The Easy-ish Way to Create Believable, Unforgettable Fictional Worlds

Worldbuilding gets a bad rap sometimes. If you ask certain people, worldbuilding is either for nerds looking for almanacs, not fiction, or it’s a useless distinction that should be an intrinsic part of writing.

But there are plenty of writers who recognize the essential nature of worldbuilding separate from the act of storytelling—for science fiction and fantasy, sure, but also for all genres. And there are a ton of amazing, detailed guides to creating worlds. But years ago, when I was first looking to build out the world I had created for my first foray into fantasy writing, I looked up resources for worldbuilding and quickly got bogged down in the sheer number of details these guides wanted me to know.

These guides offer hundreds of questions about the world you’re creating, insinuating that answering each one will lead to developing a believable, original world. I found weeks-long online courses dedicated solely to building a world from scratch.

I like to call these types of resources sandboxes. They give you lots of blank space to play around. “Where are the mountain ranges in your world?” they ask. “What military tactics does each nation in your world use?”

These are good questions, depending on the type of story you’re writing. Sandboxes are fun places for free play and for letting the mind run wild.

But once I had determined the election procedures of a specific political party in my book, which was decidedly not about election procedures or political parties, I was left no closer to a better story. I wondered: “…Now what? What does this have to do with my story?”

This is how I came to begin thinking about story-first worldbuilding.

Story-first worldbuilding falls somewhere on the worldbuilding opinion spectrum between “almanac” and “intrinsic” by exploring the details of the world around the story you want to tell. You don’t need to know where every mountain range is in your world unless your characters intend to cross them. What follows are a set of exercises that are geared mainly toward writers of fantasy who are creating secondary worlds, but hopefully applicable to all writers. The goal of these exercises to help you build a believable world that will add depth and color to the story you want to tell—without making you spend hours writing out the dominant flora on a continent your story will never visit.

How to Build a World Around the Story You Want to Tell

To complete the following exercises, I will assume that you have at least a smidgen of a story idea in mind. It’s okay if it’s not a fully fleshed-out plot yet. I will also assume that, since you have a story idea, you also have a vague impression of the world in which it’s set. It’s okay if most of the world is a blurry mess at this point.

This section contains a couple of exercises to get your mind thinking about how your world interacts with your story. The exercises are intended to be done in order, but this isn’t school. Do what’s most helpful to you.

Exercise #1: Write down everything you already know about your story’s world.

Set a timer for five, 10, or 30 minutes—however much time you think you need—and write out everything you already know about the world in which your story takes place, stream-of-consciousness style. Focus on the parts of your story you’ve either written or can picture clearly in your head. For example, if you know a critical scene in the climax involves an escape from a desert prison, write, “There’s a prison in the desert.” Do not consult Wikipedia’s list of desert flora and fauna. Even if you list things that are contradictory or illogical, write them all down anyway. Give yourself permission to let your mind run free. Important: This is not the time to make up new things about your world. If new ideas come to mind as you’re writing, don’t stop to examine them—just write them down and keep going.

When your time is up, read back over what you wrote. What are the things that are intrinsic or critical to your story and/or characters?

Exercise #2: Pick one thing about your world that you want to explore, then ask yourself “why?” Ideally, this would be something you listed in the first exercise—something that you already know about the world your story takes place in. Whatever it is, make sure it affects your plot and/or characters. Again, this isn’t the time to noodle on weather patterns, unless weather is a key player in your story. Once you’ve chosen one element of your world, ask yourself how that element came into existence. Then set another timer for a period of your choice and free write on that “why” question.

Example: Say your book’s protagonist comes from a culture that’s organized into a confederation of different kinship groups. Why are they a confederacy and not, say, a monarchy? Well, they’re also semi-nomadic, and the families herd livestock between summer and winter pastures every year. It’s hard for groups to unite under a single monarch when they spend half the year on their own, resolving their own conflicts, developing their own unique practices, etc. Since they herd, their livestock is the most important thing they have. Livestock means power. Want more power? Steal more livestock. Thus they developed a raiding culture. But they also discovered that it’s hard to protect yourself from external threats if you’re always fighting, so they created a council of all the families to resolve unresolvable issues. Now your protagonist might be forced to marry a total jerk to keep the peace between two families…

When your time is up, see where your explanation took you. Is there anything you can use to deepen your plot or characters?

Exercise #3: Now pick ONE thing that you know about the world of your story, something that affects the characters and plot. Then change it. You know the drill. Set a timer and free write for however long you want. Pick ONE thing to change, big or small, and summarize your plot, scene, or character background (whatever is affected most by the change) with this ONE thing different. Make your monarchy into a commune, or have that critical heist scene in the tower take place underwater. Be as big or small, realistic or absurd as you want.

• Is it basically impossible to change one thing without changing everything else? Good—That means your world is probably pretty cohesive already. But try anyway, and see if you get some more insight into what makes your world tick.
• Not much else needs to change to make this new thing work? You may want to revisit the “why” questions in Exercise #2 some more. Why does this thing exist if it’s not integral to your plot?

How to Add Depth to Your World’s History

One of the most common issues I see among both newbie and established authors is a clear lack of serious thought behind the world in which their story is set. I sometimes get the impression that characters are walking around on a two-dimensional screen, like one of those old-fashioned landscapes painted on a paper roll that made actors look like they were moving great distances. In other words, the setting feels created specifically for these characters to walk around in.

And yes, that’s technically true. But when you think about your favorite fantasy worlds, the ones that feel the most immersive, the ones you keep coming back to, are the ones that feel alive. They feel like you, the reader, are just popping in to watch a story unfold inside a living, breathing universe. So how do you make something like that?

There are a lot of things that make for an unforgettable world, but one of those things is that, sociologically, it makes sense. What? Here are some exercises to get you thinking about the societies of your world, based on SCIENCE! (social science)

Exercise #1: List all the races, ethnicities, nationalities, religions, species, and other “groupings” of beings in your world. Get detailed. Think of every possible way someone in your would could identify themselves. If you need some help, put yourself in a character’s shoes and have them identify themselves as though they were meeting someone new: “Hi, I’m a forest witch who practices a form of tree-based magic. I was born on the western side of the forest but now I live on the eastern side. I’m also nonbinary.” Get as detailed as you want, from hobbies or sports teams or favorite type of music to deeper identities like gender(s). And don’t just focus on your POV characters.

When you’re finished, see if there are any identity categories that are over- or under-represented. For example, what if your world contains many non-human races, but no religions/belief systems? Is there a reason you didn’t include religion, or are you just not interested in writing it? That’s fine—not every story needs it, but spare a moment to think about a world without religion looks like. People typically have a need to assign meaning to things they don’t understand. Where do yours find meaning? Where do their moral codes come from?

Exercise #2: Now pick a group from your world, and describe in a couple of words (or longer) their historic relationship with some of the other groups on your list. Have there been wars of religion? What about between ethnic groups? Why?

Pro points: Split your groups into sub-sects across geographic lines. Have two sub-sects in one geographic zone be allies, while the same sub-sects in another geographic zone are enemies. How might this happen?

Double pro points: If you are not of non-European descent, don’t use non-European sociopolitical realities as a model for your fantasy story unless you are ready to also deeply engage with those whose daily lives are affected by them. For more, see Worldbuilding for Masochists and Writing the Other.

Exercise #3: Write a history of these relationships from the perspective of the participants. You know those writing exercises that teach you about point of view by having you write the same scene through different characters eyes? Or the ones that ask you to describe a building through the eyes of a person who just got a new job, then describe the same building through the eyes of someone who just lost their father? Do that, except put yourself in the shoes of an historian from one of the groups you’ve identified.

Questions to consider: Who fired the first shot (physical or metaphorical)? Who behaved unfairly? Who is “really” the aggressor/oppressor? How might a character who has only ever learned one side of this history react when presented with an alternative story?

Worlds Grow in Spirals

These are far from the only considerations you should take into account when designing a new world, but I hope I have provided enough information to let you build it out more with your story leading the way. For examples of authors I think are particularly skilled at interweaving their original worlds with their stories and characters, read N.K. Jemisin, Rebecca Roanhorse, Katherine Arden, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia. There are, of course, many others. N.K. Jemisin also has shared slides from her brilliant presentation on creating secondary worlds that feel ancient.

Happy worldbuilding!

What other authors do you think do a good job creating rich, layered worlds? How much preplanning do you usually put into worldbuilding for your stories, and do you think it’s been enough, or too much?

[coffee]