It’s once again time for The Writing Lab, where I try to pass along any insights into the craft of writing I’ve learned during the past thirty years or so.
Last month, I started a new series on an aspect of writing, specifically prewriting/planning, that is often misunderstood. The process is that of worldbuilding1 – specifically, the art of creating a fictional world in which your characters and story reside.
It’s a bit more in-depth than just the regular planning you might so to establish the time and place of your story. For example, you wouldn’t likely need to go into in-depth worldbuilding just for the sake of a short story. (However, if you wanted to set multiple short stories in the same world2, you might want to put more thought into it.)
In this post, I’m going to lay out the categories I would consider essential to worldbuilding and detail what I consider the differences between simply establishing a setting and a larger worldbuilding project, as well as some concepts to keep in mind when you are deciding on what these elements look like in your story.
Let’s get started.
[AUTHOR’S ONGOING NOTE FOR THIS SERIES:] The advice I give here is geared mostly toward fiction writing; however, it can easily be applied to nonfiction as well. I will say worldbuilding is primarily a fiction-writing process as I describe it here.
I propose to speak about fairy-stories, though I am aware that this is a rash adventure. Faërie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold.
― J.R.R. Tolkien, Tolkien On Fairy-stories
Categories
I would separate the different aspects of worldbuilding (and probably setting, as well), into three different categories. The physical aspects of worldbuilding covers the physical, or tangible, location of your story. The temporal aspects of worldbuilding covers what period of time your story takes place in. Finally, the social aspects of worldbuilding cover the society and culture of the characters in your story, which affect their actions just as much as the physical and temporal aspects do.
Down below, I’m going to explain how worldbuilding is a more elaborate process than simply establishing setting in your story, by showing some examples from these categories.
The Physical Aspects
Establishing Setting
Every story requires a physical location where the action takes place, whether it is an actual location, an entirely fictional realm, or (as usually is the case), some subtle blend of the two. Of these three, I personally consider the actual location option to be the most difficult of all these. You become very self-conscious of being able to authentically portray an actual setting in a way that seems believable to those readers who inhabit the place3.
In any story, you have to determine how many locations you will have, their general size and relationship to each other, and maybe a few key elements and landmarks. Usually, it’s the type of planning a writer can do as he creates a rough draft.
Worldbuilding
One of the most famous fictional maps in history was the one created by J.R.R. Tolkien for his book series The Lord of the Rings. He hand-drew a map of his fictional Middle Earth, complete with names for the castles, rivers, and mountain ranges of the various kingdoms of men, elves, dwarfs, and others.
He didn’t just stop at the map, however. He invented histories for all of these locations, and descriptions of them, even locations where the characters in the series did not visit. It’s a far more detailed process, one you should most likely start even before you start on a rough draft. As George R.R. Martin later found, it’s often difficult to keep track of all these locations and names as you go along.
The Temporal Aspects
Establishing Setting
As with the physical, all writers have to determine the amount of time their story will take, and in which order this time is traveled, so to speak. Usually, most writers (myself included) simply stick to the order in which events occur, although there are plenty of stories (the film Pulp Fiction comes immediately to mind) where an out-of-sequence retelling can add something interesting to the tale.
Worldbuilding
When it comes to worldbuilding, however, you have to expand on this thinking more. Whether you are telling a story in a certain point in the past or in some far-off time in the future, you have to consider what will be known to the people of your world at that time. How will it influence the action or other parts of your world4? It’s a question science fiction authors have to ask themselves all the time.
The Social Aspects
Establishing Setting
It’s surprising about how you can develop society and culture in a short story. I used to teach “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson as an fictional example of the discussion of a process. However, looking back on that story, I also see it as a very efficient creation of a cultural event (the lottery itself) with just enough explanation to keep the story humming along. In the case of a short story, it often works better if there are some things the reader doesn’t know for sure.
Worldbuilding
Any sizable writing should make you think in more detail about the society and culture of your world. However, when you get into the realms of fantasy, science fiction, and horror writing, you have to get a bit more expansive in explaining the society and culture your characters find themselves in. What faiths do the characters follow? What do their places of worship look like? If there is a system of magic in your world, how does it work? Is there more than one system? Are there other languages or customs similar or dissimilar to those your audience is familiar with?
It can get pretty complicated – you start off with describing the system of government in your world, and by the end you might be creating an 18-page glossary of terms like Frank Herbert for Dune or creating a whole language like Tolkien did for Middle Earth?
And sometimes you can go overboard in a way that doesn’t help your story. But I’ll get into those issues later.
…but feel free to ignore my advice if it clashes with writing techniques that work for you. Everyone writes differently.
Next Time at The Writing Lab:
We’ll get into some more basics of worldbuilding, including differences between realistic worlds and fantasy/science fiction worlds (not as much of a difference as you might assume at first glance).
See you then.
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- I checked Merriam-Webster, Cambridge Dictionary, and a couple other locations to confirm “worldbuilding” can be used as one word despite what auto-correct keeps telling me. ↩︎
- By “world,” I do not mean an actual planet, although this could serve as the world for your story. It is simply the physical and temporal space your story exists in, whatever shape this takes. ↩︎
- Truthfully, this nervousness about authentic settings also applies to the temporal and social categories, as well. ↩︎
- There is quite a bit of interplay between all three setting/worldbuilding categories. ↩︎