Building a Believable World in Your Story

What’s new in my writing room: I did a great cleanout this month of my shelves and shelves of writing craft books and passed them on to a teacher with a class of new writers—they were absolutely thrilled. I was grateful to give them a little uplift and make room on my shelves for new books. What’s new in your writing room?

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

When we create a story, whether it’s true to life or made up, we place it in a world. It could be a world we know well, as in a memoir or nonfiction book. A memoir is going to show the world of the author’s life. Fiction writers create a world they imagine, often based on what they know, and a skilled fiction or memoir writer will transport us to that world in all its details of sense and setting.

Even a very informational nonfiction book, like a science book, has a world that its story lives in—the labs, the research, the data. You can almost tell from the first page what kind of world we’re in.

I try to remember that readers don’t automatically grok the world of my story. It’s up to the writer to make the world real enough to be an intrinsic part of the story.

Of course, it’s equally important that the world doesn’t take over the story, right? Like too much detail.

What’s the ideal balance? How do you ride the line between reader’s interest in the world you’re creating and your own fascination with it?

There are four main tricks to successful world-building.

Knowing the uniqueness of your world

What you reveal about this uniqueness and what you hold back

When you reveal this uniqueness, vis a vis your plot

How the world connects with your larger story (characters, plot, information, etc.)

What’s unique about your story world?

You may think, my story world is not unique at all. So replace the word unique with real.

What makes the world of your story real to you? To your characters? What allows them to live in it and accept it?

Find this out and you immediately know how to relate it to your reader.

Three examples from my own writing:

My second novel was about women pilots. So I had to make the world of flying real to the reader. I didn’t fly (my mom did) but I was fascinated with it. So I leaned on her and other experts to bring that world to life.

My third novel was about high-stakes gambling at a scuba resort on a Caribbean island. I neither gamble nor live in the Caribbean. But I was intrigued by the motives behind high-stakes risks, and I had been scuba diving a lot. I focused the novel on what I knew, from my own experience, and researched the rest.

When I wrote my writing craft book, Your Book Starts Here, the world I was building was based on years of teaching writers how to structure their books using a storyboard. I put my story into the world of the classroom and a writer’s life, to make it real for my reader.

What you reveal

For all three books, I had to do a LOT of research, even for stuff I already knew. I gathered pages of notes and links. At first, I used way too much of the world’s details as I built the story. That’s OK, it’s normal to overload. Finesse happens at editing.

When I got to revision, I had to cut about 1/4 to 1/3 of each manuscript. So I looked at the world details for each chapter. What had I delivered that was not either (1) useful to that moment in the story or (2) setting up information for a future moment? I also looked for repeated information about the story world. Readers hate this, trust me. They track so much more carefully than writers believe.

It helped me to highlight passages or sentences or even words whenever I came across world building info in each chapter. Then I summoned my ruthlessness and began to cut.

When I finished revision, I asked my beta readers to comment on the amount of world building details and whether they needed more or less. Reader engagement is something I can only guess at—feedback makes a huge difference.

So it comes down to choice: key aspects chosen by the writer define the world for us in a perfect way, so we are engaged completely, or they make the world too big for the story.

When you reveal

But always, we need to clearly understand why we’re being shown these details right now, on this page. How do they bring forth the larger story and keep us moving forward?

There’s a common problem in early drafts that I call the information dump. This is when the writer takes a bit of a commercial break away from the story and delivers their fascination with the world. I remember one manuscript I read as an editor where the history of a certain seaport occupied the first four chapters, and the plot didn’t actually begin until chapter 5. In my experience as a writing teacher, I am surprised at how many writers don’t think about the timing of their world delivery. The reader is always looking to make sense of why this, right now?

Using a storyboard or plot and character chart (which I wrote about here) helps me tie in the world with the person living in it or the stuff happening.

Beware of this tendency too: if you relegate your world details (maybe setting) to a few lines or paragraphs that open each scene or chapter, it creates a stage-manager feel to the story. We are less engaged and more listening to you, the author, tell us where we are, what time of day it is, and what the weather’s like.

Always connect the world with the story

I was looking for an example of “smooth as silk” world building, and once again I went to Octavia Butler’s collection, Bloodchild and Other Stories. Butler is a skilled character writer, and she has interesting ideas for plot, but her world-building is what draws me to read more of her work.

Each story opens with people and situation. Even though she writes in a sci-fi genre, we readers are not delivered huge amounts of world-building right away. It’s woven in. Most important are the characters and what they are facing and even though the world is totally foreign to us, Butler assumes we’ll ride along without too many details until it matters.

The more out-of-normal your world, the more distant from your reader’s personal experience, the more skill required to present and shape it on the page. And writers like Butler are excellent to study, just to learn how they do this.

I went through one of her stories, “Amnesty,” and marked wherever world details were shared. So few places, compared to my reader understanding of the world she was presenting.

So that’s my challenge to you this week: how little can you give us and still keep us in the story?

How do you create a story world that doesn’t dominate but also isn’t invisible to the reader?

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

Choose a 10-page section of your current writing.

Read through and highlight any passages that reveal your story’s world.

See what you have, how you define world-building in your own writing. How much do you share about the world? How little?

If you can, get feedback on this from a writer’s group or beta reader. How does their reader’s view of your world-building connect (or not) with your own, as the writer?

Share your thoughts on world-building. Are there stories or books you think are aces at this?

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Shout Out!

I love to give a shout out to writing friends and former students who are publishing their books and encourage my newsletter community to pre-order or order a copy to show your support of fellow writers. Be sure to let me know if you are a former student and will publish soon (pre-orders of your book are available now), or have in the past two months! Just email me at mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out! (I’ll keep your listing here for two months.)

Mary Walerak, Finding Alineade (Kirk House Publishers), August

Julia Twaddle, Aurora Syndrome (Dry River Publishing, LLC), August

Karen Lueck, The Green Thread: Reclaiming Our Spiritual Authority (Goodness Press), September

James Francisco Bonilla, An Eye for an I: Growing Up with Blindness, Bigotry, and Family Mental Illness (University of Minnesota Press), November

I’m a lifelong artist, and I love to inspire and support other creative folk, which is why I write this weekly newsletter. My goal with these posts is to help you strengthen your writing practice and creative life so it becomes more satisfying to you.

I’m also the author of 15 books in 3 genres. My third novel, Last Bets (Riverbed Press), was published in April, after becoming an Amazon bestseller during pre-orders. it was also a Kirkus Reviews Best Indie Book of 2024. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, was published in October 2023 and also became an Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release from pre-orders. For twelve years, I worked as a full-time food journalist, most notably through my weekly column for the Los Angeles Times syndicate. My writing-craft book, Your Book Starts Here, won the New Hampshire Literary Awards “People’s Choice” in 2011 and my first novel, Qualities of Light, was nominated for PEN/Faulkner and Lambda Literary awards in 2009. I’ve written Your Weekly Writing Exercise every Friday since 2008.