Five Questions to Guide Your Worldbuilding Process
Not all fiction is set in a fantastical world, distant planet, or alternate timeline, but all fiction requires some level of worldbuilding. Even a novel written to be a realistic drama set in a real, modern-day city needs internal consistency to ensure the parts that are fiction don’t clash with the parts that are not.
Worldbuilding is the process of fleshing out the different aspects of the world in which your story is set. This can include things like a map of the world, the names of great houses, the lineage of major players, or the kinds of songs sung in the local tavern. Everything you do to add depth to the world your characters inhabit is worldbuilding, even if it’s adding some fictional depth to an otherwise real place.
Today, I want to explore five questions that can help you get started building the world of your fiction.
How realistic will your fiction be?
This question is probably the most important to start with because it will determine what aspects of your world you need to fill out, versus any aspects you simply need to research.
If your story takes place at a real place in a historical context for which we know a lot of details, you may think you get off the hook because you do not need to “build” a world, but be careful! You still definitely need to research the setting to make sure you can pull it off. For example, if your story is set in New York in the 1850s, you need to make sure you don’t reference buildings that didn’t exist yet.
Your world building tasks when writing realistic fiction will have more to do with character attitudes and beliefs, but you may still need to consider the ramifications of any fictional elements you bring into the setting. A realistic story set in a fictional town may need some backstory (when was the town founded? By who? Why did that person settle there?) to inform other parts of the story.
On the other hand, if you are making up your own fictional world, building out all the facets of the culture will be a daunting task, and you can’t just handwave away problems that could arise if you don’t take some time to figure out the setting. If your fiction is fantasy, science fiction, or something like that, you will likely benefit from moving on to the next questions.
Are the people in your world religious?
This question will help direct a lot of the development of your fictional cultures. Figuring out what the primary belief systems are of any given culture will go a long way towards informing how the people should behave and what kinds of things they will value.
In the case of more realistic fiction, keep in mind that you can alter history when writing fiction, such as imagining a 16th century colonial settlement that is completely non-religious, but you will likely need to address why this is the case and what consequences it would have for this fictionalized version of the world.
A fictional world with many different religions may be prone to warfare and strife as practitioners of the different faiths seek to prove their religious doctrine via geopolitical dominance.
A fictional world with only one religion may suffer from technological stagnation as religious leaders seek to suppress those who would question their authority.
A fictional world that has never had any religious teachings may have never moved beyond day to day survival to value education, morality, and finding time to think deeply about abstract ideas.
Along with this idea is the question of whether any of the religions in your world are true. Do different cultures worship different gods who are all, ultimately, powerless inventions of people? Have the gods actually revealed themselves to people? Is there a pantheon of gods? Is it hierarchical or specialized by role? Understanding the religious history of your fictional world will bring insight into the motivations of the people living there.
Is there magic?
Determining whether magic or supernatural forces exist is important from a plot perspective, as magic systems often provide the impetus for plot movement. If there isn’t magic or obvious evidence of supernatural forces, that will affect how characters think and feel about their situations, as well as how they may react if one of your characters does have some kind of connection to a supernatural force, or heightened abilities that may seem supernatural to average people.
If your world does have magic, you should have a good idea of how it works. In fantasy, magic is generally divided into two general categories, “hard” systems and “soft” systems. The basic difference is in how rigid the rules of the magic system are.
The differences between the two are beyond the scope of this post, but they have been well explained elsewhere. My point is that you need to decide how magic works and what it’s role will be in the story. Magic can be a catalyst to the main story events or a mystery threaded throughout the narrative. Magic can mark a character as blessed or as cursed. Magic can be seen as good, evil, neutral, or both depending on who the observer is.
Whether or not you choose a system that is nebulous or one that is very concretely defined is a personal choice, but you must be sure that magic is not used as a “get-out-of-jail-free” card to solve every conflict right at the last minute. Not everything about a magic system needs to be outlined and explained, but every feat of magic needs to feel earned or serve a worthwhile purpose in the story you are telling.
What are the political power structures like?
Even in a fictional world, life in a democracy would look pretty different from life in a totalitarian dictatorship. Additionally, just because a person has total authority, doesn’t mean there are no people she must keep happy to retain her sway.
As you write fictional stories, you may need to think about what real-world principles to power would be at play. If your protagonist starts the story geographically isolated from the dominant power players, making little or not contributions to their reign, it makes perfect sense that they might be ignorant of the way the system works; but as your protagonist grows, likely in both ability and influence, you must keep in mind how such growth will be viewed by those already in power.
Does my world support my themes?
This is a question that is vital to consider, but you often won’t be able to answer honestly until late in the writing process. I’ve included it last because it is difficult to answer first, but it is certainly not less important than the other questions on this list.
Worldbuilding is often started early in the process of writing fiction, and it often should be because of how much the world will influence what you write—your character might not be able to flee into the sunset on foot at the end of chapter 1 if he lives on the western shore, for example.
Theme, on the other hand, often develops as you write, only becoming clear near the end. It’s normal to kind of stumble into a theme, like the bathroom of a house at which you are a guest in the middle of the night. You should have a good idea where you are hoping to get, and you should definitely know why you want to be there, but until you arrive, it can be hard to know if you’re in the right place.
Even so, theme will invariably be one of the most important elements of your writing, and so even a really well developed world should be adjusted if it conflicts with the themes your story is trying to explore.
If you want to explore the effects of loneliness on a person’s mental health, building a world in which magic or science has made teleportation possible, cheap, and easily achieved by everyone may not be the best option. To be clear, you absolutely still can make such a world serve such a theme (it’s possible that it will be even more powerful because of the contrast) but it may be harder to achieve.
In the end, there are no unbreakable rules in writing, and it’s entirely possible to build a wonderfully complex and exciting world without considering any of these questions. Nonetheless, these are the kinds of questions that you should ask to help you approach the process of creating a fictional universe. Please let me know what you found helpful or unhelpful about this post. Please do share it with everyone you think may be interested in this topic!
