World-Building 101
/Okay, so you’ve got a book idea and it’s set in a fantasy realm of elves and magic. Or a on a far-future planet that’s nothing like Earth. So how do you get that onto a page and tell your story without overloading with details or even <horror!>…
info-dumping?
Take a breath. It’s gonna be okay. We’re gonna try and simplify this.
Just Finish the First Draft
That’s it. There’s a reason the first draft is called the vomit draft. It’s going to be crappy; it just is. Anne Lamott calls these sh*tty first drafts, because they’re all terrible. Yours will be, mine will be, the next big bestseller’s will be. The only thing your first draft needs to do is exist. Put a post-it on your screen to remind yourself of this. Or put a reminder in the header of your WIP. Whatever works for you to remember this, do it.
And now get to finishing that vomit draft!
Get in the Right Mindset
Hooray! The messy, ugly, vomitty first draft exists. Give yourself a pat on the back. You finished the book’s skeleton. It might be rickety and, sure, there’s a skull where the pelvis bone should be. But you know what? You bloody did it! Right, now comes (what I consider) the hard part: cleaning up that hot mess. So it’s time to start trimming, cutting, chopping, and dismembering.
Say Goodbye to Your Darlings
You’ve poured your blood, sweat, and tears into this book. It’s your precious baby.
Except it’s not.
First drafts aren’t babies. They don’t need protecting; they need shaping and discipline.
Please don’t think I’m being cruel. I get it. You spent a lot of time on those scenes. That effort means something; it didn’t come from nowhere. That effort cost you time and energy. I know all this, and I know how hard it is. But to turn a vomit draft into a great book, it’s gonna take a lot of sacrifice. So acknowledge to yourself that, while yes, all those scenes you wrote took time and energy and effort, they can’t stay as is. Some of them won’t even be able to stay at all.
There’s a Lot to Leave Out (But That Doesn’t Mean You Don’t Know It)
Think about what’s happening in your book like a play. But not just on the surface—that is, not just what the actors are saying and doing on stage. But also think about what the theatre techs are doing behind the scenes to make the play happen. There are lighting engineers up in the booth running cues to dim the lights, change colors for mood or to indicate the time of day, or make them flash for special effects. There are stagehands backstage waiting for cues to move around set pieces or close the curtain.
Your book’s world is a lot like this. Your focus characters are the actors on stage, but there are lots of unseen people in the background making things happen.
Farmers growing food for the populace. Garbage collectors keeping the city clean. Shopkeepers keeping the economy running. So does that mean should you include these folks and everything they do in your narration?
Well, that depends. Is it relevant to the immediate story?
The same goes for that big history or all those cultures and/or races you’ve created for the world. If it doesn’t directly impact what’s happening in the story right now… do you hear me? Right in the immediate moment your characters are in, then it might be best to leave that out^. Which leads me to…
Zoom In On Your Focus Character’s Experience
The world is big, and arbitrarily deciding what to include and what not to can be both crazy-making and exhausting. You don’t need to put that stress on yourself. Like I said above, consider whether a piece of the world you’ve built is relevant to what’s happening to the characters right then.
It’s possible that your answer is something like, “Maybe?” “Sort of.” “Tangentially, yes.”
Fair point. Because (and here comes my favorite bit of writing advice ever) 👏nothing 👏happens 👏in 👏a 👏vacuum!👏 Put it on my gravestone because I will never not say it.
Anyhoodles, okay, so now you need to decide whether or not to include this maybe-related bit of world-building.
If you do, frame it from the perspective of how your focus character relates to that thing. How does that character feel about this thing? How does it affect their life? If your focus character doesn’t have a connection with that thing, then you can probably leave it out.
But What About Scene Setting?
An important consideration, true. Pretend for a moment that your reader knows nothing of what the book’s about. They just opened it cold right in the middle of a bookshop and started reading the first page. What parts of the world you’ve built are shorthand indicators of the kind of world it is? For instance, if your scene opens with a starship’s captain looking out into the expanse of space, stars like scattershot through an endless black sheet, a purple and red planet floating in the lower corner of her vision. That’s an immediate cue to readers that this is a science fiction world.
So should you tell us more about that purple and red planet below? Again, that depends. Is it relevant to the story as a whole? If it and its inhabitants don’t impact the story, then you can probably just leave it at that and let the planet serve as scene setting.
However, if our brooding captain is looking down at it and considering the diplomatic negotiations that went so disastrously bad that morning with the leader’s of that planet’s native people, then now might be a good time to at least tell us the crux of the issue with them/the planet.
^Not Included Doesn’t Mean Not Considered
Going back to what’s left out, just because you cut out the pieces that aren’t relevant to what’s happening in the story doesn’t mean those pieces don’t have an effect on what does end up on the page. Remember how I said nothing happens in a vacuum? Those unseen pieces still affect the world and how your characters move in it.
Let’s consider meat. Whether it’s hunted or raised on a farm, meat requires effort that plants simply don’t. You might have to search for a plant, but you don’t have to bring it down like you would a deer. Similarly, raising even just a chicken is another mouth to feed—albeit a small, beak’ed mouth—before it’s ready to eat. The food you give your chicken requires time and energy (or money) to obtain. Thus, meat is generally more expensive than basic plant-based food since there’s that extra energy cost to obtain it. And the nicer the meat—e.g. beef compared to chicken—the more it costs.
{Photo source}
All that being the case, your street urchin character who just found a copper in the street probably isn’t going to be able to afford a steak dinner. Do you take time in your story to get into the economics of why steaks are so much more expensive than a loaf of bread? No, that would completely take your reader out of the story.
But because you know that’s how the world happening in the background works, you write your street urchin character buying a loaf of bread instead.
Besides the economics of food production, some other things you probably need to know about your world—whether it ends up on the page or is just something silently and invisibly happening in the background—include but aren’t limited to:
Water—how do people get it? Through private taps in their home, public wells and/or pumps, or some other way? Is it safe to drink or does it need to be decontaminated before it’s potable? Does anyone control it? If so, is that the government or has it been privatized?
Class systems—who’s in charge and how do people obtain power?
This will likely at least partially end up on a page because, no matter where your character falls in a class system, that will affect how they move through the world. Because nothing happens in a vacuum!
Religion—most societies have some kind of faith system, but how much it affects your characters depends on how it fits into the larger society. It might be that your characters can pretty well separate themselves from religion. For instance, in the world of D&D, there are lots and lots of faiths people can follow, or you can follow none at all. Or one major religion might be tightly wrapped around most facets of the society in which your character lives and therefore has a pretty big effect on them.
Communications—Can people communicate quickly over long distances? If Romeo and Juliet had had cell phones and could have texted each other, things might have turned out very differently.
Money—does it exist? Can people barter goods or services instead?
Criminal justice—who’s in charge of policing, how do they do it, and how much power do they have? If your characters are up to mischief, big or small, you need to know what the potential consequences are.
This list could go on, but this is a good starting point.
A Few Last Considerations
There are some world-building pitfalls writers can fall into. And they can end up in some really nasty problems.
Evil Races ~ Don’t do it. Just don’t. This gets into racist territory real quick. And to be clear, this is not the same as power. Power can corrupt anyone. Anyone. Doesn’t matter who they are, their background, their religion, anything. Power is an equal opportunity corruptor. To make someone corrupted/evil because of their race/species, though—whether it’s a werewolf, vampire, Martian, etc.—well, just try replacing that species name with a race from the human line. Sure sounds racist, doesn’t it?! So don’t do it. Period.
Poor Doesn’t Equal Bad ~ Similar to the above, I sometimes see worlds built where everyone in a poor neighborhood is painted as a drug addict, ill-educated, racist, etc. There are a lot of factors that go into socio-economic situations. Some of which were caused by the people in power, who then have the gall to turn around and blame those who aren’t in power for the situation.
I’m looking at you, colonialism 👀.
Monoliths Don’t Exist ~ Also similar to the above issues. I’ll focus on gender here. All women are either barbies or tom boys. They either like pretty dresses and shoes and parties or they like jeans and sports. No. Stop this immediately. People are diverse. Some people who identify as female^^ like wearing dresses and make-up, and some don’t. Some might like one or the other, and the list of complexity goes on and on and gets more complex and varied as we add in more things that people may or may not like. Societal expectations are pushed onto different groups of people, but that’s not the same thing as all the people in those group agreeing with those societal expectations.
^^This doesn’t even get into the fact that gender isn’t binary. It’s not either men or women. We have people who identify as both male and female. Or neither. It’s complicated, y’all, just like people.
Basically, don’t paint with broad brushes.
Build it One Piece at a Time ~ I admit that a lot of this has been focused on how to apply the pieces of the world you’ve built, but what about when you’re having trouble figuring out how something works in your world. That’s actually easier to solve than you might think.
Firstly, do you need to figure it out in the first place? Again, whether or not that piece directly impacts the story may answer that for you. But let’s say, yes, it is vital to the storyline that you figure something out about your world.
Start with what you already have—our world. How is the thing you’re trying to figure out handled in ours? Maybe it works exactly the same—that’s okay if it does. If the wheel you already have works, no need to reinvent it, right? But if it can’t work the same way, break it down. Why not? And then, okay, how could it work? Does that solve the problem? No? Then what’s another option? Rinse and repeat until you’ve solved the puzzle.
Does all of this take a lot of time and effort. Heck yes. But that’s how great things get made, with a lot of time and effort. And that first draft that you poured all those blood sweat and tears into, if you want to improve it, maybe even try and get it published, deserves to be great.
Did I miss something that you think falls under world-building 101? If so, let me know in the comments below 👇.
Thanks for reading!
Latest in social media:
Upcoming live events:
Instagram Live ~ February 21st, 3pm CST. Instagram @danafraedrich.
…
Dana Fraedrich / www.wordsbydana.com participates in affiliate advertising programs designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com, Audible.com, and others. This page contains affiliate links.
