Five Notes on Writing: Worldbuilding
When I first started my writing journey two years ago (or ten years ago, depending on how you count it), I thought it was a simple case of coming up with a vague plot and writing down the vivid scenes that popped into my head. Of course, after I actually made a start I realised there was a lot more to it than that, especially when it came to worldbuilding. So here’s five things I’ve learned along the way:
Whether you’re a newbie writer just starting out like I was, or have been doing this gig for decades, starting a brand new writing project inevitably means worldbuilding. What is worldbuilding? Put simply, it’s building the fictional world in which your story takes place! Different genres may require different levels - like the epic fantasy world or sci-fi planet that needs to be built from scratch, the contemporary romance or the historical fiction that takes place in a fictionalised version of the real world - but it’s an important and necessary step nonetheless because you’re putting together the foundation on which your story rests.
The solid foundation of a well-realised world will give your story a sense of verisimilitude that will draw in and immerse your readers. Such immersion requires consistency and attention to detail, and achieving this is made much easier if you put it together ahead of time and have something to refer back to while you’re writing. This is important because worldbuilding informs how your characters interact with and react to the world around them, and how your characters interact with the world is always going to be a major part of your plot.
This perhaps works best if you’re a plotter. If you’re a pantser who likes to discover the world as you write, that’s fine, but you’ll still need to go back in the editing phase to root out any inconsistencies in your worldbuilding. You’ll find the internet strewn with guides on how to get started with it and some amazing resources to help you as you go, so that’s not really what this blog post is for. For this post, I’m going to share a few of the things I have learned along the way that, perhaps, don’t show up in the guides quite as often.
1: There’s more to it than you might think at first.
Click on the image to enlarge.
Over ten years ago, when I first started worldbuilding for what would become the Augment Saga, I sank a lot of time into what I thought was the most important aspect of my sci-fi series: awesome spaceships! I came up with entire fleets and registries from multiple time periods and several species, commissioning and decommissioning dates, notable events that the ships were involved in, techno-babble for the weapons, shielding and drive systems, cardboard cutout captains and key crewmembers. Then I came up with a timeline, plotted the hundreds of ships on it and put together the broad strokes of the major events that happened in my universe. It was great fun and it was like I was making a nerdy “ships of the line” catalogue, and you know what?
Hardly any of that was useful.
Worldbuilding, it turns out, is about far more than just the ships of the line. Don’t get me wrong, those early exercises did yield some important broad strokes for my universe - key events, places and (a couple) of ship/character names, but proper worldbuilding goes into an intimidating level of detail about your fictional societies: from governance, administration and politics, religion and beliefs, to culture, language and the effects these things have on the ordinary citizens of your world; how they interact with institutions, their friends and families, their attitudes towards difference or towards the mundane… and so on it goes. It can be really hard to know where to even start with it, and sometimes the sheer scale of it doesn’t become apparent until you pick a place and make a start.
This is where the online guides come in really handy: I’ve personally made use of an infographic credited to www.amandaschlindwein.com (but which I found on Pinterest) outlining a technique called G.R.A.P.E.S. which helps you to remember six aspects of all civilisations: Geography, Religion, Achievements, Politics, Economics, and Social Structure. It gave me a great place to start when I began building the Maldaccian Empire from The Re-Emergence.
2: But that’s okay.
Sometimes, the scale of worldbuilding necessary for your story doesn’t become apparent to you until you start writing. You might think you’ve done enough prep work into your world to finally begin the process of writing your first draft, but then you come across things and you see where the gaps are (for instance, your main character wakes up in the morning and goes downstairs to get themselves a nice hot cup of… wait a minute! Is there even coffee in my world? Is it something else? Does their species drink hot drinks? Do they even have cups!? Oh no…) And guess what? That’s okay!
I’m not the type of person who can think up everything all in one go. I can’t even do that for the overarching plot of the Augment Saga - I’m one novel and a novella in and working on the second novel and novella, but after that? My plans get really fuzzy. In fact, I get to a certain point in the series and I don’t even know how many books I want to write for that part, and only the vaguest concept of what might happen to the plot.
All this really to say you don’t need to have everything planned out before you start writing. Start with the big obvious stuff and ask questions about it. E.G. You’re writing a fantasy world with dragons in it - Where do the dragons live? Where do people live in relation to those dragons? What kind of society is it? What do they think of the dragons? Are they respected and revered as deities like in eastern traditions, feared as ferocious monsters like in western traditions, neither, or a bit of both? That kind of stuff. Then move onto some more details, and go progressively from the macro-scale down to the micro-scale.
As I said before, you don’t have to have everything done before you start. In fact, it’s probably desirable not to (more on that below). It is absolutely fine to fill in the finer details as and when you come across them during the writing process - as long as you keep it consistent.
But what if you did all that worldbuilding and you realise partway through the book that something just does not make sense? Well…
3. You’re allowed to change things.
Your worldbuilding is not sacrosanct.
Something doesn’t make sense or isn’t quite working? Press pause on the draft, go back to your worldbuilding documents and change things so that they do. Then use that as a reference to make sure it’s consistent throughout the book. I’ve said the word “consistent” a lot in this blog post, and really, that’s the most important thing about building a world: internal consistency. If you have to change things to make that happen, so be it. Just because you spent a lot of time at the start laying down the foundations of your story, doesn’t mean they are necessarily locked in place. That’s one of the great things about writing: you can go back and alter things however you want at any time and at any stage of the process. Sure big plot changes need to be thought through so that plot holes don’t appear and that can be quite complicated to deal with late in the game, but it’s not impossible.
For me that can be quite a difficult thing to get my head around. I don’t like to change things, and get pretty despondent when I realise something isn’t working. But it’s important that I give myself permission to change things, to be flexible about the aspects of my world that aren’t working. Right now with my current Work in Progress (WIP) I’m adding a major character back into the story whom I originally wanted to have written out. It’s a pretty huge undertaking, but I know the story will benefit from the addition - and so will my worldbuilding.
4. You will build more than you actually need.
So you’ve done as much preparation work as you can cope with. You’ve got a huge document full of facts and figures, events, dates and in-universe lore. Maybe you’ve even built a conlang and its own alphabet. Perhaps you now know the ancient name of every copse and clearing and field and cliff and bay. You know how your world’s economy was founded, how its sanitation system works, how its administration operates down to the most minuscule detail. You’ve started writing and you’re excited to show your readers all this incredible work you have done, so you begin the prologue with a huge info-dump about your world…
Don’t do that.
Worldbuilding is there to inform you on how you go about writing your story. Everything you have researched and decided upon might have an impact on the way your characters act, but not everything needs to be front and centre for the reader to see. Most of what you build will very likely remain hidden in your wiki, never to see the light of day. You may get an opportunity to sprinkle in a few bits here and there for flavour - worked into natural dialogue, descriptions of places and people, character actions etc… but not as multi-page info dumps about going into the history, politics and so on, of your world. Some genres, like epic fantasy and sci-fi do have a lot of heavy lifting to do to get the reader oriented, and so can be forgiven for having the odd short section of information for the reader’s sake, but huge info-dumps with stuff that’s not really relevant to the plot, or detracts from the pacing of the scene at hand (for instance, stopping in the middle of a high-intensity fight scene to wax lyrical on the regulations on the husbandry of the native three-headed grublax) are a definite misstep.
You will inevitably build more than you end up using, probably more than you’ll ever need. And that’s okay, because not everything needs to be in the book itself, but instead forms a guide for you as the writer to help keep that internal consistency in your story.
5. Don’t let it get in the way of actually writing.
I’ve talked a lot about the intimidating scale that worldbuilding can have, about having more than you need, about having a firm foundation before you start writing, and about maintaining internal consistency. But what it really comes down to is this: Worldbuilding can be a fun exercise in and of itself, but for a writer it’s useless without a story. You could spend years and years refining all the aspects of your world, but if you never start actually writing, it’s not going to go anywhere. And at that point, it just becomes a form of procrastination.
This is heavily related to point 2 above: you don’t need to have everything planned out before you start and some of the fun of it is in discovering the finer points as you go. Use the tools, get yourself a solid foundation, but don’t let it go on for so long that you forget to actually write the book. It doesn’t have to be perfect and you can refine as you go. This is exactly the kind of thing that the editing process is designed for.
When I wrote The Re-Emergence, it wasn’t until I had written a few drafts that I stopped and realised there were loads of places in the book that either needed some consistency (particularly to do with the crew’s religious beliefs), or would be enriched by a sprinkling of clues as to the Maldaccian Empire’s varied cultures. It wasn’t until this point that I went and made my own information sheet about the species, their home system, culture, history, politics etc… Most of it is still unused, but could come into play much later on in the series. As a result, I have a much more well-rounded set of characters that feel vibrant and full of life… and all that came after I had written the book, during the editing process. It was like a bit of polish to add that extra pizzazz to the book.
That’s all from me for now.
