Do you have a rich imagination? Do the confines of the natural world feel limiting, and do you effortlessly conjure rich new universes? Do you love the allure of magic, and do you imagine a realm where numerous exciting species of elves, orcs, and wizards live together in harmony, threatened by a mysterious force threatening to destroy the peace?
Fantasy is your natural home.
Turning that initial creative spark into a world that intuitively makes sense is a real art. How do you succeed at worldbuilding so immersive your readers can picture themselves being there? What elements should every successful fantasy author include?
Bringing Order to Chaos: How to Start Your Worldbuilding Efforts
Creatives, research has shown, tend to process information slightly differently than others. Our “leaky attention filters” allow us to draw inspiration from our environments continuously, and our minds conjure so many ideas that it’s hard to organize them into a coherent whole.
You’re bursting with inspiration if you’ve just had an excellent idea for a new fantasy novel. Too much of it. Random scraps of beautiful worldbuilding fodder may come to mind all the time, but you’ll lose them just as easily if you don’t develop a system.
Some writers bring order to the chaos of inspiration by starting on their first drafts and writing as fast as possible. Others do better with more visual methods. These can include mood boards, brainstorming diagrams, characters’ family trees, and chapter outlines.
Don’t attempt to stop the flow of inspiration too early in the process. Simply find a way to organize or represent your ideas, so you can design a world that works later.
Designing Your Magic System
Your book wouldn’t be a fantasy novel without a magic system — and a magic system that’s both believable and immersive is a key part of your world building efforts.
Fantasy authors have two basic choices. They can design a hard magic system with clear rules and limitations that readers intuitively understand. Mastering magic often takes years of study in these systems, and the struggles characters face are typically personal in nature. Soft magic has fewer limitations and frees authors from the need to design hard and fast rules. The fact that magic has a cost keeps fantasy stories with soft magic systems interesting.
Fleshing Your Story’s Physical Setting Out
All fantasy readers are ultimately adventurers — they yearn to follow your protagonist on an epic journey through a well-designed world filled with mystery. While your characters propel the plot forward, your setting immerses your readers in the world.
Fantasy authors have an exciting opportunity to create worlds that could never exist in the real world — at least not on our planet and in our time — including entirely different laws of physics if you like.
You’ll lose many readers along the way if you launch into long, drawn-out explanations, so show, don’t tell:
- What creatures live in your world?
- What makes the world’s plants unique?
- Which geological processes and geographical features shape your characters’ lives?
- What does your characters’ night sky look like?
- How are the metropolises, towns, dreamy villages, futuristic gated communities, and other settlements connected — and what separates them?
Excellent fantasy writers prove that a picture isn’t necessarily worth more than a thousand words, but beautiful illustrations can immerse your readers in your story. The opportunity to include maps and family trees in your novel is often too good to miss out on, too, so consider hiring a fantasy illustrator for your book.
Crafting Your World’s Social System
Adventure and conflict are the driving forces in every good novel — and your fantasy book wouldn’t be complete with its own culture and complex social system. A world that feels alive must have:
- A system of government or multiple conflicting systems within different communities. Autocratic dictatorships, benevolent monarchies, and matriarchal democracies are some examples.
- Magic systems land themselves well to the creation of religions and mythological systems, and your fantasy universe should have dominant and minor philosophical systems as well.
- A class or caste system, or other hierarchy, of some kind.
- Plenty of culture — including cuisine, music, dance, and games.
Considering the History of Your World
What happened before your readers were introduced to the story? Fantasy authors instantly create richer and more believable worlds if the story makes organic references to past events — and the feelings characters have about them.
Try writing or diagramming a brief history of your world, where possible, before you even get into the flow of writing your chapters, so you can gradually allow your readers to grasp the complex past influencing your characters’ decisions and feelings.
Making Your World Come to Life Through Technology
Your fantasy novel may be set in a hyper-futuristic world where technology is all but indistinguishable from magic. It may also unfold in a sleepy medieval town, where your characters exist in harmony with nature.
What tools and machines do the people of your realm use to farm, cook, communicate, or travel? What happens when someone gets sick? How do your characters make their clothes? Pondering these questions, and others, allows you to set your fictional universe apart from the world we live in. The tools and machines your characters take for granted remind your readers that your universe is unique.
Where Do You Draw Inspiration for Worldbuilding?
Worldbuilding is one of the most challenging parts of writing a fantasy novel, but inspiration is all around you. Have you ever wondered what a magic stove would be like, or considered how to harness the power of flying pigs? What might a world where that beautiful green spider you saw yesterday was the size of a horse be like? Can you imagine an internet in a world without electricity? What would power it?
The act of imagining your world brings it to life and gives your characters a place to call home. Allow yourself to be led by your curiosity, and the world of your novel begins to build itself.
