3 Tips for Worldbuilding Your Story

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! Now that I’m back with another post, this week I thought I would get back into talking about worldbuilding. When you work on the world in your story, knowing how to get the most out of your worldbuilding will save you a lot of time and prepare you more for when you start writing. But worldbuilding is a huge project, just as important as outlining the story itself. How do you make sure it works for you? Check out these three tips for worldbuilding to help you create a beautiful world!

Focus on One Thing, Not Many

You might have heard of the “deeply, not broadly” approach when it comes to worldbuilding. And it’s true! It’s not a good idea to try to fully flesh out every aspect of the world that you create. For one, you more than likely will end up getting sucked into your worldbuilding and you won’t get any actual writing done. Also, too many details about your world will bog your readers down. Readers don’t want to waste time on history lessons and backstories that aren’t important.

You need to go for a “deep” approach, focusing on what you want the most important parts of your world to be and developing those details fully. To have deep worldbuilding, do the following:

1. Focus on one thing that is most important. Whether this is religion, technology, magic, or anything else, take one topic that you know will be important to your story and develop that as much as you can. The rest can be developed later and with a broader approach. For example, a major aspect of the Harry Potter series is Hogwarts, the magical school for witches and wizards. The magical world is brought to life by fleshing out classes, spells, and student life, creating a place readers want to escape to. Other aspects of the Wizarding World are developed more broadly, but the series still has a rich world full of detail.

2. Be dynamic to include detail. When you flesh out one key part of your world, be sure to have fun with it! Think of different ways this part of your world permeates everything else. For example, say religion is a big part of your worldbuilding. What does the government look like? Who are the gods and priests? Does the society follow a strict set of rules or dress a certain way? All of these religious details then work to bring that deepness to your world and further immerse your readers.

Create the Rules NOW

Next, do yourself a favor. Start worldbuilding NOW rather than later. Sometimes writers like to get the basic outline of a story and just dive right into writing. That’s fine, but you need to make sure that worldbuilding doesn’t completely take a backseat. Worldbuilding is just as important as writing, and it’s a big part of the writing process!

To avoid overwhelming yourself when you start worldbuilding, start with the following:

1. Write things down. Get a notebook or a Google Doc and put down all your thoughts. That way you don’t run around in circles trying to remember all the details you want to include.

2. Get the basics figured out. How does your society work? Do you have a magic system? These major things need to be tackled before you get into writing or right when you start. That way, most of what you want to include is prepared. Don’t forget to flesh out one or two specific things that your story will focus on too!

3. Don’t sweat all the detail. By the time you start writing, you won’t have everything figured out with your worldbuilding. Your ideas will change and you’ll come up with better versions of what you have. After all, your rough draft doesn’t need to be perfect. Keep your world’s details in mind, but give yourself room to come up with new ideas and rework what doesn’t work.

Hook Readers with Quirks

Lastly, when you worldbuild, come up with little details that hook your readers into wanting to learn more about the world. Start at the beginning of your story by including a small detail about the world that readers would like, just like a hook for the beginning of a novel. Then drop in other details like breadcrumbs along the way. For example, your story might exist in a fantasy world. At the beginning of the story, you might introduce your protagonist, but they casually drop information about a war long since passed. Readers will instantly want to know more about what happened in that war. Additionally, including details like that and then continuing with the story shows readers that your world has depth. Include more details along the way (sparingly) to keep readers hooked!

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