Style

Form follows function, which is to say, "purpose first; style later." You may create a beautiful world that carefully articulates an atmosphere, but if it's not the atmosphere you want, then the style is useless. The style (what truly makes it a setting, as opposed to a world) should develop out of the purpose you want the world to serve. Similarly, you must understand why you are writing; only then can you hope to know how to achieve your goal. Once you have decided on the purpose of your setting, you can begin to flesh out the style of the world.

In Shadows & Silver, I want the reader to encounter a sense of hopelessness and despair, and to struggle in his own mind to not succumb to postmodern nihilism. This serves the purpose of demonstrating my stated theme: "by forsaking childlike idealism, men lead sorrowful and hopeless lives." This is the function. What then, should be the form?

Functions suggest appropriate forms. I've already shown that a dark world would best support my theme. It requires readers to react against the world, inserting their own opinions into the work, debating what they may perceive to be the message of the work. A very pessimistic world in which idealism has been forsaken in favor of mind-numbing realism leaps out to me. This, in turn, prompts several stylistic decisions:

• The world should have a relatively high technology level. However, it should be close enough to medieval technology so as not to be too far removed from what characters could perceive as the "good old days" before machines changed life. I'm thinking of the early Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment as historical analogues. In order to effectively show the problems with a modern mindset, however, industry must be a relatively new concept. This allows it to be a "new wave" with very little time for serious reactionary measures.
• Technology should bring with it the problems of modernity, especially since the world has had little time to solve the problems a paradigm shift brings. Corruption, pollution, poverty, slavery, nationalism, zealotry, racism, etc. are all things that are accentuated by technological shift.
• Racial tensions should run high. This may be based on the human desire for power, or on the human desire to blame the ills of society on others. In a world where other races and even monsters exist, there are more outlets for this sort of thing.
• Since technology is new, there should be plenty of lands that don't have the same level of industry as the more developed ones yet. Even today, there are many rural communities and even wandering hunter-gatherers, and this is long after the advent of industrialism. This should create many political struggles as more advanced cultures attempt to overpower the less developed ones.
• Magic should take a backseat role. In a world where discovery and science are the new buzz, magic is seen as the way of the past, something with which superstitious folk deluded themselves into believing in forces beyond their control. I may even have it outlawed.
• Religion, if it is present at all, should support the new order of technology in order for it not to go the way of magic. Perhaps it even supports the shift, resulting in a sort of divine versus arcane struggle.

This is plenty of good basic stylistic information. I'll ruminate on this some and then flesh out the style a bit more.