Worldbuilding can make a writer crazy. Especially in F&SF settings, you need to think through multiple aspects of your story world. You want to create a believable milieu for your characters and some specific details can help your readers feel immersed. But where do you stop? Unless your characters are on an outdoors adventure, do you really need to map out every mountain range or understand which way your rivers flow?
In a post on Writer Unboxed, Kelsey Allagood suggests a middle ground: story-first worldbuilding. “Story-first worldbuilding falls somewhere on the worldbuilding opinion spectrum between “almanac” and “intrinsic” by exploring the details of the world around the story you want to tell,” she explains. Allagood offers some exercises to help get you in the right mindset for creating depth and color without getting overwhelmed by the details.
- Write down everything you already know about your story’s world. List important details and the settings where critical scenes will occur, plus anything else that comes to mind, such as creatures, races, religions, or political processes. After a set time, stop and review what you wrote. Highlight the details that are crucial to your story.
- Pick one element to explore and ask why it’s important. Pick something that affects your characters or the plot. Don’t get distracted by new information or by something that isn’t critical. Set a timer and write about why this element is important to your story and then expand on it as much as you can in the time you set.
- Pick one element that affects your story, then change it. Change a library to a laboratory. Change a king to a council of elders. Then summarize your plot, scene, or characters with this change in mind. If you would have to change almost everything about your story based on the alteration in this one element, that suggests you have already created a cohesive world. If you can maintain your characters and plot while changing this element, that’s a clue that this element isn’t critical to your story. If it’s not integral to your plot, you don’t need to understand it in depth and it might not need to be mentioned at all.
Allagood also suggests some exercises to get you thinking about your world’s history. Again, you want to create an immersive experience for your readers. You don’t want them to feel like they are following characters standing around some stage props.
- Make a list of all the races, ethnicities, nationalities, religions, species, and other “groupings” of beings in your world. How would your characters describe or introduce themselves? When you’re done, consider what you didn’t list, such as religion, political affiliations, etc. You might not be interested in writing about a specific social category, but you might find yourself intrigued.
- Pick one of your groups and describe their historic relationship between them and other groups. Harmony? Friction? All-out war? Consider sub-sects within your groupings.
- Write a history of these relationships from the POV of members of the groups. Write from the POV of various characters in different groupings and on different sides of a conflict.
