that a lot of the history will end up being myths or hearsay rather than concrete evidence. But, since this history book is technically written by an omnipotent being called The Last God, I kind of want to write everything there is about it. But I understand that it's going to be nearly impossible for one person to make up 61,000 years of history alone and with insane consistency rivaling today's history. The Civil War part is a good example though!
I come in peace . I don't think questions help. Take "Solo" for example. It's a backstory of a well-established character. So, we can try to guess what questions the screenwriters asked themselves, right? Hmmmm, why is Han Solo a smuggler? Why is he wearing that outfit? Those were answered. But the rest of the events were just events they came up with on the spot, not via some sort of questions. He had a disappointing relationship in the past but we still saw him trying to form a relationship in the Star Wars movies. Because it was necessary for the movies to have it, not because something in his past demanded it. Same with "Young Indiana Jones" series, which also gave us background to a well-established character. The series told us where Indy got his hat, and to some extent they told us why he's wearing it, but the rest cannot be deducted through questions based on the movies. The events from those series can happen to any other character, they are not so specific to Indiana Jones. They are just interesting adventures. Then there's the series about young Hannibal Lecter, which I think had very little to do with the character we saw in the movies. All the events in the past were based on one single trait, that Lecter had criminal tendencies, which is pretty generic. As for the 61000 years of history, that's 10 times the recorded history of civilization, times 175 (or so) countries, each with a long series of historical events. Taking into account the existance of city-states in the past, that makes for a lot of events. Most of them would be repetitive and a good lot of them will be boring. So the first criteria when it comes to choice which to record will be their entertainment value. Of all the Ancient Greek wars most people will remember the war of Troy, because the story was quite entertaining
Pick a year at random, as far back as you can. Make up the event (it is fiction, after all). Then build logically from there onwards. Once you have enough key events, decide for certain which ones are milestones - for real life history, that might have been, I dunno, the Great Depression, World War I and II, the fall of the Berlin War, the Velvet Revolution, 9/11, Sadam Hussein and Bin Laden, the return of Hong Kong to China's ownership, Tienanmen Square. Etc. Your world should be littered with such equivalent events for multiple cultures/countries. I'm no history buff but there should be key events that completely change the trajectory of history, of how a country is run, events that still affect us today as we still feel the effects of the Nazis or the KKK or slavery today, to give a simple example. How you decide on these ripple effects will determine how the history in your world progresses. Think of it as a novel - write from the beginning chronologically. For something like this I really wouldn't write out of order save for a select few milestone events, because everything should be built on from the past.
All the examples you gave were from well-established stories already. I'm just wondering if what you are trying to do is something that usually is done for already established and possibly well-known stories. Why are people going to care about a backstory for something that isn't even a story? And if you have all this backstory and information, why not actually write the story? The market must be very small for what you're trying to do (as you say) and even smaller if you're presenting readers a history book that has no connection to an actual story or an actual history. Why take this approach over telling a real story? I guess I don't understand the point. I imagine this is something you would have to self publish and would have very low sales from. Is that what you really want? You really want to write a fake history book with no connection to a story? I imagine you'll have a lot more problems than character development since character development is often something that happens through storytelling along with many other things. History books are often dry and not entertaining. And that's real history. I can see die-hard fans of something wanting to read the history (like in the examples you gave) because they want to read everything they can get their hands on from that story/movie/game. But I can't see something of this nature doing well without that built in audience. I say all this because I think it's worth examining your approach. If you've got a story to tell, I would tell it and not a gazillion years of fake history.
One thing you could try is to pick real historical figures and/or events, and see if similar ones could be created for your world. Maybe get hold of an old-fashioned encyclopedia, and browse through it, to see if anything or anyone strikes you as worthy.
I'd snip the "nearly" from that. Really, I'd just come up with a very vague timeline covering the important events ("five thousand years ago, moon crashes into the earth"), and then pick up the "threads" that are most relevant to your story, and which do one of two things: --Either answer questions about the setting that are relevant to the story, as menioned above. --Or to establish a mood--for example, in the fictional history of Warhammer 40,000, just making a one-sentence reference to "the ancient and mostly forgotten Dark Age of Technology, where humanity was nearly destroyed by their Men of Iron" doesn't go into detail, but tells us a lot about the past of the setting, the scale of it (millenia passed which have been mostly forgotten) and suggests a reason why the Imperium's view of technology has turned out the way it has. We don't need a blow by blow account of the whole robot war and how the planet-eating weapons worked, and it's more evocative to not have one. What I'd suggest is to include quotes from the fictional book (for example, in Dune, each chapter starts with a snippet from a historical text written some time after the events of the book) to illustrate parts of your setting or give context for a location or reference. One thing to consider is that if this document is by a single author, it might be biased. If a civilisation that worshipped this god was wiped out by the Southerners, then his view of the Southern civilisations might be coloured by that. One example of the latter that springs to mind was an RPG sourcebook for Vampire: The Masquerade, called The Ericyes Fragments. It was presented as an in-setting text detailing the earliest days of vampire history written by the first vampire Caine, and also had "scholars' notes" that pointed out inconsistencies in the text, and how Caine might not be a reliable writer when it comes to certain subjects.
