Lesson 6: Setting and Worldbuilding (Part One) · 6:52am Jan 8th, 2022
Worldbuilding is the least important part of storytelling compared to characters and plot.
That might surprise some people, especially when we consider some of the most successful books and media that have come out in the past few decades. Harry Potter, Avatar the Last Airbender, Hunger Games, Maze Runner, Dune, the Witcher, Zootopia, Beastars, Marvel’s Loki, Arcane, Hilda, and so many other books and shows that have been wildly successful also happen to have incredibly compelling worlds.
It can be easy, then, to mistake that we have to spend a lot of time developing our worlds for our stories. It can also be easy to brush aside the smaller scale of worldbuilding for slice-of-life stories or realistic fiction. Even for stories that take place in the world of the banal and mundane, a little bit of worldbuilding can help enhance your story if you already have good characters and plot.
What do I mean by banal settings? Take an office comedy, for example. There’s not a lot of worldbuilding to do, but there’s still some. What kind of work goes on in this office? What is the work culture like? And most importantly, what are your characters’ places in that office? If you have a great character who’s an upstart newbie trying to break the glass ceiling, you can enhance your plot and characterization by answering questions like these.
However, most of the big challenges of worldbuilding do come from elaborate stories which take place within their own universe and their own set of rules, so we’re going to talk mostly about those, just keep in mind that you can apply the following lesson of worldbuilding on any story in any genre as long as it has a setting.
Why Do Worldbuilding?
Do you find yourself hung up on the details of lore that goes into every scene? Are you overly concerned with meshing existing lore with your new story? Then you might have a worldbuilding addiction.
Worldbuilding needs to serve the story we are telling, not the other way around. For many professional authors, or aspiring professionals, this problem comes about when a writer spends so much time inventing their world that if they ever get to writing their story, they try to stretch their story out to showcase as much of that world as they can and ultimately end up undermining the pacing of their plot and the personalities of their characters.
However, not everyone is trying to be a professional author. And a lot of times, for fan fiction, writers are usually working with an existing world. The problem thus is not how much time they spend on worldbuilding, but how much time they focus on keeping the lore and canon of their base inspiration consistent.
And that can be a problem when “what is canon” starts dictating “what I write.” Canon should only matter if it is absolutely necessary to make your fan fiction recognizable as fan fiction. If your plot and characters are solid, no one’s going to notice that you got the name of a spell wrong, or if your magic system contradicts a small detail from your core inspiration.
Beyond that, internally consistent canon is far more important than externally consistent canon. Meaning, even if it’s wrong when compared to something outside your story, as long as an element of worldbuilding makes sense within its context, it’s usually going to be fine.
So, if we’re not supposed to focus on every detail, what then do we focus on? One of the things that worldbuilding can greatly enhance are the themes of your story. If your story is going to have a theme about how “wealth must be forcibly taken from the greedy for the sake of fairness,” it would really help if your world had a compelling reason for why all but an elite few are poor and starving.
Maybe there’s a war, or a drought, or the Demon King has returned, or all the rich people are vampires. Whatever the reason may be, if that little factoid is, if the setting engenders conflicts and issues related to your theme then it might be a good point to focus on.
The final and most basic part of why writers do worldbuilding is because it is cool. It’s awesome and fun, so if you are struggling with deciding what elements to add into your world, start with your own wishes. Fictional worlds allow for a sense of escapism or wonder, so the best way to fulfill that purpose is to imagine what you would wish for in your own personalized world.
I like that time of night when thick fog banks roll in from the sea and the visibility gets really low. I can add that into my world and have bizarre weather patterns, and that’s going to change how other character or plot archetypes work together.
Magic
The big “M.” No, not maps. No, not monsters. Okay, fine, there are many cool things in fictional worldbuilding that start with “m,” but we’re talking about magic. There are a lot of different magic systems and it can be incredibly difficult to figure out how to balance your magic system to make it fun and relevant to the plot, but not so over the top that everything becomes a pointless power fantasy. Not saying that power fantasies can’t make for good stories, but it’s generally going to be really hard to sell that audience investment.
Why? For many reasons, but it’s partly due to the concept of “deus ex machina,” or god from the machine, a feature in some classical theatre where a god has to suddenly appear on stage and save everyone because the conflict has written itself into a hole. It’s avoided because it inserts a rule about the world that the audience wasn’t aware of and takes them out of their experience. You’re showing the author’s hand at play, and they become aware that what’s happening in front of them is kind of arbitrary.
Bear in mind, this can apply to any story, not just fantasy or science fiction. If you’re writing a mystery and the detective suddenly figures out all the clues because he gets a surge of inexplicable inspiration, that’s as much of a deus ex machina as the hero getting more magic because they really dug deep and didn’t want to lose.
To that end, how do we make sure we avoid a deus ex machina in our stories? I present to you:
The First Law of Worldbuilding
I must confess, this idea is not mine, nor even is the phrasing of the law my own. But as I understand it, the First Law of Worldbuilding is as follows:
The ability to convince your audience that the conflict has been solved by an in-universe element is proportional to how well your audience understands that world.
This law is developed directly off the back of Sanderson’s First Law of Magic, only this has been generalized to a broader category, as it can apply to any part of your world, not just the magic system. Looking at Sanderson’s First Law, you can clearly see the overlap:
An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.
The only reason I generalize this to most of worldbuilding is that it doesn’t have to be magic that leads to your deus ex machina.
“Oh no, the villain’s lair is at the top of the mountain and we can’t reach it! But the mountain is actually a volcano and it all blows up. The end.”
If something like this happens, and the audience didn’t know beforehand that there was a volcano, they’re going to feel like the resolution to the conflict was stolen from them. Even when magic’s not involved.
When magic is involved, however, as writers we have to choose how much our magic system can do. Or, going back to our First Laws, how much will the audience understand our magic system? There are basically two extremes we can fall between: hard or soft magic.
Hard Magic
“Hard” magic basically means that your magic system’s rules are so well understood by the reader that they feel as if they themselves can participate in the magic. This approach to magic tends to take away the “wonder” of magic but makes up for it by allowing you to use it actively in your story as a means of creating and then solving problems and conflicts.
“Magic as a science” is a trope that may be considered an extreme of this extreme, where magic is so rooted in rules that it could be taught alongside physics and chemistry. However, from the angle of a writer, this is not always going to be the case. Imagine communications technology, for a moment. How many people really grasp the inner workings of the internet, of signal repeaters and base stations, or why sometimes our device can’t seem to connect to the damn wifi?
If we were to add a field of science to our story which our readers do not fully understand, that undermines the purpose of a hard system. Simply because you adhere to the tone or aesthetic of a rigid system like science will not make your magic “hard” unless your reader can also understand those rules.
Elemental bending from Avatar the Last Airbender is a strong example of a hard magic system. Although we are not shown exactly how or why some people can bend an element, we still get a clear indication of what the magic system does. Benders can move one of the four Aristotelian elements with their bodies. And that’s about it.
Nearly everything that varies from those rules is simply logical developments off of it. Metalbending and bloodbending follow the rules, but in particular ways.
Soft Magic
Conversely, “soft” magic means that the reader understands little or none of the rules. Opposite to hard magic, soft magic preserves a sense of mystery and wonder, even if it may be well understood by certain people like mages or wizards.
Despite being part of the “magic as science” trope in My Little Pony, where magic is a skill that can be taught, has to be studied in great detail, and is even taught in regimented schools, the magic system of My Little Pony is very soft. Its rules are vague and unimportant, and while there have been some staple spells that have moved the magic towards “hard” like teleportation and energy blasts, for the most part, the audience can’t identify the cost and consequences of most of the magic.
The reason for this goes back to our lesson in narrative capital. If a character uses magic to solve a problem, even at a small scale, that solution becomes a transaction point and there is a difference in capital between the before and after. Narrative capital has to be traded off in order to make the new status quo compelling.
But with a soft magic system, when a problem is solved with magic, the audience is unaware of what is being given away or what are the consequences of the spell.
For example, if you have a magical door that cannot be unlocked without a very particular spell, a hard magic system will push the characters to test their wits and figure out the spell. But a soft magic system will have the spell already provided, usually by something that can’t or won’t explain the spell, like a cryptic wizard or an enchanted object.
The hard magic system is like using your character’s wits to find the key, while in a soft magic system the key will feel like it was given because your readers don’t know what the cost or effort of opening the door really was.
A Lived World, not an Encyclopedia
Another challenge that many writers face is finding a way to give the reader information about your world without them realizing they are being given that information. Depending on the length of your story, there will be differences in how much you can give your audience. Because we often create our world and setting before writing, there’s a temptation to get deep into the details so that our readers will understand the setting as we do.
But passages of high-concept or abstract lore aren’t generally going to be received right off the bat. The reader will know that they are being talked at or lectured to, fed information that they will have to remember for later. The more conceptual you become, the more your story will feel like an encyclopedia.
For example, imagine you have a story set in a post-war world. If you begin listing battlefields and naming generals and giving the whole history of the war and why everyone was fighting, all that information can feel like it’s stalling the story when they don’t arise naturally. Worse still, if you try to put that worldbuilding into dialogue, you can fall into the trap of “Lexposition,” that’s “lecture” and “exposition” rolled into one. Lexposition as dialogue can feel really stale, even though it’s easy to write from the author’s side.
We avoid these information dumps by first establishing the Lived World, the world that the characters see from day to day. In our post-war example, that means if there’s a general’s statue in the protagonist’s hometown, give concrete details about the appearance and uniform of the general, maybe an off-hand comment about a story he’s famous for, but don’t go much deeper than that.
Then, when you get further into the story, you bring up the general’s name or mention the statue and the reader will think “Ah-ha! I can make a connection here!” That’s when you can add a few more facts.
A Lived World also means we should be thinking about how our worldbuilding serves the core goals and themes of our characters and plot. Why would a character care so much about a war statue? Maybe they’re a historian, or a soldier, or a sculptor.
But, if you are set on telling a story about a rebellious kid breaking away from tradition and challenging the status quo, details about a statue and a general might not be as effective as showing how the post-war culture puts constraints on your characters’ lives.
An example of this in successful media would be the four nations in Avatar the Last Airbender. The story is about a kid who has the weight of the world on his shoulders and is expected to bring world peace. It’s incredibly thematic, then, that each nation is based on one of the elements he has to master because it helps him see the whole world and acknowledge the weight of those expectations.
Conversely, if ATLA had started giving the viewer lore about Fire Nation cuisine, that might be kind of cool and interesting, but it’s hard to tie it back into Aang’s plot.
The key to this is understanding that in worldbuilding we are not creating an entire world, we are creating a world through the eyes of our characters. And as big as our heroes might become, individuals are small and their personal worlds are small. And so, when we lay the groundwork for our world we need to start with the concrete details.
People are Small
This principle applies to plot as much as it does to worldbuilding, but when I say “people are small,” I mean that we have to take the large-scale conflicts in our world and miniaturize them to a scale that matters to characters.
Just like in real life, large national or international conflicts don’t matter to most people until it starts impacting their own life. It’s much easier to understand that all your packages are trapped in a port than it is to understand the layered politics of a trade war. And it’s no different for your characters.
The Warded Man by Peter V. Brett is an excellent example of this. The premise is that demons rise from the earth every night to kill humans and destroy their homes. The only things that can save humanity are magical wards which simply create barriers that demons cannot usually cross.
As the primary problem of the world, Brett is inventive in how he portrays life being different from one place to another, but we don’t get a bird’s eye view of the world, we’re treated to the problems of a single village. Because travel is difficult with demons rising every night, not getting enough salt due to delays in the courier system is as devastating as a lucky demon breaking through the wards.
Brett establishes that the whole world is segmented and divided because people cannot travel long distances. Daily life is fixated on getting as much done as you can in the day before hiding through the night. And it’s all shown simply through the day-to-day life of one of the main characters, not through exposition or explanations about the world.
Iteration and Archetypes
As you know from Lesson 1: Iteration, I like the process of starting with common tropes and archetypes and gradually reworking those ideas into something that appears original. It is in worldbuilding where we can have the most fun with our iterative process because there’s so much that we can do.
On the surface, iteration looks like it would be different between original fiction and fan fiction, but the only real difference is that fan fictions are clear about where they’re taking their archetypes from. Original fictions go through the same process of being inspired, it’s just that writers have to mix around elements and hide their inspirations to look original. So, regardless of whether you’re writing fan or original stories, or something in between like an Alternate Universe story, this method is going to be equally applicable.
The Blank Page Method
The blank page method is really simple. You take a blank page, and you fill it with as many individual ideas as you can. Divide it however you want, make as many categories as you need, just start putting down ideas. A condensed version of this might look like this:
Weird Weather
- Tidal locked planet
- Mind-altering fog
- Blizzards everywhere
- Frequent earthquakes
- Flaming tornadoes
Material Culture
- Bows
- Pocket watches
- Dreamcatchers
Magic
- Magical fountains/Sources of magic
- Techno-necromancy
- Enchanted objects
Monsters
- Vampires
- Dragons
- Demons
Once you have a bunch of ideas jotted down, just start piecing them together and coming up with a way to make them all work, and don’t just stop at what seems obvious. For example, let’s say I was writing a story and combined these aspects together:
> Mind-altering fog + Dreamcatcher + Magical fountains + Demons
To me, these ideas seem to mesh well together. They make sense. The setting might be a fictional world where mind-altering fog spews from fountains built by trickster demons, and the people in that world have to protect their minds with dreamcatchers. Everything is at least a little bit complimentary, as far as aesthetics and genres go. This is the obvious answer, which is fine for the first step of iterative ideation, but let’s get even weirder.
> Mind-altering fog + Pocket watches + Techno-necromancy + Dragons
Now, maybe this story is set in the same kind of weather, but this time it’s a waste product of eldritch beings roughly resembling dragons. Using techno-necromancy, the people can reanimate corpses to go out into the fog, and it’s fine because they don’t have actual brains. But they don’t stay alive forever, so the reanimated people carry around pocket watches to know how much time they have left to complete their job.
If your character is one of the reanimated people, then their action scenes can then be treated like car chases or runaway trains, problems that have to be solved within a set time limit.
Or maybe the pocket watches are also enchanted objects that keep the techno-zombies alive. That would help you lean your action scenes towards survival and protection since the zombies have an object they need to protect at all costs. Kind of like the brain for traditional zombies, but now it’s an object that can be moved around or hidden.
Working with a blank page is just an exercise of stepping out of the familiar and comfortable and connecting ideas you wouldn’t have connected before. In this stage, there is no such thing as an idea that doesn’t work or one that doesn't make sense. If you have a strong grasp of characters and plot, and you do just enough worldbuilding to give a hint of your world, any idea can be a good one. Just look at Jim Butcher, the author of the Dresden Files, who wrote Furies of Calderon in response to a challenge to write a story inspired by “terrible” ideas: mashing Pokemon with a lost Roman legion.
Ideas are cheap and easy to come by, so you might as well get as many as you can to practice ideation.
Homework and Concluding Comments
I’ve noticed that as our lessons have gotten longer, fewer and fewer readers are interested in reading through everything. So that’s why this lesson is going to be cut short compared to the rest. Part 2 will be up soon, but in the meantime, we have some assignments.
- Fill your Blank Page: Go through the Blank Page Methods and create a directory of ideas for yourself that you can use as a sandbox for new ideas. Remember, creativity and originality don’t come from the ideas themselves, they come from trying to make a bunch of them work together.
Read the first chapter of the Warded Man to get a feel for “small scale” worldbuilding.
The funny story for how “Pokemon and a Roman legion” turned into a 6-part book series:
- Read Sanderson's First Law: https://www.brandonsanderson.com/sandersons-first-law/
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