I recently talked with an author who told me she struggles to worldbuild for her own projects and generate all the details, but she loves helping other authors refine their worlds and problem-solve.
Is this you, too? If you’re a problem-solving author and you feel like it takes more energy than it should to generate the initial Continue reading “How to Approach Worldbuilding as Problem-Solving”
Defining the purpose of your fictional world is a foundational and yet often overlooked step of worldbuilding. Leaving your world’s purpose indefinite and vague opens the door wide to overwhelm, lack of direction, and frustration with the worldbuilding process. But defining a world’s purpose can feel limiting–and how do you effectively frame the purpose of a world, anyway? Hence often overlooking or ignoring this helpful step.
Today I want to look at how defining the purpose of your world will aid you in the worldbuilding process and how to frame your world’s purpose effectively.
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“Why do it? Won’t outlining my world’s purpose just limit my creativity and the scope of my world?”
Yes and no.
Defining your purpose with a world limits the scope of Continue reading “Defining the Purpose of a World”
Worldbuilding can present a number of challenges—often different for each author—but one that seems to be a universal struggle is the challenge of knowing how much worldbuilding to do before you start a writing project. Whether you’re an author who gets sucked into the worldbuilding and has trouble getting into the actual writing process, or an author who leans into the writing process and finds later that their worlds don’t have as much depth as intended, hopefully this post will be a help and encouragement on the subject of worldbuilding for the sake of drafting.
You don’t need to know everything before you start writing.
Those of you who prefer to dive into Continue reading “Worldbuilding for a First Draft”
Sanderson’s Third Law of Magic states,
“Expand what you already have before you add something new.”
If you’re constantly coming up with new story ideas, you might also come up with a lot of different settings in which to place those stories. The question is, at what point is it appropriate to create a whole new world and when should you just build on whatever you already have?
Now, we are discussing Sanderson’s Laws of Magic. He has magic systems in mind when he presents this advice. But this “law,” at least, is applicable to much of writing and today I want to explore how it interacts with worldbuilding as a whole.
First off, why is Sanderson’s Third Law good advice for worldbuilding as a whole?
For one thing, it makes worldbuilding Continue reading “Sanderson’s Third Law: When Should You Create a New World?”
Last week, I talked about the core elements a fictional culture needs, and over time I’ve written posts on many different worldbuilding concepts and how to build them well. Today, I want to share with you a worldbuilding checklist that includes all of the elements (both general to a world and specific to various cultures) that I see as integral to a functioning world. And I’ll include a printable version, too, so stick around to the end for that. Continue reading “Worldbuilding Checklist – The Basics”