Worldcraft No. 1: How to Build a World

Worldcraft is a series about how fiction makes a place the reader believes. Each issue takes one principle, shows how published books use it, gives you something to tap and take apart, and ends with an exercise for your own pages. This first issue is the overview: what worldbuilding is, three principles that the rest of the series will return to, and a way to start today.

What worldbuilding is

Worldbuilding is every decision about a story’s setting that the reader can feel, whether or not it is stated. It is not only for fantasy and science fiction. A novel set in a Richmond law office has a currency, a set of taboos, a history nobody mentions and a map. The writer of the law office gets those for free. The writer of an invented world has to make them, and then has to resist showing the work.

There is a serious case against all this. The novelist M. John Harrison has argued that worldbuilding is the dull part, a survey of a place that does not exist, and that the urge to complete it deadens fiction. He is right about the failure. The answer is not to build less. It is to remember what the world is for: it exists to put pressure on people. A detail earns its place when someone in the story has to live with it.

Principle 1: Imply, do not explain

A believable world is one where the people in it do not explain it to each other. They pay the toll, cover the ear, buy the jar. The reader works out the rest, and the working out is the pleasure.

Here is one paragraph written two ways. Tap the shaded phrases in the first version, then switch.

Both versions contain the same eight facts. The first has a person in it who wants to cross a river. The second has a narrator who wants to be understood. Keep the second kind of writing in your notes, where it is useful, and out of the story.

Principle 2: Pick a method

Good worlds are not built the same way. Some are piled up and some are deduced from a single rule. Two writers I return to more than any others sit at opposite ends.

China Miéville builds by excess and by rigor, in different books. Perdido Street Station overwhelms: a city so crowded with districts, species and trades that most of it is never used, which is why it feels real. The City & The City does the opposite. It has one impossible premise, two cities on the same ground whose citizens must not see each other, and it follows that premise with the patience of a police report. Embassytown makes the world out of a language whose speakers cannot lie.

Marlon James, in Black Leopard, Red Wolf, gives the world to a witness who cannot be trusted. The whole novel is a prisoner’s testimony, told to an inquisitor, by a man who starts with the ending and contradicts himself on the way back. The world, drawn from African myth and history, comes to the reader as contested oral history. Nobody stands outside the story to say what is true.

Those four, and three more, are laid out below. Each has something to try.

You do not need all seven. Most strong books commit to one or two. The common mistake is to use none, and to deliver the world in paragraphs of summary between scenes.

Principle 3: Draw the map

Robert Louis Stevenson drew the map of Treasure Island before he wrote the book. Tolkien said he began with a map and made the story fit it. Ursula K. Le Guin drew the islands of Earthsea first and found the stories by looking at where the ships would have to go.

A map is not decoration. It is the cheapest way to find out what your world forces people to do. Distance decides who has heard the news. A river decides where the city is. A border decides who is a smuggler. Draw one, however badly, and plot problems you had been solving by hand start to solve themselves.

The most useful thing to put on a map is not a mountain range. It is a fault line: a place where two systems meet and do not agree.

From my desk: the map for Lossless

My own manuscript, Lossless, is set in a near-future America during a second civil war. When I came to map the outbreak, I did not want to invent the lines the country splits along. I wanted to find them. So the map began as research into seams that already exist: in the power grid, in the highways, in old borders, in the rock.

There are seven. Every one is real.

What the map taught me is that an invented war is more frightening when none of its geography is invented. The same is true at any scale. If your world is wholly made up, give it fault lines with the same logic: an old treaty, a soil, a road built for another purpose.

How to start

Before you write a history of your world, answer seven questions in a sentence each. They are the ones the three principles keep asking.

Five ways it goes wrong

• The guided tour. A character walks through the city noticing things for the reader’s benefit.
• The lecture in dialogue. Two people tell each other what both already know.
• The complete system. Magic, politics and religion with no gaps, no exceptions and no one cheating.
• The world with no past. Everything is the age of the plot. Nothing is ruined, repurposed or misremembered.
• The unused map. A world where distance and borders never cost anyone anything.

The exercise

1. Fill in the seven answers above.
2. Write one paragraph, under a hundred words, in which a person crosses from one place to another in your world. Use at least four of your answers. Explain none of them.
3. Draw the crossing. Mark one line on the map that the person is not supposed to cross.

Next

Worldcraft No. 2 takes up rules: how to reveal a society by showing who gets to break its laws.

Verse / versa,
C. Harder