Guest post written by author Jean Louise
Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, Jean Louise currently lives in Queens, New York, with her cat Martha. When she’s not writing, she can be found with her nose buried in a graphic novel or taking down bad guys in her favorite video games. She received an MFA in Writing for Children from The New School. This is her debut novel.
Her first novel Waking Fire is an incendiary YA fantasy debut follows a girl who will stop at nothing to save her village after it’s discovered by a dangerous warlord and his army of undead monsters.
As a fantasy author, creating a believable world is as important as crafting realistic dialogue, an engaging plot, and compelling characters. Since my book takes place in a world that exists only in my imagination, my worldbuilding has to help the reader suspend their disbelief when fantastical things like dragons, magic, or prophetic visions appear in the story. Good worldbuilding is key to helping the reader accept that these kinds of things can happen in the world I’ve created.
But worldbuilding isn’t limited to fantasy—all genres benefit from the solid foundation that a well-built world provides. Whether you’re writing a contemporary romance, historical fiction, hard-boiled detective series, or any other genre, the world your characters inhabit must be realistic, fleshed-out, and feel lived in. Worldbuilding is one of the most useful tools authors have at their disposal when writing. The most impossible thing can be believable if the worldbuilding supports it.
I worldbuild in four stages, or layers. The first layer focuses on the characters’ day-to-day lives: what kind of food do they eat and how do they get/cook it, what is their home life like, do they have parents/siblings/other family, do they attend school/work, etc. I think about what life would look like if the events in the story weren’t going to happen. What would a typical tomorrow look like for the characters? How about five years or ten years from now?
Once I’ve grounded the characters and filled out their days in the first later, I move on to the second layer: environment. Environment is more than the landscape (although landscape is very important—a story in the desert will have different obstacles compared to a story in the mountains simply due to the natural surroundings). The main characters’ economic status, culture, traditions, and religion are important elements in worldbuilding. Considering the social hierarchy of the world is also imperative—a female main character in a male-dominated society will have different reactions and priorities compared to a female in a matriarchal or gender-neutral one.
The third layer focuses on relevant historical events or figures that shaped the world in which the story begins. You should try to answer the question “how did we get here?” with here being the inciting incident of your story. What happened in the past that influences the characters and the world today? Was there a war that separated families, or perhaps a famine that forced thousands of people to emigrate to far-off lands? Did someone once try to assassinate a powerful leader or perhaps they succeeded? What are the repercussions of those events and how do they affect the current world where your story takes place?
The final layer, logistics, combines the first three layers to make a cohesive, believable world. For example, what a character eats for breakfast can be influenced by their culture and their environment. The amount of information a character has access to depends on their socio-economic status as well as their family’s attitude toward education and their proximity to places of learning and knowledgeable people. A character at a contemporary high school would be an anachronism if they spoke using archaic forms of speech more suited for someone in 14th century England and a reader might have a hard time believing a pampered prince could survive in the wild on his own without any worldbuilding that makes those scenarios plausible. Logistics helps suspend the reader’s disbelief so that questionable or confusing elements don’t take them out of the story.
The exciting part of worldbuilding is that everything doesn’t have to be fully fleshed out before you can begin writing. You’ll learn about your world as you write and you can always add in elements that you think of later into already-written sections. I have re-written whole chapters because of a worldbuilding idea that came to me in second or third drafts. What matters is taking time to focus on worldbuilding to give your world, real or imaginary, contemporary or historical, a depth and richness that will draw your reader in and keep them there.
