I’ve been told I’m pretty great at this “writing Fantasy”-thing.

It’s weird to make any blog offering writing advice at this point because I’m far enough along the journey to know every author’s application to the craft of writing and storytelling is different. However, someone reminded me recently that I have published multiple manuscripts both traditionally and independently, that I’ve been nominated for and won an award, and people like my worldbuilding. With that said, I thought it would be fun to put together some thoughts and suggestions I had on the subject.

Worldbuilding is a tough subject to tackle because there are so many perceptions around what this means and how to approach the construction of living, breathing settings and cultures filled with wonderful characters readers can identify and fall in love with, but are also unique and different from us in telling ways. But notice how many things I placed into that: people, cultures, and settings are three distinct things authors have to weave together precisely in their narrative, especially in the genres like Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Therefore these “rules” are more “guidelines.” I try to make them more observational than ironclad because just like the worlds an author writes, the world of our reality changes as well, and to make any firm and lasting statement on most anything is a foolhardy endeavor.

But since this post is for those wanting to join the march, let’s set out on the road!

• The land shapes the setting, not the other way around

This one is key to developing great settings, but more importantly, gives you basis from which to build cultures, characters, and conflicts. Good worldbuilding raises all three of those things and they start in the place people are existing. Note the word I used—exist. Before anyone can *live* in a place they must first figure out how to survive well enough in it where they can build the things they need to thrive like farms, or aquaculture, or an understanding of herd movements in pastoral or nomadic landscapes. You get enough farms together and you have the foundations of villages and settlements, and at some point if a settlement is prosperous enough it develops into a town, and then maybe a city, which in the ancient world allowed people to form states. With a state comes a sense of national and regional identity, and if you are still following this rule then you can see the versatility how starting your worldbuilding with an understanding of the land is crucial (or lack thereof, which can be a story in itself.)

How does an entire kingdom form out of a desolation like Mordor? Of course there is a heavy element of Fantasy when it comes to Mordor, but Tolkien understood its history down to the geology so well he makes it real.

Know what kind of plants grow in your world space, or if animals can exist because there is enough water, but more importantly, give the characters who are there *a reason* to be there outside of narrative conceits or plot concerns. It’s great to have a story centered in New York because it isn’t just New York—it’s an epicenter and a true melting pot where millions of stories can be told. The way the islands are shaped decide how people like me live there, and you can tell who the authors are that have never lived in NYC when they use it as a setting. Where I am in upper Manhattan is *incredibly different* from how people live down near Wall Street. Take account of the land as much as you do your setting and you will be well on the way to developing a place your readers will want to experience.

• People are just trying to get through the day.

Moving away from the physical and nature aspects of the land where you set your story, one important aspect to remember in any successful story is that the world is full of people just trying to get through the day. This is actually something I learned in undergraduate where I obtained a History degree with a minor in Religious Studies. One important professor I had was Dr. Jeremy Schott who taught his students about Early Christianity. He impressed upon us about making sure to avoid what I have come to call “the academics/worldbuilders fallacy.”

Not all, but one thing many academics and authors of fiction share in common is the belief that their focus is the focus of the story, and therefore everyone should arrive informed on some level about the focus of the story. It breathes in every character, informs every interaction, and bleeds through chapters as a never-ending motif.

And that’s fine as long as someone is remembering to empty the chamber pots, or pay the bills, or order food for the keep, or organize the militia, or go on the hunt to feed their family, or a whole host of simple, *mundane*, repetitive *stuff* that weighs the days of 99.999999999% of people across the world. Most of us have to work, most of us have to eat, most of us have to have a place to sleep, and if we have family, we have to place them at the forefront of what we do—despite what the religious, political, or economic situation might be. Unless you have a world where the family-structure needs to be deconstructed, which still applies to this rule. People go throughout their entire lives looking the other way from terrible things simply because they have to get on with what they value as being the most important thing in their lives. Sometimes nothing, even a cataclysm, can change that.

Have minor characters your main characters run into the in world that isn’t part of their narrative, but still part of the world that has to get on with their day. By showing that these people exist you not only provides a ballast for your main cast but you enrichen the world with a sense of both wider and smaller things happening alongside the main plot.

• Make a Map

This applies across multiple genres, but in Fantasy in general it behooves an author and their readers to have a map. It may not be affordable to have one in your book, which in that case do what you can (show it off on a blog or post it in your social media), but for the purpose of worldbuilding, maps are a godsend.

It doesn’t have to be anything intricate or hand-drawn to the level of Tolkien, and sometimes you don’t need a map as much as you need Google Maps (looking at you, Urban and Contemporary Fantasy authors). Maps also make you ask questions. Need to get a caravan north over the dreaded mountains in the middle of winter? Great, but make sure that same caravan has to dread those mountains if they head south again, perhaps to the point of taking a highway around. Want to remember all that? Notes work too, but for the sake of keeping a good idea for yourself where you set your story, maps provide infinite value.

They also help Epic and Sword & Sorcery authors have something to put in a book readers of those genres really want. Maps add so much to the aesthetic of a Fantasy novel or series and here I would argue for their requirement.

Now, I hand draw all my maps (see below), but the ones that actually show up in the book I have re-created and to a certain extent redesigned by an artist who specializes in creative cartography. I’ve had very good results with artists like Arcane Atlas, who helped me put together this map for the Imperial City of Hostlann, the setting where my Sword & Sorcery-Thriller series Spy|Counter|Killer takes place. They were able to help me put together something that took my original ideas and concepts and refine them.

If you can afford a good mapmaker it is always worth it, but if you have the skill and the time, it is definitely a practice to take up to help hone multiple aspects of your worldbuilding.

• Events are long in coming and forever in effect

Things don’t just happen and coincidences are incredibly rare, and usually quite terrible. That’s not to say that random chance doesn’t occur in real life (it most certainly does), but within the bounds of narrative fiction it is important to remember that in building a world with histories, cultures, and people, it’s important to steep the problems they face in those things as well.

Let’s use a great example from a classic fantasy:

The first is from a book I recently reread as part of a larger re-examination of one of my favorite authors, RA Salvatore, and the second novel in his Neverwinter Series which bears the same name. In the first book, Gauntlgrym, Salvatore cleverly employs the natural disaster of a volcano eruption and reworks it as a massive primordial, long asleep until the villains of the story reawaken it and cause the volcano to activate! And like a real volcano, which builds pressures over decades, centuries, and millennia, it is something that the world had there the entire time, sitting beneath the surface, fated to eventually erupt one day *any way* after Drizzt and company discover the magical holds on the primordial of Gauntlgrym, set thousands of years ago by the dwarves at their civilizational height, were already failing before the villains arrived.

And it does erupt. And after the ash, cinders, and debris has been cleared away the land is forever changed. So are the characters. So is the nature of their stories.

Salvatore, a master of worldbuilding, draws us deep into the story because he uses what is there, which makes it unique to itself, which goes outside the classical paradigm of an object being at the focus—which I would observe characterized his earlier works. Great worldbuilders need to instill a sense of a place that goes beyond just the food they eat or the smell in the air. I would also refer people to the works of Ursula K Le Guin with Earthsea and NK Jesmin’s The Broken Earth series.

• Sensory details are not unique details

This will be controversial, but sensory details like the taste of food, or the sound of an instrument, or the smell of a place are details needed to build dynamic settings, but they are only a small, small, small part of worldbuilding that is often mistaken for the whole act. In fact, most of the time they are not unique at all.

Follow me, because this is probably the roughest suggestion I will make. I’m not trying to say that the things your characters will sense along their adventures won’t be unique, but most authors (especially new ones) believe “senses = story = worldbuilding”, when really it is “sense of place + story=worldbuilding.” I know nobody came for bad math, but the equations check out.

Let’s us an example:

I live in New York City, which is home to over 20,000 different establishments where you can purchase food from all over the world, and I mean everywhere. Pick a place on a globe or map of the Earth and you can find it in New York City. If you want really great Mongolian borts or camel stew from North Africa, it’s there.

But that also means there are over thousands of Tikka Masalas, and not everyone is special or great. Everyone can taste tomatoes, yogurt, and spices mixed with a protein or vegetable, and honestly, when you look at that basic list of what goes into a curry, it can go into everything that isn’t a curry as well. How many dishes use yogurt? Or tomatoes? Or are spiced for flavor? When everyone uses salt, the presence of it on a table in your fantasy tavern isn’t that special unless it’s rare and its use has greater purpose.

What makes that Tikka more special in Brooklyn than that Rogan Josh in Queens isn’t the ingredients, but the story told around the dish. So you can put every beer smell in every tavern, manure on every cobbled street, or make every bit of blood smell like iron or copper—but what does that beer taste like to your hero after they just watched their lover die in battle? How terrible is that manure when you live in a situation where that is all you will have?

Senses in worldbuilding are absolutely important tools, but the magic with them is found in how the characters perceive them in connection to the story, not just by mere presence.

• Stay Regional (with caveats)

Everyone loves Lord of the Rings because it is a world-expanding fantasy epic that literally sweeps you across thousands of miles of places you want to walk every foot of.

But it only takes place over a few thousand miles.

The Fellowship is not fighting in Rhun, and we don’t see anything happening in the south of Middle-earth beyond what Tolkien gives us. There is only so much room George RR Martin shares with us on the map in Westeros, but there is a larger world out there. Hearkening back to rule/suggestion two (everybody is just trying to get through their day), the entire world cannot be involved in the entire world-ending events of a good story. That’s why modern moviemakers often set modern thrillers in places like London, New York, and Dubai—these are financial centers of the world, where if something catastrophic happened there would be real damage that reverberates. Centralization allows you to condense a world-rending threat to a usable space, and this concept is understood well in video games too.

In writing there are always exceptions to any of these rules and suggestions, and it always comes down to is how well you built the connections in your worldbuilding. Going back to London as an example: the reason why so many spy thrillers pass through Heathrow is because the world is literally passing through that airport in numbers and at rates that outstrip most other places. It is a hub for international travel, leisure, commerce, and there is a reason they have a military presence there and security measures that are far more serious than what most Americans deal with in the States when they go to the airport. But you can also hop on a plane and have your characters fly to Atlanta, where you want your story to take place.

A really good example of this in cinema is Indiana Jones (I haven’t seen the fifth one yet, so no, I don’t know about it enough to have an opinion.) Raiders of the Lost Arc does an incredible job taking you from the peaks of snowy Nepal to the banks of the Nile in Egypt all the way to northern Africa, all containing a uniqueness that adds a richness to the narrative—but that’s also because they build the process of getting from one place to another, and its change, into the setting. Travel is an integral part of telling an Indiana Jones tale. We literally see Jones and Marion move across a map right there on the screen. The Black Company by Glen Cook also does an excellent job of this.

• Only Show/Use what you Need

In fiction, but Fantasy and Science Fiction especially, there is a tendency to see worldbuilding as a process of filling in space that the characters inhabit. This is done with buildings, world spaces, universes, etc.

In the midst of all this, things can get very, very cluttered. I find this is especially true in highly-technical “hard” science fiction, where a lot of inexperienced and experienced authors put so much of the scientific detail in front of the story they mistake it for the narrative itself.

There is no easy way to say “only use what you need” because every author is going to have a different idea of their narrative needs in a scene, but I follow some general rules that need no great explanation outside of their mention—passing focus on the walls and floors, but really focus on objects people use on a constant basis that are part of their story.

Is your hero going to be swinging this one awesome sword throughout the entire narrative? Awesome, give us great details so we know what that looks like in our head, but if she is going to change clothes every other scene, we only need a sentence of two about cut and color. Otherwise it becomes a book about clothes, and while there is an audience there for that, most want the escapism of the story. The story allows them to escape allows them to escape into the world, not the other way around.

Have a setting you really want the reader to explore with you? Built them that place, but these days people don’t need a complete journey describing every barren stretch of Mordor between Minas Morgul and Mt. Doom. Have us in Minas Morgul, place us in Mount Doom, but don’t interrupt the heroes until they get there—unless you have a damned good reason to interrupt them that involves the setting itself! Like that marsh with the dead elves! That was cool and worth some diversion over.

Again, these are always more suggestions than rules, but when it comes to worldbuilding, really pick and choose your focuses in terms of how they serve your overall narrative. Even if the warrior-princess’s only object of significance is a comb, give us the story behind that comb along with the story she carries it into.

• Context Matters

Everything that can be written about is up for grabs. Every character, even the worse psychopathic villain, is eligible for focus, as are events and places around them. The question becomes whether or not the application is appropriate.

Let’s use an easy example from movies: it’s okay to write Jojo Rabbit, which makes fun of Hitler and the Nazis. It’s fine to write a historical drama detailing the last, desperate days before his suicide in his bunker as the Russians descend on Germany, like in 2004’s Downfall. Like alternate-world histories like Man In The High Tower? Awesome and can’t wait to see those Nazis get theirs, which they do.

However…

IT’S NEVER OKAY TO WRITE A MOVIE GLORIFYING ADOLPH HITLER.

NEVER EVER.

He’s never a good guy in any sense, he should never be cast as a good guy in any sense and attempts to do that are tone-deaf to the contextual circumstances that society understands this historical figure. You don’t get to slaughter twelve million people and then get a heroic break to make out with the love interest, especially if its Eva Braun. The same goes for Stalin, or Pol Pot, or Elizabeth Holmes (Sorry, New York Times, money isn’t morals), or anyone who is an outright terrible human being by nature. It’s weird that people fetishize serial killers, but even the most fervent fan of crime fiction I’ve met knows the serial killers aren’t good people.

I shouldn’t have to say this, but I have to, but the same goes with rape. Rapists are never, never, never heroes.

But not all societies have such agreements, and sometimes to make note of this human failing and see where the honest villainy lies we require stories that take up difficult, sometimes gross subjects in a direct, critical way that seeks to examine—not to promote—but to examine to the fullest human extent the depths of who we are and why we do things holy and profane. We learn to defeat evil *only* by staring it in the eyes and understanding how it came to be and can exist within ourselves. Using the topic of rape and its difficult, diffuse, and demeaning layers is at the very heart of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. But it’s written in context of a world where rape is allowed but also rebelled against—there’s no glorification of the crime, only an examination of how it is used to reinforce terrible power and domination by those who would call it something else.

I often look at Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone as a prime example of contextualized characters. His homeland and the Melnibonean culture is one of disgusting deprivation sexually, full of wholesale violence inflected on those beneath this prince who carries a *soul-sucking* sword. He’s sleeping with his cousin, who is also terrible. He is a traitor as well, willing to see out the doom of his own people when his cousin is killed in the midst of political drama—which is celebrated by the populace!

But Moorcock also goes out of his way to let us know that the people and culture of Melnibone have been around for tens of thousands of years and they are dying as a society, culture, and identity because of their lust, avarice, and gluttonous quests for power. These are not good people, including Elric, and they are going to suffer for it. But along the way we discover how noble Elric is outside of his homeland, how the nature of other places and different people really can change someone’s moral and ethical framing, and how we can choose to be better in the face of our constant inequities. Elric becomes the last of the Melniboneans, but reflective of the damage they had done to their civilization and the fledgling human world, he decides that his individual legacy will be different from that of his people.

And this cousin-fucking, soul-stealing murderer has enraptured us for decades and is beloved because Moorcock did the work of contextualizing him and the world he’s in.

There are always boundaries we cannot cross for the sake of our morals and ethics, but if you want to write a world where morals and ethics have incredibly elastic boundaries and that is the story, then do the work of showing why the world works the way it does for the reader’s sake. That way everyone has a full understanding of what is going on. But be prepared—someone will still dislike your, or your work, and be disgusted. That is particularly true with this rule. You have to measure that risk for yourself.

• The World is Always Ending/Beginning, So Ret-Con the shit out of it!

However, for all the suggestions I might give on the subject of world-building, the best is simple and bears repeating: Do what serves the narrative first.

The story must always come first, even if it means you have to destroy and rebuild the setting. Need to make your picturesque rural kingdom grimdark with that one central town wiped out? Industrialize it in the second book and pave over the damn thing! That’s what the video-game series Fable did throughout its three games and it really added to the sense of change to a world we always remain at home in but never familiar with, which was the point—while the world changes the need for its heroes remains (no matter how weird it gets.)

Never be afraid to change for the sake of the story you want to tell, but if you are going to change it dramatically, make it as dramatic as possible. One franchise that does incredibly well with this is the legendary Mobile Suit Gundam anime series of Japanese mech-combat epics. One of my absolute favorites, it has played fast and hard with its own stories through the years, but always with an acknowledgement *to its audience* they are openly doing this. The narrative centers around the Gundam as the physical representation of the main characters and their internal aspirations, good and ill, and the worldbuilding is knitted together from there. It may look very different every time, but it also carries the same theme throughout—war is always terrible, the ones who end up fighting it are the dispossessed, and the stakes are only as high as we let them be until our better sense takes over, which they might if we allow ourselves to evolve through peace and space exploration together. Each world Gundam has presented us has kept those elements, though they sometimes remove space completely.

A final thought—while worldbuilding is a wonderful, necessary, and fascinating function of storytelling that every storyteller must endeavor to master as well as they can, but sometimes that mastery comes with restriction. Adhere to the spirit of your story when you consider how you go about building its world, the characters that live in it, and the story they will experience along with the reader first and foremost. It is the spirit of the story that matters most.

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Safe journeys!