Worldbuilding Basics
If you have even gently brushed upon the thinnest edge of writer Bluesky/Instagram/Twitter/YouTube (take your pick), you have almost certainly seen at least a little bit of discussion about worldbuilding.
Worldbuilding, on the off chance you don’t know, is essentially designing the setting of your story. It is creating the geography, cities, ecology, climate and history of your world, as well as the various peoples and cultures that call it home. Worldbuilding is an important part of writing a story - even in stories where it doesn’t seem like much worldbuilding has been done. It is also a lot of fun. That’s why we writers tend to prattle on about it to anyone who will listen.
With that said, I’m now going to prattle on about worldbuilding to anyone that wants to read about it and share some thoughts about how to approach creating your setting.
Build the World You Need
I get it, worldbuilding is a lot of fun for most of us. I’m not about to discourage doing something you enjoy. However, from a purely practical standpoint, I think sometimes authors get so bogged down in their worldbuilding and lore that they forget to actually write their story. Or, in a worst-case scenario, are more invested in sharing their world than telling a compelling story within it.
Not every world needs to be as rich and detailed as Middle Earth or the world of A Song of Ice and Fire. Although, it is also entirely possible to go the other way and then end up making everything up as you go along. Then you’re stuck spending a lot of time cleaning out inconsistencies in your lore.
So, when I say “build the world you need”, I am being quite literal. Consider the story you want to tell. How different is it from the world we live in? How grand is the scale of your narrative? What elements of the world are essential to your plot and your characters? If you’re writing a fantasy epic, where your plucky band of heroes comes from many different cultures and races are travelling across a sprawling land on a quest to collect ancient artifacts to defeat an equally ancient evil, you’re going to need to do a lot of worldbuilding. There is a lot of history, geography and biology baked into that concept before you even begin to think about things like magic systems. To make that world feel immersive and cohesive, you’ll need to do a fair bit of legwork.
If you’re writing a murder mystery set in a town in the outback, you have very different things to consider. The setting here is essentially the real world - specifically, rural Australia. So your focus is going to be more about the way the actual state of the world in your time period has impacted this small town, the geography around it and the local social and political landscapes. You’ll want to have information about the population of the town and you’ll want to consider how these elements can influence or contribute to a murder investigation plotline.
In the case of Domino and Marble, it was somewhere in the middle of those two examples. The world of those books is very similar to our own. In fact, it is our world if a handful of historical events happened to go just a bit differently. The landmasses and ecology are more or less the same, but the borders and cultures are different in places. Both stories are set entirely within the single Ionian city of Kudin but, because of the premise, I had to give thought to the typical culture and political climate of the country and how those things might give rise to the premise of the story. However, I haven’t gone into much detail about the rest of the world beyond the basics of Ionia’s immediate neighbours because the rest wasn’t super relevant to the story I was telling - even if figuring out the details of the world and where it diverges from ours is fun.
Essentially, worldbuilding as a hobby is entirely valid. This is true even if the same worldbuilding is also a part of your work. But be aware of how much worldbuilding is actually needed for the story you are telling and where your focus should be when you craft your setting.
The Approach
To be completely clear, there’s no one way to go about building a world. In fact, everyone probably differs in one way or another in their process. Especially if you’re following the mantra from above and “building the world you need”.
That being said, I’m of the opinion that you can more or less lump worldbuilding methods into two categories: macroscale and microscale.
As you might expect, macroscale worldbuilding is talking about working on a large scale. This is your large, sprawling settings - nations, continents, planets. You could also look at this method as building from the outside in. You start with the broad strokes of your geography and ecology, then move down into your nations, cultures and the locations of important places. Once you start getting to the smaller scale areas like individual cities and towns, you can start filling things in as you need them for your plot. When dealing with a huge world, the broader strokes are more important for the full picture than knowing exactly where every blacksmith or jeweler’s is located. Unless your character is going to Little Village Town, you don’t need to have a lot of information about Little Village Town.
Naturally, microscale worldbuilding is the opposite approach. It’s starting with something smaller - a neighbourhood, town or city. You fill in the details about this smaller location and then start building out from there. The smaller your location, the more you’ll want to pay attention to those little details. The largescale stuff can be filled in as needed but, the smaller your setting, the narrower the focus of your story is likely to be - and therefore the narrower the focus of your characters.
As I said though, you’ll surely have to customise your approach to your story. Don’t go out of your way to try to stick to one school or the other if you feel it is more appropriate to take from both - or if your own method doesn’t feel like it fits either. I’m generalising here to help frame where the majority of your focus should be directed depending on the scale of what you’re working with, not trying to set hard rules to follow or present a concrete methodology. Remember, “build the world you need”.
In Conclusion
What I’ve included in this article is the very simplest beginning point for worldbuilding. It isn’t a step-by-step guide or any sort of comprehensive theory. I’m generalising a lot and not trying to set any hard rules. Instead, what I’m trying to say is that you should be aware of where you need to direct your focus for the story you are writing. Don’t get bogged down with a lot of extraneous detail about the world at large if your story never leaves one small town. Don’t find your world feeling dead and not immersive by telling the story of an epic journey through a setting that is lacking in history, culture or ecology. It’s simple stuff that will probably come pretty naturally to a lot of people. But sometimes it’s hard to get started and a little reframing of things can help give you that push. Given that, I think it was worth putting this out there.
Of course, I have a lot of other thoughts about worldbuilding and I intend to write more detailed articles about both macro and microscale worldbuilding in the near future. Stay tuned.
