Getting More Out of Your Worldbuilding - Guest Post by R.M. Archer
Hey everyone! Today I'm doing a blog swap with a good writing friend, R.M. Archer! I have been a huge fan of her writing and her blog posts on worldbuilding. A link to her website is listed below so you can check out all of her amazing work. And now, I'll pass you on to her! When you pour time into building a world, you want it to serve its fullest purpose—especially if you’ve spent a lot of time on it. You want all of that work to pay off with more than just a pretty backdrop. The question is, how do you accomplish that and truly get the most out of your worldbuilding?
Deepen Your Characters Your characters should be impacted by the world in which they’ve grown up. Their surroundings, their upbringing, and the society they live in should shape how they see the world and interact within it.
Besides that, they should also know something about the world they live in (even if they’re not experts). They should have opinions on things that are important to them and know how to engage with the world around them, even if they can’t tell you the entire history of their world. (Even real-world historians don’t claim to know everything!)
If you’re struggling to deepen your characters or make your world meaningful to them, look at how your world might impact one’s thinking or expectations about life. See what habits might be fostered in the type of society you’ve built, or what might be frowned upon.
You can also look at this in reverse and use your characters to deepen your world, as you learn what your character learns or allude to details through them. Even if these details have no true depth behind them, they can say something about your world and give your readers the illusion of greater depth than you’ve discovered.
(If you’re interested in learning more about how to convey years of depth without years of worldbuilding, this idea of the illusion of depth is something I cover at greater length in my course The Worldbuilding Toolbox.) Shape Your Plot There are a couple of ways that your world can shape your plot (and if you’re like me and prefer worldbuilding to plotting, these can be very helpful).
First, your world can offer plot tools. This is sort of a shallow use of worldbuilding, but it can be helpful and it can work. One example of the setting providing a plot tool would be the tauntaun on Hoth serving as shelter and warmth in The Empire Strikes Back. The tauntaun doesn’t shape the story much, but its aid is invaluable to the characters. If your aim is to create a world that supports the story but isn’t especially complex, you may end up with a fair number of “plot tool” uses for your setting. Just make sure that they make sense and have been set up ahead of time so that they don’t become a deux ex machina.
Second, however, your plot can be more tightly interwoven with your world as you develop more fundamental systems (e.g. magic systems, cultural structure, political machinations, etc.), which ought to fundamentally dictate some of your story’s direction. With a more complex world, you begin to open doors to stories that “could not have been told (or not so economically) in any other way.” Here you look to your world and its systems to find out what is believable to occur within this world and what would likely happen next based on the motivations and behaviors that you’ve already mapped out for your world. Support Your Theme(s) Themes can—and often should—arise naturally out of the problems and beliefs of your created society and world. At least, they should feel like they’ve arisen naturally.
Your world should have problems—even if they stem from nothing more than poor human judgment. Different cultures will be prone to different problems, and thus different lessons to be learned from those weaknesses.
If you’re struggling to find the theme of your story, look to your story world and ask what weaknesses might naturally arise from its surroundings, its values, or its structure.
If you already know what theme you want to emphasize, ask what sort of setting or society might best highlight that theme with its strengths and weaknesses and use that to guide your worldbuilding efforts.
Inspire Future Stories If you’ve created a fleshed-out world—or even if you’ve created a relatively shallow world with a few notable details you’re excited to explore—you can draw on this to inspire future stories as you discover characters, themes, or settings you’re interested in writing more about. While worldbuilding is often cautioned as a time-suck that distracts from writing, you can turn it to your advantage and use it to write more as you take fascinating pieces of your world and spin them into full stories.
There are four ways you can get the most out of your worldbuilding, putting it to use for your story without becoming derailed in the details. I hope this post has inspired you! If you’d like, comment below with one way your world has impacted your story thus far.
R.M. Archer has been writing for nearly as long as she can remember and has always been fascinated by fantastical worlds. Now, she not only builds her own but also teaches others to think deeply about the worlds they build and the values they weave in with them. Her blog—as well as her other worldbuilding resources and published works—can be found at rmarcher.com.
Deepen Your Characters Your characters should be impacted by the world in which they’ve grown up. Their surroundings, their upbringing, and the society they live in should shape how they see the world and interact within it.
Besides that, they should also know something about the world they live in (even if they’re not experts). They should have opinions on things that are important to them and know how to engage with the world around them, even if they can’t tell you the entire history of their world. (Even real-world historians don’t claim to know everything!)
If you’re struggling to deepen your characters or make your world meaningful to them, look at how your world might impact one’s thinking or expectations about life. See what habits might be fostered in the type of society you’ve built, or what might be frowned upon.
You can also look at this in reverse and use your characters to deepen your world, as you learn what your character learns or allude to details through them. Even if these details have no true depth behind them, they can say something about your world and give your readers the illusion of greater depth than you’ve discovered.
(If you’re interested in learning more about how to convey years of depth without years of worldbuilding, this idea of the illusion of depth is something I cover at greater length in my course The Worldbuilding Toolbox.) Shape Your Plot There are a couple of ways that your world can shape your plot (and if you’re like me and prefer worldbuilding to plotting, these can be very helpful).
First, your world can offer plot tools. This is sort of a shallow use of worldbuilding, but it can be helpful and it can work. One example of the setting providing a plot tool would be the tauntaun on Hoth serving as shelter and warmth in The Empire Strikes Back. The tauntaun doesn’t shape the story much, but its aid is invaluable to the characters. If your aim is to create a world that supports the story but isn’t especially complex, you may end up with a fair number of “plot tool” uses for your setting. Just make sure that they make sense and have been set up ahead of time so that they don’t become a deux ex machina.
Second, however, your plot can be more tightly interwoven with your world as you develop more fundamental systems (e.g. magic systems, cultural structure, political machinations, etc.), which ought to fundamentally dictate some of your story’s direction. With a more complex world, you begin to open doors to stories that “could not have been told (or not so economically) in any other way.” Here you look to your world and its systems to find out what is believable to occur within this world and what would likely happen next based on the motivations and behaviors that you’ve already mapped out for your world. Support Your Theme(s) Themes can—and often should—arise naturally out of the problems and beliefs of your created society and world. At least, they should feel like they’ve arisen naturally.
Your world should have problems—even if they stem from nothing more than poor human judgment. Different cultures will be prone to different problems, and thus different lessons to be learned from those weaknesses.
If you’re struggling to find the theme of your story, look to your story world and ask what weaknesses might naturally arise from its surroundings, its values, or its structure.
If you already know what theme you want to emphasize, ask what sort of setting or society might best highlight that theme with its strengths and weaknesses and use that to guide your worldbuilding efforts.
Inspire Future Stories If you’ve created a fleshed-out world—or even if you’ve created a relatively shallow world with a few notable details you’re excited to explore—you can draw on this to inspire future stories as you discover characters, themes, or settings you’re interested in writing more about. While worldbuilding is often cautioned as a time-suck that distracts from writing, you can turn it to your advantage and use it to write more as you take fascinating pieces of your world and spin them into full stories.
There are four ways you can get the most out of your worldbuilding, putting it to use for your story without becoming derailed in the details. I hope this post has inspired you! If you’d like, comment below with one way your world has impacted your story thus far.
R.M. Archer has been writing for nearly as long as she can remember and has always been fascinated by fantastical worlds. Now, she not only builds her own but also teaches others to think deeply about the worlds they build and the values they weave in with them. Her blog—as well as her other worldbuilding resources and published works—can be found at rmarcher.com.
No comments have been added yet.
