Fantasy with Friends: Worldbuilding

Monday means Fantasy with Friends time! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about methods of worldbuilding: Ursula K Le Guin has written about “consciously imitating” Tolkien and creating a wider landscape and history for her fantasy world by naming events or places she actually knew nothing about at the time she wrote them (as opposed to Tolkien, who was referencing events already decided in his unpublished work). What do you think of this strategy for creating “plausibility?” Do you think readers can tell when authors are referencing things that have no “real” definition? Can it come across as just making stuff up, or can it work to convince the reader the world is real? I don’t think Le Guin and Tolkien’s methods are as far apart as they sound, because Tolkien did make things up at some point (he wasn’t writing real history, after all!), and sometimes when asked questions about aspects of the world, he hadn’t worked them out…