As promised, I decided to write up a few of my thoughts on worldbuilding in fantasy. This is a followup to my earlier pieces on outlining on my Patreon page (which you can find here and here and here and here, and I’ve unlocked ‘em for non-patrons.)
Worldbuilding? Just make some shit up. There you go, you’re welcome.
…what, that’s not enough? Ugh, fine. Okay, the creation of fictional worlds is both an important process and a dangerous trap. The trap lies in the temptation to go all-in, to define your world down to the smallest tree branch, which is not only overkill but tends to result in not actually writing the book. It’s easy, especially for new writers, to disappear into one’s own navel and compose more background material than you’ll ever use or need.
And that brings a second, even more insidious trap: the compulsion to put all of that stuff on the page and share it with the reader even though it has nothing to do with the story. Yes, the heroes might be riding past the former castle of Baron Pfluhrhr, who lost his life two hundred and ninety-one years ago in the Cola Wars, struck down by a silver-plumed griffon which is notable because griffons only rarely have silver plumage, but this particular griffon was bred in the far-off kingdom of—
—and congratulations, your reader has either fallen asleep or thrown the book at the wall.
Here’s the trick to get around all that: worldbuilding isn’t the first step. It’s the last step. When I’m working on a new story, I always begin with characters. Who are the leads? What are they like? What do they want, and what’s stopping them from getting it? While I’m jotting down a mess of notes, I’m also thinking about theme. What do I want to say in this book? How do I want the reader to feel, and what’s the ultimate takeaway?
With rudimentary characters, conflict, and theme, I’m ready to roll. All three will get fleshed out during the outlining process (and may radically change by the time I’m done), but now I know the basics and have a list of things to focus on. If I’m writing a story about a humble baker, I don’t need to write thirty pages chronicling the history of the kingdom he lives in: I need to know how to bake bread. A story about a politician doesn’t need a treatise on the local flora and fauna, but I do have to define how politics work in her world.
Tools of the Trade
Time to get organized. Trust me on this one. I know a certain author whose initial series notes are scattered across three notebooks and twenty-odd text files, and they really wish they’d had their act together when they started out. Sigh.
In my posts on outlining, I’ve extolled the virtues of Scrivener. All of my books are written in Scrivener, and it’s a great tool not only for structuring your scenes and chapters, but for keeping your background notes together for quick and easy reference. I’ve recently found a perfect companion tool: it’s called Plottr, and it’s absolutely amazing for outlining and note-taking. It’s essentially a database where you can keep all of your info on characters, important places and events, and also a timeline which can be exported to create a handy-dandy final outline.
(Not an endorsement, and I don’t get kickbacks from these folks, just sharing my two favorite tools. Check ‘em out! I think there are demos for both, so you can try before you buy.)
Focus on What’s Needed
You have characters, conflict, theme, and a plot all beginning to emerge. Now it’s time for worldbuilding. I like to distinguish between which setting elements need to be set in concrete, and which can be left (for now, at least) as rough sketches.
For example, my patrons have voted on my next project, and it’s going to be a challenge: my first stab at science fiction (well, science fantasy). I haven’t slept much in the last week. It’s a whole new, weird universe, and I have to build it from the ground up. Once I nailed down the story itself and who it’s about, I was able to get to work on the essentials.
“Write what you know” is well-intentioned but often misunderstood advice. After all, I write crime stories but I’ve never robbed a bank or committed a murder (my lawyer told me to say that.) I’ve also never conjured a demon (my lawyer told me to say that, too.) But with a little imagination it’s often possible to adapt the knowledge you do have to storytelling and worldbuilding.
We’re writing a space opera here, and people are going to be on starships. I don’t know about starships but I do know, thanks to my wayward youth spent out on the Florida coast, about boats. I know how showers and toilets work on boats, and cooking, and how people adapt to tight quarters and limited storage space. We can work with that! (I also know how boats are money pits that demand constant expensive maintenance, and you’d better believe that’s finding a way into the narrative…)
These are all details that can make an imaginary starship feel true to life, because they are true to life. And that’s the most important part of creating a fictional world: nailing down the details that make a reader feel like they could live there. Defining things like where people live, what they eat, and how they get around will serve you and your story more than a hundred pages about your world’s ancient history.
I started by defining the setting in its broadest strokes. I had images in mind of an over-extended empire in collapse, lost technology and mysteries, and a lawless frontier that would make the perfect playground for my characters to explore (while getting in trouble, of course.) Instead of writing out thousands of years of history, I decided on the big beats of the timeline, the pivotal moments that shaped the setting into what it is. After some brainstorming, this boiled down into three key eras — the Age of Titans, the Age of Heroes, and the Age of Decadence and Ruin. Each age got a three paragraph writeup, summarizing the most important moments and events that the protagonists would be affected by.
That’s it. Just three paragraphs each, maybe a couple of pages, for the history of the galaxy. When it comes to the big-strokes elements of your setting, gaps aren’t a sign of incomplete worldbuilding, they’re a powerful tool you can put to work later.
Leave Some Gaps
You know I’m an obsessive plotter. The last scene of the final Daniel Faust novel (which is still many books away) was written before the first book, because I needed a rock-solid vision of Daniel’s series arc. The cosmology of the universe, the nature of god, the heaven situation — none of that stuff was revealed to readers until the Wisdom’s Grave trilogy, but I wrote it all in my notes years beforehand, because I needed to know it. With all that said, you might think that every last corner of Daniel’s world has been documented to death.
Nope! There are lots of wide-open spaces, waiting to be filled in — but only if/when they’re needed. For example, very early on I decided on the ins and outs of infernal politics; the machinations of the courts and princes are integral to the series, so I absolutely had to nail down how hell worked, its laws and customs, who holds what territory and where. But while Daniel travels a lot, he’s never left the United States, and that means I’ve left the infernal courts overseas as a blank slate. They don’t feature in any of the stories, so there’s no need to spend time figuring them out.
That said, I’d love to bring the whole gang to Europe someday. When that happens, I’ll need to write up the local courts and influential demons, and most importantly I can create them to fit the needs of the story I want to tell (instead of bending the story to fit the pre-written lore.)
Getting Specific
When it comes to the details you really need to pin down, your characters will show you the way. Take a look at each of your main characters, one at a time, and make a list; you’re looking for any notable qualities about that character which demand background details. This is a brainstorming session, so just keep it casual and loose and jot down anything that leaps out at you. For example, here’s a partial (trimmed heavily for space and to avoid spoilers — the original is about four times this long) list I put together for one of our new protagonists: Mair Finley, co-pilot of the Second Chance.
— “co-pilot” reminds me, we still need to decide/justify how faster-than-light travel works. Also, fuel. How much is needed, and how available is it?
— augmentations from military service. How common are these things?
— anti-rejection drugs: who makes them (brand name, or generic?), and how expensive/hard to get? This will tie into the ‘how common are augs’ question above.
— Mair and Waylon both like to kick back with a drink when they’re off-duty; should come up with some notable brands and what they taste like.
— sidearm: something big and reliable, she doesn’t go for the weird stuff. So probably a heavy pistol but we can jazz up the tech some. Electromagnetic propellant, maybe? Do some reading on speculative designs.
— has a music collection; what’s the dominant recording medium in this world? Are there multiple standards? Music is universal, part of the human experience, really think about how it expresses and evolves across star systems
— why did I say I would develop an entire new universe in one week, why do I do these things, I am not smart
— pet fish?
And just like that, you have a list of worldbuilding tasks that are actually relevant: stuff that you know you’ll put to good use, not just filler or busywork. Make a list for your entire cast and you’ll really be on your way! Also, it’s not uncommon for questions to lead to other questions, and that’s a good thing. (For instance, in my case, a question about local government led to a lot of pondering — and some heavy economic research — about the behavior of currencies in a collapsing regime. Definitely a detail that will be important in the story to come.)
One Last Thing: All About Magic Systems
Don’t.
Seriously, though, I wrote up a whole thing for this section that devolved into a bit of a rant and there’s really no point; the very concept of “magic systems” puts my teeth on edge, but a lot of readers love them, the more detailed and mechanical the better. If you really want Cormac the Bold to power up his firebolt (which he can use twice per day, each bolt traveling a maximum of twenty feet and inflicting 3d6 damage) by infusing his aura with precisely three drops of purple mana and one drop of blue mana, go for it. Authors far, far more successful than me have gone that route.
My personal taste is to keep my magic weird and, when I can, use it to reflect its wielders or the world they live in. Daniel Faust, Vegas magician and hustler, employs a deck of magical cards. The ever-rational scientist Savannah Cross turns the Mandelbrot Set into a lethal incantation while Nessa Fieri, befitting her essence as a fairy-tale villain, spins flesh into tortured glass. Assigning rules and mechanics and hows and whys to any of that would strip it of the, well…magic.
But that’s me, you do you. In any event, just make sure that magic sits in its proper place: in service to the characters and their story. Readers should not come away knowing more about your magic system than they do about your protagonists’ inner lives, and they certainly shouldn’t care more about it.
Thank You For Coming to My TED Talk
So there you go; a few thoughts on worldbuilding, jotted down while I’m in the middle of doing just that. I hope that you found this useful, or illuminating, or at least interesting! And now, I’m getting back to work. This book won’t write itself, after all.