Step 4: Finishing Touches

You have done the first three steps. You’ve figured out the basic ideas your invented world needs to function and ironed out any contradicting consequences. This means it’s time for the final step: the finishing touches or the spicy details.

What do I mean by this?

Spicy Details

Overall, as you go through these steps, you move from abstract to specific. Your core twist that makes your world unique will be a general, broad statement. (“In my world, magic exists and can be learned at schools!”)

In a sense, the details of your world have to prove this statement. The more concrete details you can give, the more believable your world becomes. (“To do magic, you have to say the right words and hold a special wand.”)

This final step is about finding those details. Because details are what make people fall in love with your world. They’re the thing they’ll actually remember or latch onto. (“Whenever you move up a year in my magic school, you get a new and more powerful wand. Each wand has a different material and shape. Holding the wand in your weak hand reduces its power. Etcetera, etcetera.”)

But you can’t stuff a book with details only.

It would make the story far too long and introduce far too much information.
And the details should be consequences of your more abstract/general twists

That’s why I call it “spicy details”. From all possible details or areas of your world, you must pick a tiny selection that represents your world (and your story) the best. A tiny selection of details you will include to make the reader fall in love with the world.

Example

Take my quick examples about the magic school and the wand. I could include details about the clothing people wear at the school, or get very specific about pronunciation of spells. Even though relevant, they don’t seem like very “spicy” details.

For this story, adding more details to the wands and general use of magic seems more useful. Because it’s more important to the character and the plot, it’s automatically more exciting. Readers want to know what cool stuff this new wand can do—they do not care that the school uniform has a specific embroidered detail.

This relates to the “ladder of abstraction” I mentioned earlier. When writing, you want a good balance between “vague” and “concrete” statements, leaning heavily towards the “concrete” side.

Do not say that “the school uniforms looked ugly”. This is a vague statement that doesn’t say anything, at least not without further explanation. Say that “the school uniforms were blue with patches of brown, as if somebody had shat on them. Your initials, white slanted letters on your cuffs, were unreadable and completed the ugly look.”

More specific statements paint a more vivid image and actually ensure readers see the world you envisioned. (Now as to why you’d write about a magic school with such ugly uniforms …)

Remark

But notice how the specific statement takes way more words. That’s why a book can’t be filled entirely with spicy details, as it would mean thousands of pages and a plot that crawls along at a snail’s pace.

Combining with the hybrid approach

When using my hybrid approach, you can use the spicy details to worldbuild in reverse!

As you write a scene, try to come up with the most interesting detail or information to mention. Hone that sense for coming up with spicy details.

Once added to the scene, you have to backtrack and see how this detail fits into the larger world. Sometimes, disappointingly, it simply won’t fit. Often, though, this is a nice puzzle and a “win-win” situation:

Your scene is amazing because of those spicy details.
While they also enhance your worldbuilding and lead to more creative solutions.

Example

This can be stupidly simple. I once wrote a fight scene and was like “this is boring and repetitive, what if this character was missing limbs?” I added the detail: they had only one arm. I thought about the consequences for the other scenes this character was in. This improved the fight scene, but also the character and the world.

Example

It also works well with mysteries. I once wrote a story in which people were looking for some important ancient book. But I’d rushed the plot a bit (to prevent it being a very slow-paced action story), which meant they already found the book halfway the story!

What to do? Invent a spicy detail to make sure this is not the end. In my case, the book is empty and they deduce it was swapped by someone before them. But you can think of anything: the existence of the book is a myth, they translated old texts wrong and they’re looking for a different object instead, etcetera.

Be wary of preconceptions

As they say: all stories have been told before. Whatever you do, you will surely include elements in your story that audiences have seen before. Maybe your story has zombies, or it has a love triangle trope, or it uses magic through wands.

This isn’t necessarily bad. As always, you can do anything, if you do it well. A cliché can lead to the best story ever if executed properly.

But it does mean that audiences come to your story with baggage! They have assumptions, preconceptions, memories attached to these common themes.

You can use this to your advantage. By using common ideas, you can shortcut a lot of the explanation of your world.

Your characters are holding wands? Any reader will know they are wizards who use them to perform magic, possibly by yelling a spell. You don’t need to spend a lot of time showing or explaining such details.

You have zombies? Readers assume they are brainless, foul beings that come in hordes. No need to explain it again at the start.

When done right, you can focus on the details that make your zombies different from the others, and skip the general explanation altogether. Additionally, you draw in the fan base already attracted to these elements, without additional effort.

But, as you already see, this can easily become a disadvantage. If your zombies work completely differently than other media, your audience will feel confused or even cheated. You’ve broken a promise you didn’t even make (explicitly)! If you do so, you need to clearly communicate (from the start) that readers should forget their assumptions about zombies.

It depends on your story whether this is more work than it’s worth.

Example

I had to really watch out for this with my Wildebyte Arcades. (I still do.) It’s about somebody dropped into the world of video games. This means people come into it with lots of memories and assumptions about how games and devices work. Some of those are reinforced, some are broken to make the stories possible.

This is one of the reasons why my first book is the way it is. It’s not a traditional “action” story, not like the other handful of books in the “get-sucked-into-a-game” genre. The first book opens by clearly showing that I am going to be mostly realistic about how games and computers work, instead of handwaving the entire setting away and jumping straight into the “hey, fun game, action!”

If I didn’t do that, I felt like readers would feel cheated. They’d assume the whole story was similar to playing their favorite games, or how they view computers from the outside—which it is not.

Internal Logic vs External Logic

At the start, I told you to view the world through the lens of character. That’s how you make people care about all the information you convey. That’s how they interact with and experience the world.

But it’s important to realize that this lens is subjective. What seems “logical” to one character, might not seem so for the next. How your hero sees the world is not necessarily how the world truly is.

As such, making your world “logical” is somewhat subjective. Instead, let’s distinguish two types of logic.

Internal Logic: how a character sees the world. (Actions and consequences are logical if the character decides it to be so.)
External Logic: how the world actually is. (Objective truths from an impartial observer.)

The devil is in the spicy details.

You can not get away with a character “not believing” major parts of the world. If it’s always raining in your world, you can’t make a character believe (with completely logical arguments, in their view) that rain doesn’t exist. It’s a measurable, physical fact. (You can only do this if you purposely want to mark a character as insane.)

But you can create differences in the details. All characters agree that it rains indefinitely, but maybe they argue about the origin.

One character believes their god is disappointed and these are his tears. This immediately contradicts the established history of the world, which means the internal logic is not the same as the external one.

Through this very simple contradiction, though, you now have a lot of information about this character and the world! You know they’re religious. You know they’re prepared to ignore facts or popular opinion to confirm their own religious views. You know not everyone in the world is that way.

Differences in external and internal logic …

Communicate character and world at the same time
Allow you to hide secrets and plot twists, or build more mystery and tension, simply by giving the reader information through a smoke screen.
And come through in the details. Such differences on large, easily proven facts are hard to execute.

Example

I’m currently planning a story in which one of the protagonists believes his family betrayed humanity and led to the biggest disaster in history. Whenever he is told facts about what happened, his internal logic sees it as evidence that he just wants to distance himself from his family forever. The external logic, however, is that the facts stack up differently and his family actually did something heroic.

The facts are the facts. 99% of the info you get about the history is simply true. But through this contradiction, you get both character and world building. Very efficient, very immersive.

Closing remarks

This concludes the deep dive into my four steps for worldbuilding. I, however, had a few things I wanted to mention (again) that didn’t fit anywhere else.

Do not forget the rule of cool! If a detail is awesome, though not entirely correct within your universe, add it anyway.
Remember that focusing your world on one twist does not mean everything else is neglected. Instead, see how that one twist could create interesting details in all the other areas. Then put small hints or mentions to those details in your text.
In a sense, you want your setting to become a character unto itself. That’s what they say of the best worlds: you just want to be there and experience adventures there, as if they’re your best buddy. Adding colorful details helps this process. Your setting might not have motivations or goals, but it can be consistent and rich in its “personality”.

Example

On that last remark, I always immediately think of Firefly. It’s the name of the spaceship in which the main characters travel. Throughout the episodes, we learn more about how it works, about what it means for the main protagonist, we see it break down and get rebuilt. By the end, the spaceship feels like a personality. It feels like a home, an extra character that’s part of the adventure, and that feeling stuck with me for a while. It’s probably one of the reasons why so many adore the series.

The last few chapters of this course will talk about magic (systems).

Continue with this course