By Jesse Bullington (Alex Marshall)
If you want to excel at writing speculative fiction, you have to master worldbuilding. This is obvious when it comes to second world fantasy and SF, but just as true with historical or urban fantasies, horror, and any other genre you can think of. After all, once you start injecting the supernatural into a real world setting it stops being reality and becomes some place new, a world that readers need help navigating. Yet daunting as the prospect of creating a complex, believable new world can seem, once you figure out the basics it will come swiftly and naturally. This essay will cover both these basics and a few personal techniques I’ve developed for taking your worldbuilding to the next level.
Credentials and caveats: I sold my first pro short story in 2002, and over the last decade and a half have published five novels, dozens of stories, edited two anthologies, and dabbled in RPGs. I’ve been shortlisted for awards and translated into half a dozen languages. I may also have a completely different philosophy of writing than you, in which case glean anything helpful you can from this essay and discard the rest. There are no absolute truths when it comes to creating art, but this approach has served me well over the course of my career. Now, on to business!
The first thing to keep in mind with worldbuilding is that your work will be conducted in two stages. First comes the initial brainstorming where you build the world in your imagination. For some this might mean filling a dozen notebooks with the history of your new setting from the creation of the universe right up to next Tuesday; for others, just jotting down a few basics to get started. The second stage of worldbuilding is when you actually draft your novel or short story and convey the mechanics and details of your world to the reader via the text.
Of course, there is often a lot of interplay between these two stages. Maybe your initial concept of the world will shift to suit an ingenious plot twist you hit on at the last minute, or maybe you’ll realize your original plot idea will be so much better if you tweak it to revolve around some detail of the setting. For now, though, it will help simplify and streamline your process to separate the internal worldbuilding you carry out in your imagination (stage one) from the external worldbuilding you lay out on the pages of your manuscript (stage two).
Whether you are just beginning to conceptualize your setting or have already hammered out a detailed world, the single most important habit you can foster to become a better worldbuilder is to conduct research. Research everything. Once you get to stage two you have to be careful not to oversaturate your text with every single cool little detail of your world at once, lest it read more like a travelogue or history book than a ripping story, but for stage one ingest anything and everything that might remotely relate to your world.
If you don’t know where to begin with research, think about what sort of setting you’d like to create in the vaguest sense. Is it quasi-medieval European? If so, pick up Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: the Calamitous 14th Century, visit the website http://www.medievalists.net/, and track down Terry Jones’ series Medieval Lives (seriously) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTWsUvT8nsw&app=desktop). In the course of exploring these resources I guarantee you’ll notice some interesting details that you wish the authors had spent more time on, and when that happens follow up on the subject yourself—looking up one specific thing usually leads you down a rabbit hole of research, and before you know it you’ve stumbled over a dozen different elements to incorporate into your world.
The above example assumes you already have a rough idea of your setting, in which case you’re building the world to fit the culture and level of technology you envision. If you don’t even have that much in mind and are not sure where to start, don’t panic! Now is the time to play God: let all be void and darkness, then give shape to the oceans and continents, populate it with creatures both real and imagined, and then allow your intelligent race or races to evolve and begin the long road to civilization…then stop the flow of history at whatever point seems most interesting and set your novel there, be it something resembling our Bronze Age or the far future. As always, when you’re stuck let research be your guide—overviews of our social history like Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Discoverers: A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (or the TV mini-series) will help you get a handle on the factors that have driven the human race to take the shape that it has.
Research isn’t just about studying ye olden times, of course, but studying the world—currents events can feed worldbuilding just as much as history books. While its detractors dismiss genre fiction as being escapist, the best second world fantasies feel believable precisely because they engage with real world issues and our emotional responses to them. George R.R. Martin and Joe Abercrombie are both obviously students of history, for example, but they also both incorporate modern tensions surrounding imperialism and religious fundamentalism into their worlds, and that is a large part of what makes them so engaging: they feel real, because they are relatable.
I’ve been emphasising research a great deal, and with good reason, but remember that all this research is basically just fertilizer for your imagination. You aren’t teaching yourself how and why things work the way they do so you can perfectly duplicate our reality in a fantasy land; you’re learning all these things so you can build different yet convincingly plausible worlds. Creating a fantasy setting where the culture or cultures are simply real world analogues with the serial numbers filed off is lazy, so cast a broad net and draw in as many influences as you can.
In my Crimson Empire trilogy, for example, one region of the world is partially based on Viking Age Scandinavia and partially on Central African tribal societies. Another realm is a fusion of early Joseon Korea, island cultures, and Baroque European sensibilities. A third contains elements from both the Mughal Empire and earlier Rajput Kingdoms. By combining aspects of disparate cultures, or cultures from different eras, or both, I was able to come up with peoples and places that felt familiar yet original, a sensation that embodies the ethos of the fantastic for me. I was also very careful to ground these imagined societies in the actual cultures I paid homage to rather than just taking their superficial aesthetics; fantasy has a long and ugly history of Orientalism and appropriation, so taking care not to exoticise or Other your subject matter is crucial.
These were just the starting points. Once I had the rough ideas for the cultures I then had to imagine what effect eons of interaction with one another would have on them. Even the most isolated civilizations engage with the outside world sooner or later, and none come away from the encounter unchanged. On top of all that, I decided from the start that my world would be one where the supernatural would be manifest, so what effect would the historical existence of monsters and magic have on each of these societies? On the world at large?
These were but two of the many, many questions I asked myself as I worked on A Crown for Cold Silver, and answering them first for myself and then later for the reader represents a microcosm of my worldbuilding process. Fortunately, the more work you put into worldbuilding the more the world builds itself—once you develop what a culture’s religion is like, for example, you can extrapolate how the clergy might react to a violent coup by the crown prince. If your world is to be truly believable it must develop organically, just as ours did, but once that process starts the growth becomes exponential.
So far we’ve been mostly talking about stage one worldbuilding, or the brainstorming stage. Now I want to briefly touch on stage two worldbuilding, where you convey as much of your world as you need to your reader in the course of the text itself. AKA The Tricky Part, because if you overdo it you’ll smother the reader in infodumps but if you don’t include enough your world will come across as vague. Readers need firm ground to stand on, but they don’t want to sink in a quagmire of minutiae.
It can be a very fine line to walk, so here’s a perfect example from A Crown for Cold Silver…a perfect example of what not to do, that is. The following is how I began the prologue that I eventually cut, for reasons that will become obvious:
Two thousand years ago, the Black Cascades brooded in silence broken only by thunder and the songs and shrieks of hunter and hunted. The mountain range jutted from the Star where the upper two arms broke from the continent’s body like the crooked horns of a goat. Both the Immaculate in the northwest and the Flintlanders in the northeast had made their tortuous trails around the foothills that cut their lands off from the rest of the Star, while the high heart of the mountains knew but the lonely paths of elk and ram, and the padding pursuit of wolf and panther along the same. The only travelers to dare these lonely reaches were deserters of civilization: fugitives who could be harried no further; shamans and lunatics seeking the sublimity of desolation…
On the surface it’s not such a bad passage, if I do say so myself—a bit ornate, yes, but that was the tone I wanted for the prologue, and it sets up the geography, history, and atmosphere of the setting in just a few sentences. By the time I had written and rewritten the rest of the book, however, I realized the prologue wasn’t just unnecessary, it was actively detracting from the novel as a whole. Why? Because while the sole function of the prologue was to build the world for the reader, it did so in a stilted, info-dumpy fashion. It offered facts and descriptions but without any immediacy or context. That’s why I axed the thousand-odd word prologue in its entirety, so instead of starting my novel with a history lesson the reader instead turned to page one and read:
It was all going so nicely, right up until the massacre.
Sir Hjortt’s cavalry of two hundred spears fanned out through the small village, taking up positions in the uneven lanes between half-timbered houses that only the most charitable of surveyors would refer to as “roads.” The warhorses slowed and then stopped in a decent approximation of unison, their riders sitting as stiff and straight in their saddles as the lances they braced in their stirrups. It was an unseasonably warm afternoon in the autumn, and after their steep ride up the valley road rider and steed alike dripped sweat, yet not a one of them removed his or her brass skullcap. Weapons, armor, and tack glowing in the fierce alpine sunlight, the dull russet of their cloaks covering up the inevitable stains, the cavalry appeared to have ridden straight out of a tale, or galloped down off one of the tapestries in the mayor’s house...
As you can see, there’s worldbuilding aplenty in that opening paragraph, but unlike in the excised prologue it’s all woven into the immediate action. Instead of starting the novel with a dusty “Two thousand years ago…” we start it with a sharp “Right fucking now!” Much better for gripping the reader from the outset, and all the important information I had originally conveyed in the prologue eventually came out over the course of the novel anyway, but in an organic fashion. On top of that, by holding off on telling my reader everything about the setting in a prologue I was able to preserve an air of the wondrous and the mysterious around my world, and keeping your reader intrigued is always best practice. This is not to say prologues are always a bad idea, but if your only reason for having one is to summarize your setting and theoretically avoid the heavy lifting of worldbuilding then you run the risk of turning off your reader before they’ve even started your novel proper. There are no shortcuts to good writing, so take your time and let your worldbuilding be a natural part of your narrative instead of a clumsy first impression for the reader.
As with all things writerly, practice will be your best teacher when it comes to worldbuilding, but there are a couple of principles to bear in mind as you’re trying to render your setting with a deft hand. First and foremost is that all people are a product of their environments to some extent, including your characters. So the reader should learn most if not everything about your world through the lens of your characters, who are individuals unique to your setting—or at least they should be! If your characters would be virtually the same in some wildly different setting then you need to reevaluate the way you approach character creation, but that’s an essay for another time.
Just as your characters should be shaped by your world, so too should your plot. A big part of making your world engaging as well as believable is making the central plot something that couldn’t happen just anywhere. What about your world is driving the action forward? Is it a particular culture, monstrous enemy, or system of magic? If the answer isn’t immediately forthcoming, then you have some other questions to ask yourself.
As you might have guessed by now, though, asking yourself questions is a good thing! Readers will be asking the same ones, sometimes less politely, and relying on you to provide a convincing answer. So long as you follow this modest advice, you’ll always have one at the ready. [GdM]