Fantasy Worlds as Instruments of Storytelling
Building a world is one of the best things about writing fantasy. It’s a chance to let our imaginations run wild, to rewrite the rules that constrain us in reality, or to create a place inspired by something we’ve seen and wish to live in. There’s an easy trap to fall into during worldbuilding, though, especially in an original secondary world: getting too attached to the brainstorming phase, where we’re creating charts of magic systems and researching types of government and making Pinterest boards of food or weather or architecture— [stop to inhale]
Does this sound familiar?
Have you ever looked at something like this and gotten overwhelmed by the sheer amount you have to think about to make a world feel “believable?”
Alex McDowell's World Building Mandala
I’ve got good news. You don’t need all of this.
In our attempts to make a unique world, we can end up doing a lot of unnecessary work and add unnecessary complexity. If we spend all this time on something, we’re going to want to talk about it, and this can lead to the dreaded info dump. The truth is, world-building may be one of the most fun parts of writing fantasy, but it is not the most important.
The most important thing is our characters. The parts of the world we want to spend time fleshing out are the ones that will be important to them. The most interesting fantasy worlds are more than background or set dressing; they serve the story. They’re structured in a way to push the characters along (or hold them back). These magical and fantastical elements feel realistic instead of outlandish because we see them impact the way people move through the world.
This doesn’t mean the worlds are vastly complex or explained in detail, if at all. I recently read Nettle and Bone, which has only vague references to magic at the beginning, until the main character gets thrown into a world she had only the slightest idea existed. Things like the goblin market and the Toothdancer are fascinating and creative and not explained at all. They simply exist, and when Marra asks questions like “How did a demon get into your hen” she gets answers like “Well, I couldn’t put it in a rooster, that’s how you get basilisks.” Marra is horrified the whole time and completely out of her depth, but she must push past it to reach her goal. In this case, the lack of explanation works toward her emotional journey: she finds her inner strength in making it through these crazy things. And the reader gets to ride along with her.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have Brandon Sanderson’s worlds, where the magic and societal structures are understood in great detail because these are the things our characters are directly interacting with. They are the plot, and the world greatly impacts the characters’ arcs. In the Stormlight Archive, the difference between a lighteyes and a darkeyes wouldn’t matter if we didn’t get to see Kaladin’s story. The painstakingly laid out details of allomancy in Mistborn would feel encyclopedic if our characters didn’t use these rules to win the day.
So, how do you make magic and a world that serves your story? I have two methods, depending on what kind of story I’m working on.
Start With Character
This works best for stories with one or two POVs whose emotions I’m going to deep-dive into over the course of a book. I figure out what internal struggles they’re going to face, so I can craft a world around them that is designed to put pressure on those struggles.
For example, I knew when I started drafting Oblivion’s Hymn that my characters would have some questionable morals. They were selfish. They wanted the path of least resistance to achieve their goals, and would only come to care about the widespread consequences of their actions over time. So I made a magic system where it was nonnegotiable to give up something in return for power. And of course, rules are only interesting if you have people trying to break them, so then I like to ask what would happen if characters found loopholes, or tried (and failed) to make them? I picked a theme for my pantheon involving beginnings and endings, because my characters were dealing with that sticky point in their lives where things should’ve been going better than they were, where it felt like it was too late to start over or do things the “right” way. And I built out the world only as they interacted with certain pieces of it, which gives the illusion of a meticulously crafted world without having to spend oodles of time doing the crafting—and leaves me room to fill in the blank spaces later!
“The big catch-22 of fantasy is people go to the fantasy section for the world building. But they don’t stay for the world building. World building can only do so much.”
Start With a Conceptual Question
Using examples from my past projects:
What would a world look like where the sun died for several minutes then came back?
What if, on a desert planet, water could be used to resurrect the dead?
What would a god do if they were trapped inside a mortal body and wanted to break free?
From here, instead of working from small scale to large scale, I work from large to small. These stories tend to be more about the systems and societal implications of the questions I pose (though the POV character is still important, and should still have an emotional journey, which tends to reflect their place within those structures). Starting with a concept also lends itself very well to figuring out what your antagonist is up to: sewing fear in order to control the populace, hoarding a limited resource, or collecting power in ways that hurt innocent people.
“World building to me is taking the consequences of an idea.”
As with any writing advice, there are a hundred ways to go about every part of the process. Some people love worksheets, diagrams, and having all the information they could possibly need before they start to write. I used to fall into this camp. But the more I’ve written, the less I’ve found myself needing to be so thorough. Why bother getting into the intricacies of government and economics if my characters are on the run, stealing what they can to survive? Why does it matter what the rest of the continent looks like if they’re trapped within a single city? If it becomes important later, I’ll figure it out then.
So next time you find yourself starting a new project and wanting to answer 101 Worldbuilding Questions before you write any prose, ask yourself this: will this help me tell the story I want to tell?