The Purpose of Worldbuilding

As usual, I also want to devote a chapter on the why question. Why do we need worldbuilding? Why would people like to learn facts about a non-existing world?

Those are good questions. If you can’t answer them, it’s pretty hard to create a satisfying world! But the answer is very simple and predictable.

Worldbuilding should always be in service to your story.

People actually care about characters. People get excited about the plot (their actions and decisions). The world in which this happens should simply facilitate that. Don’t get in the way, but make your characters and plot automatically more interesting.

That’s why most people rank these three elements as follows: Character > Plot > Setting.

If you haven’t already, I recommend you check out the Character and Plot courses first. If you don’t get those right, a great world cannot save that.

In other words, people don’t care about your world and its weird rules, they care about the effect this has on the characters and the plot.

Admittedly, there is also an element of “interest” or “intrigue” to made-up worlds. If you do it right, you can get people invested in your world through creative ideas and interesting rules. This, however, is hard to pull off. It should not be your top priority, as “interesting” does not automatically equal “fun” or “good story”.

Even so, when a writer leans on their interesting world to sell the story, they usually frame their world as mysteries. They dangle a unique rule in front of the audience … but don’t go further. This leaves them wondering what will be the consequences or how that rule works exactly. Essentially, you’ve turned your worldbuilding into a (mystery) plot!

The biggest mistake

The biggest mistake you could make is, therefore, detaching the worldbuilding from plot, characters or theme.

I like to start writing the story without knowing the full world beforehand. I only know my basic rules I want to hint at in the first few chapters—and I start writing.

Why? So I can let the story inform the worldbuilding (instead of the other way around). I focus on writing a good story. I add whatever rule/location/system I need to make a certain plot point happen.

But once I invented that rule? Well, it’s a rule! I add it to my worldbuilding document, and now I need to stick to it. This slowly builds the world, but in a way that also naturally allows a good story to appear.

Additionally, such restrictions (like “oh no, a new rule I now have to always follow”) are actually good. They remove many options, which makes it easier to make decisions (and overcome writer’s block). Restrictions breed creativity. If I’ve established in chapter 1 that “characters can only use magic when it’s night time”, I have to be more creative with my plot to accommodate that.

That’s why I recommend doing it this way.

How to know if you succeeded?

The previous examples hint at the answer to this question.

Create the world that is most uniquely challenging to your hero.

All the elements should be so tightly connected, that it’s impossible to remove one element. (Without ruining some part of the story.)

If you can swap your setting with a completely different one, last-minute, then the setting is not important enough. Similarly, if you can change your hero’s personality and their interactions with the world would be identical, the two aren’t intertwined enough.

That’s the part that makes my worldbuilding approach also a little risky. Because you keep building the world as you write, there’s a chance you have to go back later and fix earlier plot points. Now that the world changed, and it’s deeply connected with the story, the story obviously also has to change.

But I try to see that as a good thing. If I invent some important rule for a world halfway the story, and it requires no edits … then maybe it wasn’t such an important rule after all?