Welcome to our Worldbuilding Wednesday! On Wednesdays, we will discuss the creative process behind different facets of the Twinverse, from as lofty a concept as the entire cosmology, to specific characters and their role in the setting. Worldbuilding Wednesday is meant as a behind-the-scenes column to give insight into how the setting itself changes and evolves, beyond just the events of the books.
Last week, we discussed world concepts and how they can be a powerful tool to invest the setting of your fantasy novel(s) with verisimilitude, consistency, and concepts that connect well with each other.
Once the world concept is set, however, the real work begins. There are two major techniques for fleshing out a world, depending partly on personal preference, and partly on where you're starting. If you are starting from a world concept, the top-down approach is most likely to help. In this approach, you start drilling down from the larger concepts to smaller and more specific topics. For instance, your world concept could describe the entire world as being covered in jungles. You could then consider whether the world is a single continent, or multiple ones. If the latter, why are all the continents covered in jungles?
Once you have defined that, you could choose a specific continent to focus on, map out, divide into regions, select a region to continue developing, and so on, down to the realm or even settlement level. As you do this, you'd develop the local culture, pantheons (if any), and so on. Somewhere along the line, the discoveries you make along the way could inform the style of magic of the world (for instance, you could decide that magic in the jungle world is primarily focused on primitive survival - no blasts of fire or massive deeds, but perhaps the ability to summon animals, invest yourself with the power of an animal, manipulate vegetation, et cetera).
The top down approach is very helpful to flesh out the world if you have a world-spanning concept to begin with. But if, on the other hand, you are starting from something small, then the bottom up approach might be better. You could have a world concept that's very circumscribed, or you could have elements of the world you already set up because of a short story, or even your novel, which you now want to flesh out to write more in the same setting.
In that case, you start small and ramp up. For instance, you might have defined a settlement (perhaps where your main character is at the beginning of the story). From there, you could develop the realm the settlement is in, and then the continental region that realm is in. Who would be its neighbors? What would be their attitude towards it? Based on what you already wrote, what is the culture of the realm like? What about its religion?
There is no correct choice as to what approach is best, and personally I have found that both have their advantages. When creating the Twinverse, I have employed both to different degrees - I find that the top down approach really helps in filling in the major gaps, but if I want to make the world more detailed and lived in, I then take one of the elements and build it back up in a different direction. This approach is sometimes known as the "top-bottom-up" approach. Here, as I mentioned on Monday, a wiki tool can be extremely helpful to keep track of everything and connect the dots one way or the other.
The important thing is that you constantly strive for coherence and some form of realism. While a world with dragons, magic, ancient titans and mysterious haunted ruins may not be realistic in the traditional sense, everything needs to fit in properly with everything else: the world must be internally consistent. I keep repeating this because one of my biggest pet peeves are authors who, either because they only do the minimum amount of worldbulding or because they want to go for the simplest approach, create unrealistic situations in their worlds. For instance, using the same name for a phenomenon throughout the world, or having a single world-spanning culture. This may be acceptable under certain circumstances, but otherwise it risks causing the reader to see behind the curtain and remind them this is all fictional.
One of the best things about reading fantasy and science fiction is the ability to escape and imagine different worlds, different characters, grow attached to them, and eventually suffer and rejoice with them. Anything that brings you out of that mindset by reminding how fictional everything is, detaches you as a reader from the effect the author otherwise would seek to achieve. As such, my personal opinion is that time spent worldbuilding your setting isn't wasted time at all, but an investment that will pay off when your book is published and your readers find themselves lost and engrossed in it. A developed setting gives a deeper connection to the story, and makes the reader want to know more. It can also provide you with ideas for other stories, other novels. It's a win-win for everyone, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Coincidentally, much of this advice originally comes from the world of roleplaying games, where the effort to create a world is perhaps even more critical to the players. The best resources to learn more can be found on RPG websites such as Roleplaying Tips.
Thank you for joining us today on this quick essay on worldbuilding approaches. If you are interested, more information can be found on other websites and blogs, such as the aforementioned Roleplaying Tips column, or the Worldbuilding School. I hope you enjoyed this primer, and look forward to seeing you again next Worldbuilding Wednesday!
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