3 Most Common Worldbuilding Mistakes for Writers and How to Fix Them

Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. World Anvil, a 2021 NaNoWriMo sponsor, helps you develop and organize your characters, plot, and world setting. Today, World Anvil founder Janet Forbes is here to share some pro tips for worldbuilding. Don’t forget to check out the offer to NaNoWriMo writers for 30% off a World Anvil membership!

I talk to hundreds of writers every week, in our World Anvil Q&A live streams, our World Anvil writing challenges, and meetings with our professional authors. And mostly, they’re encountering the same few worldbuilding problems! Here are the 3 most common worldbuilding mistakes, and how you can fix them:

1. Mary-Sue Worldbuilding

You’re probably familiar with the Mary-Sue—a flawless, artificial-feeling main character. Mary Sue Worldbuilding follows in the same vein. If everything in your setting is directly related to your main character, it feels like the world revolves around them. It’s too convenient and artificial. That’s Mary-Sue worldbuilding.

Mary-Sue worldbuilding is usually caused by worldbuilding exclusively around your plot. Introducing larger-scale conflict in the backdrop of your setting, current affairs like civil or religious movements, war, disasters, or technological breakthroughs, can help expand the world beyond just your main character. 

Your main character might interact with these elements, or more usually, with problems caused by them. For example, they might help some refugees from “that war over there”. But your character should not be at the core of everything—they’re not the cause of the war. Other things are happening outside of your story, in the background. (Pro-tip: this is a great way to reinforce your genre and themes, and make your world feel alive and expansive, too!). 

Fixing Mary-Sue Worldbuilding

Of course you’ll need a series bible like World Anvil to help you keep these current affairs organized, connect them together, and make sure you don’t lose your notes! Use World Anvil’s worldbuilding templates to get inspired for your big conflicts, and remember - you only need to write a few bullet points to start with! You can always expand more later (we’ll talk more about that in a moment).

World Anvil’s Worldbuilding Templates are custom-made by experts to help inspire and guide your creativity—and you can customize your own templates too!

2. Mosaic Worldbuilding

You know those computer game worlds where each area feels like a self-contained zone? Where the “desert” region and the “forest” region have no trade, communication, or overlap between them? That, in a nutshell, is Mosaic worldbuilding. It ruins suspension of disbelief, makes your novel setting feel false, and can pull your readers out of your story! 

Fixing Mosaic Worldbuilding

The best way to avoid Mosaic Worldbuilding is to make sure that you have a clear overview of your world early on, with each major region and concept penned out in just a sentence or two. That way, each region will feel like a connected aspect of your seamless setting, not a tile shoved on the side. 

On World Anvil, each world setting has a “Worldbuilding Meta” section to help you detail the 10,000 foot overview—the big stuff. And not just your physical world and its people, but your genre, your motivations, and your themes. This invaluable reference tool helps you expand your setting and add more detail, and will also help you sense-check what you’re adding!

Once you have a clear picture of your meta, and know the overview of your world, it’ll be easy to make use of cultural aspects like imports and travellers, cultural diasporas and geographical transition zones to make your world seem more connected and less artificially divided! And you’ll be able to do it without spending too much extra time worldbuilding. Which brings me to my final common worldbuilding mistake…

World Anvil’s Worldbuilding Meta tool helps you focus, streamline and sense-check your world setting! It’s full of guides to create an excellent overview for your worldbuilding project. This is the view mode of Manifold Sky by B.C.G. Wurth.

3. Worldbuilder’s Disease

Sounds nasty, right? Well, Worldbuilder’s Disease is a very common problem—a compulsion to continue worldbuilding things which aren’t actually useful. Here’s my favorite example—the “elven shoes”:

In your world you have elves. They wear shoes. So far, so good. Maybe there’s a plot-point where an imposter’s revealed because they’re wearing the wrong shoes. So you fill in a few details on your series bible. But if you find yourself writing a 5,000 word treatise on elven shoes through the ages… honey, you have worldbuilder’s disease.

I use shoes as an example, but it could be anything. It might be detailing three centuries of monarchy, or expanding unvisited areas in excruciating detail. Sure, it can be fun, but all that time spent on unnecessary parts of your setting isn’t helping you polish the core parts—or get your novel written! It’s distracting you from your primary goal. 

Curing Worldbuilder’s Disease

There are three major causes of worldbuilders disease: 

Lack of perspectiveLovers of proseFear of losing your ideas

1. Lack of perspective

Lack of perspective can often lead down a worldbuilding rabbit hole. Keep clarity on what’s important in your setting with tools like World Anvil’s Worldbuilding Meta. This helps you define your active worldbuilding area - not just geographical but thematic areas—which helps  streamline your world and your project, so you can be sure you’re spending your time where it counts!

Also, be clear with yourself WHY you’re worldbuilding the element you’re working on. Keep clear notes in your series bible about how this new element fits into your novel. If it’s little more than set dressing, you only need a few words. For a core concept, you might need more.

2. Lovers of Prose

As writers, we love to write (duh)! But for most of us, writing in prose in our series bible can cause serious problems. Not only does it mean that you write MORE than we should (your get in flow, words happen!), it’s also harder to reference your ideas quickly later on. Stick to short, organized articles in note form. Make sure the salient information is there, and link in anything relevant. You can always expand to prose later if you need to.

Keep your series bible in brief notes with clear headers! This character article took 5 minutes using World Anvil’s character template which automatically adds the headers. The linked articles help me easily reference related people and places as I’m writing.

3. Fear of losing our ideas

Fear of losing our ideas is actually one of the most common reasons for worldbuilder’s disease—that we’ll forget or lose our notes if we don’t write them out in vast detail. To combat this, make sure you have somewhere to keep your world details safe, organized, tagged and searchable. Then you can reassure yourself that you can go back and develop more later if you need it. 

Obviously, World Anvil is custom made for this, backing up everything in one place and linking everything together, so you can easily search, reference and update your series bible whilst writing your manuscript and not have to worry about losing things!

Anything here ring true for you? Or maybe you’re struggling with another worldbuilding mistake or problem? You can always hop into our live streamed Q&A sessions on our Twitch channel and ask us directly! We go live three times a week to answer questions about writing and worldbuilding, as well as helping our community with World Anvil queries too! Maybe we’ll see you there. And happy worldbuilding :)

Janet Forbes is a published fantasy author and RPG writer, whose recent credits include the Dark Crystal RPG with the Henson Company (coming 2021). In 2017, she and her husband created World Anvil, the ultimate worldbuilding and novel writing platform. World Anvil helps you organize, store and develop your worldbuilding and series bible privately, and market your books to the world too! The inbuilt novel writing software, accessible from anywhere, integrates seamlessly with your worldbuilding. And when it’s time to publish, you can export, or publish directly on the World Anvil platform and monetize YOUR way! Check it out at World Anvil.