Friday Favourites - Worlds

I have spent this week planning out a new trilogy that I'm hoping to publish next year. It's a fantasy, which I've never tried before and I can already see that it's going to be a huge challenge for me.

A few days ago I started penciling out a world for these characters to "play" in. It was really fun coming up with names for different places and designing what the world will look like in my head. I had to decide how far I was going to go and I made the decision not to be too extreme. I'm sticking to scenery that we see in the world we live in. I will add a few magical elements here and there, but on the whole when the reader is reading this book, they should have some sense of what the world looks like without me having to go into copious, descriptive details.

My reason for doing this, is that I am a very character based writer. I like my stories to spend a lot of time on the relationship between the characters and the internal struggles they are dealing with. My stories are always dialogue and action heavy. I don't want to spend too much time visually creating a world that the reader has to work extra hard to connect with, because there's nothing they can compare it to.

I was thinking about some of the fantasy or sci-fi movies I love and picturing the worlds they live in. I love Lord of the Rings because I feel as though it's magic in the real world. It's the same with Harry Potter. I know there are creatures in both those movies that don't exist, but the landscape and environments are things we can relate to.

Avatar, on the other hand, is a whole new world with plant life and animals that are completely new to us. It's the same with the Star Wars movies. Now don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed Avatar and I have loved Star Wars since I was a kid, but I think I prefer stories that have slightly more realism, yet still a sense of magic.

What do you prefer?
Are there any worlds you have discovered in books or movies that you've fallen in love with?