How Worldbuilding Can Go Wrong
Worldbuilding can bring vitality and authenticity to your fiction — or it can drain the life out of it.
I’m going to take a different approach than the usual to talking about culture and society in worldbuilding.
Most articles on this subject offer a list of aspects of culture and society to consider and then, sometimes, options for each aspect — such as the aspect of politics and then the different ways of organizing a society politically.
These lists are definitely helpful, but they’re out there already — a search will turn up a slew of them. (The most comprehensive I found is the University of Auntimoany Ethnographical Questionnaire, which could keep you busy for weeks.)
Instead of duplicating those lists, I’m going to comment on how to use them — and why you should do that or, possibly, shouldn’t.
Benefits of worldbuilding
Worldbuilding has been called the “lifeblood” of storytelling. It can do all this for a story:
- make a world feel authentic, credible, and vibrant
- aid internal consistency
- help the reader become and stay immersed in the story
- create texture
- suggest events and stories
- awaken a sense of wonder and play, for both the writer and the reader.
To highlight the necessity of giving thought and research to creating a world, Poul Anderson describes two blatant examples of thoughtless worldbuilding he’d come across: (1) a planet with an atmosphere of hydrogen and fluorine, which would explode, and (2) a plant-less desert world that nevertheless has a breathable atmosphere and supports animal life.
This kind of mistake takes readers out of the world — out of the story — and can completely undermine the world’s credibility. A world that makes sense keeps readers immersed in it, even when they ask questions about it. Careful worldbuilding helps you avoid these dumb mistakes.
Asking worldbuilding questions can also help you understand your setting in greater depth, in the same way asking questions about a character can help you understand that person better. Worldbuilding prepares you to write evocatively and with authority.
For example, considering what kind of food the people eat, how they dress, and how they groom themselves allows you to use specific sensory details to bring scenes to life: the scents of cooking, the rustle of silk cloth, the weight of a bearskin cloak, the jingling of ankle bells, the smell of soap or body odor.
Thinking about the culture and society in my own novel has led me to see possibilities for stories and plots that I hadn’t thought of before. For example, the world of my story is small city of about 50,000 people, completely isolated and self-sufficient. (I’m modeling it on North Korea.) Only I realized (just like North Korea) it’s not really self-sufficient — it can’t be — because a society of that size, in the place I’ve chosen for it, couldn’t possibly independently develop and build the sophisticated technology its upper classes have access to.
This point of verisimilitude led me to realize the society isn’t truly isolated, it’s part of a much larger, sophisticated society, and the connections with that larger society will be explored as the series goes on.
Hazards of worldbuilding
But worldbuilding has its detractors, and they bring up some excellent points.
For one thing, worldbuilding takes lots of mental effort and time. That’s time when you aren’t writing. Worldbuilding can serve as a distraction and a rationale for procrastinating.
Also, Holly Lisle points out that you can lose all that work if you build a world intending to place a series in it, and then your publisher cancels the series. You could lose the rights to that world and never be able to use it again.
Whether that particular issue is of concern to you or not, it does suggest considering worldbuilding as an investment. If you’re primarily a writer and not a worldbuilder — in other words, worldbuilding itself isn’t your thing — then worldbuilding needs to serve your writing. As you aim for a balance between taking hours to flesh out your world versus actually writing the stories the worldbuilding is meant to serve, you can think of your time spent worldbuilding as time invested, and keep an eye on whether that investment is likely to return benefits for your stories.
For example, working out a lengthy list of plants that live in your world and their medicinal properties might make sense if one of your characters is an herbalist. If your protagonist is a musician, spending your time developing a harmonic mode specific to that culture might pay off in enhanced authenticity. But if music isn’t that relevant to your story, maybe it’s not a good investment of your time.
Second, worldbuilding itself can detract from storytelling. Lincoln Michel observes, “In fairy tales, we don’t learn the construction techniques of the witch’s gingerbread house or the import/export routes of evil dwarves.” Readers don’t need this, and incorporating that sort of lore can break the suspension of disbelief: it treats the fantasy world as if it were a real world, thereby reminding readers that it is fantasy.
Michel writes, “The goal of the writer is not to clutter the path with every object they can think of, but to clear the way for the reader’s journey.”
“What matters in a story is the story, and what serves the story is useful.”
—Lincoln Michel
M. John Harrison wrote, “Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.”
Harrison points out that speculative fiction ideally offers readers stories that subvert control and celebrate intuition and imagination. Excessive worldbuilding runs counter to those values— it’s an attempt to quantify and specify every little aspect of the fictional world.
Harrison also opines that worldbuilding “centralizes the author, who hands down her mechanical toy to a complaisant audience (which rarely thinks to ask itself if language can deliver on any of the representational promises it is assumed to make), as a little god.” Harrison calls worldbuilding “control-freakery.”
“[Frank] Herbert goes into such detail building the culture surrounding the Bene Gesserit [in Dune] that their actual magical power ceases to make any real sense, since it doesn’t track with the world’s rules and stakes.”
—Michael J. Seidlinger
As Michael Seidlinger points out, worldbuilding can get so complicated it defeats the purpose of creating authenticity and credibility. Real-life cultures are incredibly complex, interconnected, and ever-changing. Each new detail of an invented culture and society has to integrate with all the other details. Besides exhausting readers with information, you also run the risk of creating inadvertent contradictions that will distract readers and impair your world’s credibility.
“Culture is holistic, which means that all the pieces of it are interconnected.”
—Michael Kilman
Worldconjuring as an alternative
As an alternative, consider worldconjuring. Worldconjuring means evoking a world without building it brick by brick: giving readers just what they need to feel they’re entering a new world, and to stay immersed in it, without suffocating them with superfluous technical detail.
“All stories may need to conjure a world, but only a few benefit from building one.”
—Lincoln Michel
Worldconjuring is just a longer word for what writers do all the time: conjure a sense of reality — whether it’s a setting, a society, a world, a person, or a story — from well-chosen words.
Wrongheaded worldbuilding is akin to trying to build a flesh-and-blood character by writing their entire biography and medical history, including blood type, the number of hairs on their head, and the exact length of each of their thumbs. It isn’t necessary, it’s a poor investment of time, and to impose that information on readers would most likely send them running back to the bookshelf.
Recommendations
Develop your world sufficiently to write about it convincingly. Definitely, considering worldbuilding questions can help you understand your world — and your story — better. Likely you will learn quite a bit more about your world than makes it onto the page, and that’s okay. But keep your focus on the story, and use worldbuilding as a tool for the benefits it can offer.
Don’t count on a truckload of detail about your world to substitute for evocative writing. I once copy edited a mystery novel where the author specified that the sleuth, attending a wedding, sat in the fifth seat of the third row, and the seats were upholstered in royal blue. This kind of mind-numbing detail doesn’t add to, it detracts from authenticity and immersion. Creating a vivid, credible setting doesn’t happen by piling on endless details.
“Build with the people in mind.” (Dimitri Halkidis) In other words, make your characters and their story central. The world you build serves as a stage. The stage shouldn’t upstage the story.
Worldbuilding itself isn’t the lifeblood of a story — the writer is.
The writer breathes life into a world through their skill, passion, insight, and intuition. Without those qualities, an encyclopedia of data about a culture and society is nothing more than that — an encyclopedia, where a novel could have been.
