This week, we’re going to be talking about worldbuilding! It’s right there in the name, folks.
The biggest and most important piece of advice I can give you about worldbuilding is this: overbuild and then don’t share it.
Yes, it’s horrendously easy to lose yourself to “research” when you should actually be writing. (Learning when to start writing vs learning when to research is a very important writer skill, on that note!) But I’ve noticed that in a lot of cases, it can be little details that make or break worldbuilding and reader immersion, and those kinds of things can only appear if the author has poured their heart and soul into a project – and a lot of time building things up.
That said, you’re going to come up with page upon page upon dozens of pages of notes. You’re going to know about currencies, flags, plants, fashion, animals, magic, government, traditions, everything you could ever want to think about.
And you’re going to take all of this knowledge and share a fraction of one percent of it. Do not add everything to your story. I don’t care if it’s super neat. I don’t care if it’s fanfic or original. You will bog down the narrative if you share everything you came up with, and that’s one of the last things you ever want to do to a story.
If it’s that important, then it should be relevant to the plot somehow so the information can come out like that. Or perhaps it’s tied into a character’s subplot, introduction, or end goal. You can get away with adding worldbuilding details into scenery and description scenes, but you can’t do that too much, otherwise you end up with pages of details that a lot of readers will skim over. And you don’t want that! You want to share your cool ideas!
But you have to follow the law of conservation of detail, too. Include details if they are important. The rest of the super cool stuff you came up with can be added after the fact, in other projects, in interviews, in footnotes, in whatever you like! But don’t ruin your own story with your research.
Also, trust your readers! I know that can be pretty hard for some writers to do (cough), but they will pick up on things and you don’t gotta spoonfeed ‘em.
So, with all those warnings out of the way, worldbuild the hell out of things! No detail is too small or silly or irrelevant for you, the author, to know.
Maybe the royal color of this country is green because way back when a drink got spilled on a queen’s white dress and it became fashion rather than a faux pas. Maybe those bird things you made up have poisoned spurs and maybe only the southern species of them have red plumage whereas the western counterpoint have brown and blue. Maybe these things are pack animals but people don’t eat them—maybe the islanders use glass as currency instead of metals—maybe this location had a famous battle three hundred years ago and the ground is still scarred from it. Go for it!
Worldbuilding is both a pain and one of the most fun things authors can do. Usually at the same time. Do all of these things need to make it directly into the narrative? Not necessarily! But if the author knows about them then the author will use these details correctly, and the most important thing in any story is internal consistently. Seriously. That is the most important thing.
Go get that tattooed on your writing hand, and I’ll be waiting, back next week with another blog post.
