World-Building 104: Making a World That's Compelling

This is part of a series on fictional world-building. We've talked about how to get started, how to organize your thoughts, and how you can use maps for inspiration and internal consistency.

We've noted several times that world-building can be a huge endeavor. Even if your setting is mostly true-to-life, you're still creating a whole made-up world to immerse the reader in. It can be overwhelming to think of everything that is—or even just could be!—true within your setting.

On top of it all, you want your world to be compelling, to draw the reader in so that they want—no, need!—to know more about its mysteries and what happens next to the characters in it.

How do you do that?

To make a world that's compelling requires two of the same things that make your plot and characters compelling: conflict and theme.

Let me explain.

Conflict

A good plot has conflict—usually grown out of the conflicting goals of the characters within it. Luke Skywalker wants to save the princess from the evil Darth Vader. Eleanor Shellstrop wants to stay in the Good Place even though she doesn't belong there. The Baudelaire orphans want to escape the evil Count Olaf.

These conflicts are what make these stories compelling. We root for these characters and want them to succeed. But the worlds of each of these stories have their own inherent conflicts as well (major spoilers deliberately avoided below):

• In Star Wars, the Galactic Empire oppresses the entire galaxy, while the Rebel Alliance struggles to resist their fascist rule.
• In The Good Place, humans face a universal point system that determines whether they live in paradise or are tortured for eternity.
• In A Series of Unfortunate Events, a mysterious organization secretly helps people and thwarts those who would do harm.

These conflicts are all part of the world-building of their respective settings. They exist whether or not the characters are aware of them or even engage in them.

Though, as you may have noticed, characters are frequently involved in their world's conflict. That's part of what makes their stories so compelling. You certainly can tell stories in these settings that don't engage with the world's conflict (the Star Wars universe does all the time!), but those stories are often seen as side stories—fun but maybe not as compelling as the stories that change the setting itself.

Conflict in world-building provides a deep well of ideas and plots to draw from as you tell your characters' stories. It helps the reader become even more invested in your story.

Theme

Related to conflict is your world's theme. This element often remains under the surface, rarely stated outright and sometimes even ambiguous. Readers may not know or even care what the theme is, but your theme can help you make decisions about what is in the world while also making everything feel more connected.

Again, the world's theme might not be the same as the theme of your story. Star Wars is about a farm boy learning that he is capable of so much more. In The Good Place, a selfish woman learns to live ethically. The orphans of Unfortunate Events learn to navigate a world that is more dangerous than they knew. But each of these worlds also has themes independent of the characters and plots within them:

• The world of Star Wars explores themes of fascism, freedom, and resistance.
• The world of The Good Place explores ethics and morality.
• The world of Unfortunate Events revolves around education vs. ignorance and what it means to do the right thing.

Your world's theme is usually tied to the world's conflict. And yes, your plot's theme will often touch on the world's theme, but it doesn't have to.

Theme aids world-building as a means of making decisions. Say you were creating a new planet in Star Wars, and you're trying to decide its history and characteristics. These could be literally anything—a world within a world! How do you decide?

Well, think about the world's larger theme and conflict. What does this new planet have to do with the rebellion against the Empire? Maybe it's on one side or the other. Maybe it has tried to stay deliberately neutral and uninvolved. These decisions can help guide you as you detail the planet.

Even if the planet has nothing to do with the Empire, the world's theme can guide decisions about the people and culture. How have these people wrestled with fascism, freedom, and resistance? Maybe a local ruler oppresses the local farmers in some way. How? Are the farmers resisting, have they given up, or do they believe the ruler to be beneficent? Or maybe the planet has devised a form of government to prevent fascist rule. What does that look like? How did they arrive at that?

By using the world's theme, we've gone from "This planet can be literally anything! HELP!" to a smaller set of questions that not only focus our ideas but also complement the larger conflicts within the world. The world's theme helps us arrive at decisions while simultaneously making the entire setting deeper, more connected, and more compelling.

Putting It All Together

The best part of world-building is that you can come at these elements from any direction and it still works. Themes might emerge from a conflict you already have in mind. Conflict might be defined by themes you already want to explore. Either might arise from a character or plotline that you've already thought up in your head.

And when you become aware of the conflicts and themes in your plot, characters, and world—and when all those conflicts and themes begin to inform each other—you end up with a world and, more importantly, a story that is even more compelling than the random, cool ideas you scratched down at the start.

Now, you just gotta use that information in an actual draft. We'll talk about that next time.

World-Building 103: Maps!

Today, we're going to talk about one of my favorite parts of world-building: maps! This is the third part of a series on world-building. The first two parts can be found here:

• How to get started
• How to get organized

Often, we think of novel maps as big, complicated (possibly overkill?) illustrations used primarily for secondary fantasy worlds like in the Lord of the Rings or Song of Ice and Fire series. They're pretty and scary and pretty scary when you think about making them yourself!

Big fantasy novels often publish their maps as part of the book, and that's certainly something you can explore, but for our purposes today, we're just talking about maps to help you draft and deepen your world.

These maps can be as big as a world or as small as a village or even a single house. They are not for the reader; they're for you, the author.

An early map I drew for my old Air Pirates novel (that I have to get back to some day)

How Do Maps Help With World-Building?

Maps can provide several benefits to your story, even if nobody ever sees them but you:

• A map helps maintain consistency. Like a world bible, a map provides a way to keep track of things in your story—specifically, where things are relative to each other and how far away they are.
• A map helps you think things through. Drawing a map—like drawing anything—requires dozens of tiny decisions that you might not have thought about if you were just looking at words in a word bible. How large is this place? What does it look like? How far is it from that other place? How did it get there? What resources is it near? It's another avenue of questions to ask that can deepen your world.
• A map can inspire new ideas. You'll start your map with the locations you know, but pretty soon, you'll run into areas that provoke new ideas. What would be located in this space here? How might that impact the people in the other places? What cool thing might go in this empty space?
• A map can immerse you in the world. One reason maps are published in novels is to immerse the reader in their worlds. Making your own map can do the same for you. And as I've said before, if you are immersed in your world, your reader will be too.

The map for my Post-Apoc Ninjas novel

How Do You Make a Map?

There are lots of ways to make your own map, but my preference is to actually draw the thing. You don't have to be an artist, and it doesn't have to make sense to anyone but you, but drawing your own map gives you several advantages over, say, finding or generating a map online:

• It's faster. This feels counterintuitive, but it's true—I've spent enough time with map generators to know. Usually, you spend a lot of time generating new maps (or trying new searches) when it would be much quicker to just do a couple of drafts yourself.
• You get exactly what you want. You may not know what you want right away, but when you start generating maps, you quickly realize you know what you don't want. This is one of the reasons drawing your own map is actually faster. Drawing your own forces you to think it through and make decisions, until you realize you actually do want certain things.
• It's easy to revise. This is another reason that finding or generating a map doesn't work as well: you know it's not what you want, but you can't just tweak things here and there. You have to generate a whole new map with different parameters. Drawing your own map, revision is as simple as a quick erase.

(Interestingly, the same advantages above apply to using AI to create anything—writing a novel or creating an image or whatever. It feels like AI will save you time, but in the end, it actually takes longer and is never quite what you want, and that's not counting AI's other problems.)

A map for a secret project I co-authored with a friend (man, I want to return to this one, too)

How Do You Use the Map?

Most of the utility you'll get from your map will come as you're actually making it—as you're asking and answering questions and recording dozens of large and small decisions. A map can also be an inspiring thing to look at every time you sit down to write.

And, depending on your story, you might occasionally use it to determine times and distances, though this happens a lot less often than you'd think... even in a book that's all about walking:

As you write your story, your map will be useful for reference and inspiration, but always remember one key thing: your reader will never see it. It can be tricky to write for someone who can't see what you see, but as with most things, it's a skill you can learn.

In the end, the goal of your map is not to be perfect or pretty or to ever be seen by anyone. It's help your world remain consistent and to help you immerse yourself in that world. Because when you're immersed in your own world...

You know the rest.

World-Building 102: Getting Organized

Last week, we talked about what world-building is and how to get started. Among other things, we learned that world-building is... well, it can be a lot.

Even if you're just taking regular old modern-day Earth and giving it a small tweak—like humans figure out how to get to Mars or there are actual witches—there are still dozens of questions and implications that you could think through to deepen the world. And for a full-blown secondary fantasy world? The questions are endless.

So today, we'll talk about organizing all of that so you don't get overwhelmed.

1) Start a world bible

A world bible is just a document (or a wiki or a Miro board or something) where you record your ideas and decisions. You'll need this so you can remember them and reference them later.

How you organize your world bible is up to you—the document is literally there to aid you and you alone. I like to separate mine into sections like a historical timeline, nations or kingdoms, sentient species, cosmology (how the world came to be), how magic works, unique plants and animals, etc. Obviously, not every story needs every section, but these are places to start.

Remember, too, that your world bible is a living document. It is for your benefit only, and you can revise and add to it as you need to.

2) Choose a point and work outward

It's overwhelming to try and think about everything at once, but the point of having a world bible is that you don't have to keep it all in your head. You can have one idea, write it down, and then move on to the next.

Maybe a cool idea for your magic system makes you think of some war that might have occurred—jot down the magic idea then move over to the history section. Maybe writing down ideas for that war raises the question of how many nations there are and what state they're in today—scroll down to the list of nations and start brainstorming some ideas for that.

Don't know how to answer a question yet? That's okay. Just write the question down and move on.

What if a new idea conflicts with an older one? That's okay! Again, nobody else is going to read this document, so it doesn't have to maintain internal consistency. I mean, you should try, but you can address conflicts as you discover them.

Often, when a new idea conflicts with something you thought of a while ago, you'll find that the older idea can be easily updated or dismissed. And if it can't, then maybe the new idea can be tweaked. Consistency is important in world-building, and it's a lot easier to create when you haven't even written the story yet.

SIDEBAR: Creating a world bible for collaboration—say, for a video game or when co-authoring a novel—does require more internal consistency. People who are not you will reference the world bible and assume what's in there is fact. The basic ideas in this post still apply though. You and your collaborators just have to do extra work to keep the world bible up to date.

3) Sketch out a timeline of events

I mentioned a timeline as part of the world bible. For me, this is where I often start, and it often becomes the backbone of my world. It helps me to understand how one thing led to another and how everything is connected.

It might not work that way for you, but a timeline is still a good thing to have. Understanding the larger story of your world is a good way to maintain consistency and create real depth.

4) Focus on your story

It's easy to go overboard on details and histories and nations and magic systems and flora and fauna... but remember that you don't have to flesh out everything. You really only need enough details to start writing your story.

When you feel yourself getting overwhelmed with questions or unable to detail some aspect of the world (or unwilling to because it feels boring), take a step back. Ask yourself, "Do I need to know this to write my story?"

Often, you don't.

Because world-building isn't about actually creating an entire world; it's about creating the illusion that you've created an entire world. And that's a lot easier to do.

How do you know when you're done?

The truth is you're never done. There are always more details you can think up (and there always will be when you start writing the story). The good news is that you don't have to be done to start writing.

World-building of the kind I've described above has two main goals: 

1. To help you understand your world enough to start writing
2. To give you extra details to draw from when you need them

We'll talk more about the latter one in a future post. But for now, you know you're done when you feel immersed in the world and ready to start writing the story.

Like I said before, if you are immersed in your world, then you can immerse your reader in it too, and that is the whole purpose of all of this.

World-Building 101: Asking Questions

If you're writing any kind of genre fiction—if there are any fantastical or sci-fi elements in your world at all—you need to do some world-building. This is true whether you're creating a full-blown fantasy world, a sci-fi universe set 100 years in our future, an urban fantasy that's mostly like our world but with some magic in it, or even just our regular world but everybody has self-driving cars now. All of these require some world-building.

So, let's talk about that.

What is world-building? It's you understanding why things are the way they are in your fictional setting and how things are different from our world. It's exploring the "What if?" behind your speculative fiction. What if magic was real? What if we colonized other planets? Even a full-blown fantasy world is a form of "What if?": What if there were a world like ours, except with elves and dwarves, and it was created by some kind of gods?

World-building is thinking through the implications of that "What if?" and then using those implications to flavor your story and immerse the reader.

How do you do it? By asking questions. For example, say your setting is a world exactly like ours except that the city your story takes place in was designed with walkable spaces and public transportation instead of cars. This is mostly (but not entirely) science-fiction, and it raises some questions that you might want to answer, like...

• How long has the city been like this? Was the city always this way, or was it converted from a car-based environment?
• Is it the only city like this, or are most cities in this world like this too?
• How do people feel about it? Is it just normal to them, or is it brand new or even controversial?
• How did the city come to be this way? Is it part of an urban-design experiment, or did the culture shift away from traditional cities because something happened, or something else?
• Does the city's design have a direct impact on the story, or is it more of a backdrop?

With each question, you'll want to explore how that might change things. How do people feel about the city? How does that affect the story?

And as you answer questions, more questions will come up. You might not know or even care about all the answers, and that's okay, but thinking through some of them will enable you to flesh out the world in your mind.

The more you can immerse yourself in the world, the better you'll be able to immerse your readers.

What about deeper world-building, like secondary fantasy worlds? The example above presents only a small change in our world, and already there are a lot of questions and things to think through. How do you create a whole new world?

The same way: by asking questions. For example...

What is a central feature of this world that makes it interesting and/or different from our world? This is usually some form of magic, but it doesn't have to be. For example, the Game of Thrones universe has dragons on one side, White Walkers on another, and a very particular political situation among the humans in the middle. It does have magic, but that magic isn't central to what makes the world unique.

Are there sentient species other than humans? What are they like? Where did they come from (e.g., were they created by gods, or are they an evolutionary branch, etc.)?

Is there magic? Who can do it? How does it work? How long has it existed? What would the implications be on war, economics, and politics if certain spells existed and could be cast by anybody?

What kingdoms, nations, and cultures are there? How are they different? What is interesting and unique about them? Why are they like that?

What are the major historical events that have occurred? How have they affected the people of the present? Were there wars? If so, how big, how long, or how terrible? What do people think of these events now?

Just keep asking questions—the same questions your readers will be asking, in fact. The more you ask and answer, the more fleshed out your world will be.

This all feels like a lot. And it is... and it's just the tip of the iceberg, but it's also a lot of fun!

We'll talk more in future posts about how to organize your thoughts and get the world-building on the page, but to start, you really just have to let your mind wander and ask why?

Think about what excited you about this world idea in the first place. Was it a magic system? A future society living among the stars? A particular "What if...?" that piqued your interest? Start there and branch out, following whatever questions and threads interest you the most. Don't worry about answering everything, just the parts that are exciting to you.

Because if it's exciting to you, it will be exciting to your readers, and that, really, is the whole point.

Setting Up Character Growth

Writing a compelling story requires a lot of ingredients. One key ingredient is the character arc.

Compelling characters—especially protagonists—usually grow and change over the course of the story. They learn something about the world or themselves, and this knowledge changes the way they live their life. This is, of course, talking about a traditionally Western style of story, but if you're publishing in the Western market, you'll want to know this.

Character growth is compelling because we want to believe that people can grow and change—we want that for ourselves. It's compelling because the character has a dream and strives to achieve it despite all odds, and we love that. That's the kind of character we can root for and identify with.

What if you designed the character and obstacles in your story such that they are diametrically opposed? A pacifist must defeat a murderous dictator. A rebellious loner must trust others in order to stop a great danger. A nervous homebody must overcome their fear to rescue someone they love. The character is ill-equipped to face the obstacles in their way, and the only way to achieve their goal is to grow.

It's a compelling arc, which is why you see it everywhere in fiction. It might look like this:

1. A character believes something that has served them well their whole life. Neo believes he is nobody special. Shrek believes he's unworthy of love. Hiccup believes he is a bad Viking.
2. The character wants something that cannot be achieved with their old beliefs. Neo wants to understand the Matrix, but he must become special to survive. Shrek wants Lord Farquad to leave him alone, but he must rescue a princess to do it. Hiccup wants his father to accept him, but he has to be a good Viking to do it.
3. There comes a crisis point where the character tries to solve the problem the old way, and it fails them. Neo's mentor is going to die, so Neo tries to fight using what he knows. Shrek realizes he loves the princess. Hiccup is torn between pleasing his father and protecting his dragon Toothless.
4. At their lowest point, the character must learn something new. Neo nearly dies, until he sees the Matrix for what it really is. Shrek decides to risk everything for his love. Hiccup decides to be the kind of Viking he wants to be.
5. The story's climax shows the character stepping into this new way of being. Neo defeats the Agents. Shrek and his friends stand up to Lord Farquad. Hiccup and Toothless rescue Hiccup's father.

The character at the end is different than they were at the beginning. If the character-at-the-end had faced the same inciting incident, maybe the story would never have happened! That's true growth.

Of course, this is just one way to draw a compelling character arc. It's effective, but it's not a formula—merely a framework that you can customize for your story. Experiment. Try new things, and see what works for you.

And then do that.

The Pressure We Put On Ourselves

A lot of what I write here is projection. That is to say, a lot of my advice are things I need to remind myself. And one thing I constantly struggle with (as do many writers) is the fear that what I'm writing isn't very good.

This fear is paralyzing. It frequently makes me not want to write at all.

But here's the thing. The part of you that is afraid, that puts pressure on you to MAKE IT GUD OR WHAT'S THE POINT, is—believe it or not—trying to help you. It wants you to create amazing things, and it believes that you can! But it doesn't realize that the pressure it's putting on you is actually having the opposite effect.

That's because the pressure used to work. When you started writing, you pushed yourself to improve, to get your butt in the chair, to get the words out. That pressure is what got you on the writing path in the first place. (Probably. I'm definitely projecting now.)

But the pressure didn't stop, and people can't live under pressure all the time forever. Writing is a marathon, not a sprint, but that pressuring part of you wants you to run your hardest the entire time.

What I've had to learn is how to be kind to myself. I need to give myself permission to suck, of course, but I also need to be kind to that part that's yelling at me all the time. It's just doing what worked, and in truth, I don't want it to stop completely. I just want it to trust me.

For me, that involves a lot of self talk. Whenever I'm doing something hard, especially writing, I end up having a conversation something like this:

ME: This sucks. What's the point?

ALSO ME: It won't suck when it's finished.

ME: It'll take so much work to get there though.

ALSO ME: That's okay. We've done it before. We'll do it again.

ME: What if it never gets better?

ALSO ME: It will. It always does.

ME: What if this time's different?

ALSO ME: Then we'll figure it out when we get there.

And so on.

In the past, I would get depressed or angry with myself for not being good enough. Now, I'm trying to be kinder, to talk myself through it. I've written stories before, and I'll do it again. It's always hard, but I know how to do the work to make the story better. I know I can do it.

You can too.

Personal Updates

There has been a lot going on in my own life lately. I know many of you care about such things, so in lieu of writing tips today, I wanted to fill you in on some things.

On work. After a few months without steady work, I've secured a long-term contract as a narrative editor for an upcoming action RPG. It's really fun work, combining my experience in writing, editing, and branching dialogue. I also get to work with some pretty great people (and a stable paycheck is no joke).

I'm also still taking on private clients. When I restarted my editing services, it was with the intent of keeping them going indefinitely. Rebooting freelance work is hard, and ultimately, I'd like nothing more than to serve private clients full time if I can. So, if you need editing for your novel in any form, let me know!

On writing. This topic's harder. A couple of months ago, I lost my agent. It was nothing bad between us—Tricia Lawrence is a fantastic agent!—but the agency was restructuring, and she and I hadn't sold anything in a long while. I don't fault her decision one bit.

It's also been a while since I've been able to focus on my own writing. I've been doing more for the kids this past year as well as going through therapy for myself, both of which resulted in less mental, emotional, and temporal resources to create worlds. I'm still hopeful that I will be able to return to it soon (see "On life," below), but yeah, it's been hard.

I do still have one novel sitting with a publisher. It has gone through a rewrite and a couple of rounds of revisions. I'm hopeful something will happen with that soon, but without a contract, there are no guarantees yet. We'll see.

On life. There have been a lot of changes in my household in the last several months, and a few more coming. Many of you know that my real job is being the dad of many, many kids. And this past year, I have been the stay-at-home parent in addition to work, which (as stated) has contributed to a reduced ability to write for myself. (Current events aren't helping either.)

And even more changes are coming. Chief among them is that my first-born biological son has moved to the States, and several others (we have five boys within a year of each other) may be moving out soon as well. This is hard emotionally and comes with a lot of unknowns. Empty nest syndrome is real, folks (and yes, I recognize how weird it is to talk about an "empty nest" when three to six of them are still at home).

But who knows? Maybe once I've worked through the emotions of it all and solidified a new schedule, I'll be able to write some more. I certainly hope to. I have a lot of hopes for my near future, but right now, I feel like I'm in a liminal state, waiting for the end of the transition.

Until then, I'm gonna keep doing what I'm doing, working on my editing, spending time with kids who haven't left, and working on myself.

So, that's me...