World Building as Writing Prep

Hint: It's All Water

It’s tempting to think of world building as painting backdrops for the stage. However, good world building is not a two-dimensional backdrop to the story—it’s the water from the parable of the young fish and the old fish. (Old fish asks the young ones “How’s the water?” Young ones look at each other and say: “What is water?”)

World Building can and should be visual, but it’s also about deciding how things work in the world of your story and how those things manifest on every sensory and conscious level for your characters. The uniforms your armies wear in this world reflect what the society respects. The customs and holidays reflect what it holds sacred. The laws reflect what the society considers profane. The types of jokes they tell explain what they value and what they don’t. (In Klingon an insult is “Your mother has a smooth forehead.” In Dothraki an insult is “He doesn’t own a horse.” Both of these tell us a lot about the cultures.)

The society you build also tells us how our characters’ personalities, goals, and histories were formed. Everyone is a complex combination of being both a product of and a rebel against the society in which they were raised.

Speaking of society, it can be as large as a solar system or planet or as small as a family or a romantic couple. World building helps you know and the reader understand how things work in this society. And these rules and customs therefore determine how the characters will act, what choices they have available to them, and what sorts of obstacles they face both internally and externally.

Wow, that’s a lot, right?

There’s more. I hope you don’t believe that world building is just the work of Science Fiction and Fantasy writers. Nay, my friend. Every writer does some form of world building. My favorite example is that if you’re writing a cop story, the world of the NY Beat cop is very different from that of a small town Sheriff. They have different waters to navigate, different foes, different training, different goals and possibilities. And each small town cop shop is going to be different depending on where the town is located—the Sheriff’s office in Bumfrick, Georgia is going to be pretty different from one in East of Nowhere, Oregon.

The good news is having the major rules figured out before you sit down to write can help you figure out what to write when the time comes. After all, if you write about a society/world where the Chief of Police is by-the-book, your maverick detective is probably going to have a few run-ins with the rules. Or if you write about a historical time period where women had no real rights, and your heroine is a rebel, then that’s gonna create some conflict.

See? The world is the water. The characters are the fish swimming in that water. Whether the water is clear or murky, hot or cold, low or high, etc. will have an effect on how your fish behave, how they look, and what’s possible in the story.

Before you sit down to write your novel, do a sketch of the world. Ask yourself where this place is located, how many people live there, is it a homogeneous culture or a melting pot? How do things work there and how would that impact the story you’re wanting to tell?

This last question is the most important because if the world has no impact on the story then you’ve simply created a backdrop.

Happy writing!