A Simple and Not At All Complicated Guide to World Building in Writing
From fantasy to sci-fi and everything in between, world building can feel like the most necessary and unused part of the process when writing a novel. Who am I to be the person you listen to on the subject? I'm an author with several incomplete and unpublished books in my body of work, so you know, an undisputed expert on the topic.
Most of my blogs posts are lengthy and verbose, so I wanted to shake it up with something quick and easy that doesn't need any debate or fact checking. Here's my guide to world building in writing. You can apply this any field of writing that doesn't use "established scientific reasoning" and "historical accuracy" to minimize how wild you can let your freak flag fly creatively.
It really breaks down to 3 easy steps:
- Make some shit up
- Repurpose old shit
- Make more shit up
You can stop reading the post here, that's the whole thing. But if you're not 100% convinced, let's go through an example so you can see it in action.
You're going to write a fantasy book. Exciting! So now you need to decide what "world" your book will be set in. (Choosing a real place with real people that did real things? Leave! This guide is not for you!) You're going to want to build out the entire place, even if you don't use half of it. That's okay! Writing should be fun! So set your book in World A with Continents 1, 2, etc. and list out even more countries, cities, geographical locations, buildings and other items of note than you can possibly need. Like a cool castle!
Not sure what to name your planet? Make some shit up. Name your planet Steriyan. How did I get that name? I saw a stereo speaker and made it sound like a place.
Not sure you love that either? Make some different shit up! It's Fanduminea now. Fall in the trap that every fantasy writer falls in and make names that can't possibly be sounded out in any logical way then pay someone way too much money to read an audio book version of your story and hope they can guess at what you were hoping for! Or better yet, have no plan in mind and make their pronunciation canon!
Awesome! You've used step one and come up with some of the things you need to make your world. Now you're getting tired and you're done throwing letters together until it resembles something similar to a name. What do you do now? You have 8,000 more cities and places and people to name and you don't have enough juice to make up all that nonsense.
Step two: Repurpose old shit!
How many centuries and millennia of information do have we have documented? So many! Find a history book on a civilization you've never heard of and steal every worthwhile name or cool word. Use a group of people that interacted with each other and then give your readers little hints at who might be evil! Or ignore the real events of the world and accidentally play into or against what everyone who knows about that part of history!
How many gods have been written about? How many saviors or conquerors? You don't have to be original when you can just make something clever out of something that already exists!
Great! Step two is easy, so we're done with it now.
So now it's time to write how everything interacts. You have your map drawn up and various locations labeled, but now you need to decide how it all comes together. That's easy! Step three is here to help you do just that. Time to make more shit up.
This town is near a mountain? Make them have mountain town stuff like hot springs and mining jobs! A city on the sea? Easy, hub of trade. Place in the middle of the woods? No one knows, but your readers can find out in chapter seven!
That's it! Your world is built now and you can get down to the part that actually matters: the story that other people will read. But hey, at least you had some fun along the way!