Worldbuilding 101 by Joshua Simpson

Worldbuilding for me has always been one of the easier and obviously most fun aspects of creating fiction. It’s a revelatory experience, as pieces come together in my mind to explain why things exist the way they do, why characters behave as they do within the story.

For me it typically starts with the vision of a single character, captured in a small moment in time. It may be an action scene, it may be a moment of reflection. It comes to me as it so often does for so many people, right around the time I’m trying to get to sleep at night.

I build from my characters, primarily. My Warpworld series (co-authored with Kristene Perron) started as a late-night vision of a character giving a training lecture to students, establishing the function of their organization and the nature of the world around them.

(The interesting twist of it all is that the scene as originally written would actually be impossible to fit into the novels that ensued, as the context that provided for the scene did not occur in the novels.)

So the characters were the core of it, because the characters provide me with the story. My writing process typically amounts to ‘create the characters, then set them against each other and allow them to dictate the events’. So at first, the characters give me the world by having traits, clothing, and accoutrements that come from their social origin, which then fills in as an environment that would provide these things.

After a while, the world begins supplying its own characters as needed. Do I need a lawyer or a corrupt bureaucrat? A janitor? A bored magnate? A wild ravening monster on the loose? At this point, the institutions and environment will provide them. Moreover, as the setting bakes in, obstacles are easy to provide- the nature of the world itself, the human problems that create the friction that creates the tension, these emerge naturally and organically from the setting.

It’s not an organized process, but neither is a society. Elements come to me as needed, sometimes staying and making a lasting impression on the setting, while others flitter in and out to provide the touch of a lived-in world, a place where things are happening beyond the doings and adventures of our protagonists and antagonists. I like to try to leave the impression that there are any number of stories being told in my world, that a shift of focus could bring us a whole new series of moments to digest while following the life of entirely different characters.

I like to think that my method tends to help alleviate the peril of elaborate worldbuilding, in that the world and the details within becomes the point of the story rather than the drama and tension of those acting within it. Since the world exists to suit the needs of the story and characters, it can be bent behind the scenes as needed, so long as previously-established details are not contradicted.

Which does bring me to one final point, which I hadn’t really appreciated or even comprehended until I co-created a fictional universe of my own and began publishing work in it: the world is more real to the reader than it may be to the creator.

That’s a cool fact that creates its own inherent challenge. When you’ve created a setting that exists entirely in your mind, you’re entirely used to moving things around, adding and removing things, it never really feels static or beyond those adjustments. But for the consumer of the media, if they’ve suspended disbelief then the world is real, and should be held to the standards you’ve established for it.

Before I wrote my own books, I could be a bit of a canon snob on occasion. After writing them and seeing how easy it is for details to blur in your creations, I have a much greater appreciation for how writers can lose those details and outright contradict them in service of the story. Keeping on top of that was a harder piece of work than I originally anticipated.

So ends my discourse on worldbuilding, how I go about it, how it functions in my creation, and the ramification of making a world that readers engage with. If you haven’t read our Warpworld series, let me take a moment to encourage you to pick it up- the first hit is free on any epub vendor. I’d like to thank Garvin Anders for inviting me to write this, and wish everyone a great day.