Hi, everyone, I took a month off from this series, but I night have enough in me to put something together on the wild, wonderful world of worldbuilding. It’s once again time for The Writing Lab, where I pass along any insights into the craft of writing I’ve picked up during the past thirty years or so.
A few months previously, I started a new series on an aspect of prewriting/planning, that is often misunderstood. It’s worldbuilding – the art of creating a fictional world in which your characters and story reside, a more detailed process than simply deciding what the setting of the story is. In my opinion, I believe you need to engage in some level of worldbuilding, especially if it is a world you are going to spend a long story in or multiple stories.
In the most previous Writing Lab, we’d gotten to the difference between world-building in a “realistic” or “known” world as opposed to one “wholly” set in a fictional world. As you might have guessed from the quotation marks, there’s not as much difference between thew two situations as you might guess.
In today’s post, I’m going to lay out some of the devices or elements I’ve made use of in the time that I’ve been writing. This is by no means an exhaustion look at these devices; I’ll only outline three of them I’ve made use of for my own projects. Each has a similar purpose; to organize and keep track of information that’s essential for you to get a handle on the world your story occupies, the people and entities inside that world, and the society they live in.
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.
In brief, worldbuilding is different than setting in my opinion. Setting is a room. A backdrop. It’s scenery. But without good worldbuilding, you can’t have realistic feeling scenery. You can’t have cool, unique backdrops for your story.
― Patrick Rothfuss, author of The Kingkiller Chronicle series
Maps
Knowing where you are going is always a useful thing, whether in life or in fiction. I always believed having a good map of a place was a good idea to start getting to know about it.
I know that I first saw a map of Middle Earth long before I began reading The Lord of the Rings series. But it created a major impression on me growing up, that an author could have imagined such a variety of worlds. The more you start plotting out your own world, the more you start visualizing what grows there, who lives there, and what societies would arise from the terrain and climate you’ve created.
While the map of Middle Earth has helped readers better visualize an author’s world, you don’t have to necessarily make your map “publication ready” unless you really want to. One of the major reasons I created a map of this little river town is because I wanted to know where everything was so I could reach for it, in the storytelling stance, whenever I needed the information.
For such a purpose, a hand-written map like the one above will suit you just fine. If you do want to have a fancier Inkarnate illustration for a more public purpose, you don’t have to be a master illustrator to create a usable map. Such programs as Wonderdraft and Inkarnate have some easy to use inputs and I’ve had some luck at using them in the past.
Whatever technique or technology you use, it’s always a big help when your readers, and especially you, have a visual representation of the world that your story occupies.
Family Trees/Character Webs and/or Maps
It was a long day about three or so years ago when I was at one of various book fairs I’ve attended to help promote my books. It was slow going during the afternoon, and I wasn’t meeting with too many people who weren’t selling their own books.
As my mind wandered, I began thinking of a story involving a family of professional wrestlers. Pro wrestling is famously a family oriented business, with sons, grandsons, brothers, sisters, and daughters and granddaughters following their family into the squared circle. To keep track of the family, I realized I needed to know who was related to whom.
Within an afternoon, I had created a main character, sketched out a rough the majority of the paternal side of the character’s family, and had an idea of who they were, when they died, and how they were related to each other. It played a great role in how I formulated the plot and timeline of the story, and I have continued to use that family tree, with several revisions and additions, ever since for the project.
it’s important for you from a storytelling and a continuity standpoint for you to have a good handle on who and what is in your world. Look at the example of George R.R. Martin, who’s had to rely on fan-run wikis for him to keep track of all the characters he’s created in the a Song of Ice and Fire series and would have otherwise forgotten.
This can look quite different for you, depending on what project you are working on or your storytelling needs. Maybe it looks more like a character web, with characters and relations spelled out. You could, perhaps, format the entries to include more information than some of their basic statistics, depending on the level of information your readers (but most importantly yourself) have to be aware of, and the importance of the characters. Maybe you decide you need another family tree to fully lay out all of your characters. (In my case, I ended up doing both.)
Again, this can look very different to you depending on the type of project you are working on. I always thought I needed to know enough about my characters to know what they would likely do in any given situation or what they were capable of. Even if this information is not available to your readers (sometimes it’s good for them to not know everything about what’s going on for the sake of the story), you want that information to be available to you to use.
Timelines
Keeping the order of events straight is always something of a difficulty for me. As I mentioned before, I am very much a plotter, not a pantser, so I need to have an idea of where my story is going, even if I end up changing course mid-journey.
Developing a timeline of events can be a good way for you to know what’s going on for your story. It can also help you with formatting how your story will run, depending on how you plan to lay out your storyline. For example, maybe you are tempted to style yourself a Quentin Tarantino, and wish to write your own Pulp Fiction-type non-linear fiction masterpiece without losing your place.
Or, perhaps you’re dealing with more than one timeline, which is where I found myself on my wrestling project (Kayfabe Tales). Part of the main story was set in the past, running between the 1950’s into the 2010’s, while the “main” story was set between just a couple years in the late 2010’s.
What I ended up was creating parallel timelines, one with the “past” period and one with the “present” period. I set them u visually right next to each other in my notebooks. Each event was on the individual timeline, but I also saw how it could interact with its neighboring timeline. By using this, I was able to plot out when I was going to be in my present timeline and when I would be in the past timeline at any point of the narrative, allowing you to adjust for pacing or plotting issues.
Again, if you do create one of these timelines or other devices I’ve made use of, don’t ever believe you can’t ever change them, however. Tools you use for creating fiction can be revised just as well as the fiction you create with them. I’ve encountered this many times in my own writing experiences.
…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:
To wrap up (for now) our discussions on worldbuilding, I’ll get into what I consider to be one of the biggest dangers of worldbuilding – getting so involved with the process you start to confuse it with actually telling a story. And I’ll be using my own recent experiences as a way to illustrate these dangers.
See you then.
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