Ah, worldbuilding. The bane of my existence as a writer.

Not because I don’t like doing it–I do. I just really, really hate the place it occupies in the discourse around writing speculative fiction, especially fantasy.

Worldbuilding is the process of creating a setting that feels lived-in, coherent, nebulously real in some way. This is especially important (or is it? we’ll talk about that later) when your story takes place in a “second world,” a world that isn’t our own. Y’know, Middle-Earth, Westeros, Narnia, etc.

What’s the history of this world? What kind of cultures and politics exist in it? What’s the technology level? Languages? Ethnic or racial groups? If magic exists, how does that affect the world’s social systems and political structures?

There are literally thousands of further questions you could ask along those lines that could all go into “worldbuilding.”

The problem is that, far too often, worldbuilding becomes an end unto itself for many writers.

Now, some people just enjoy worldbuilding for its own sake. That’s fine. If all you like to do is to imagine different worlds and the stories that might take place in them, then worldbuild away.

What I’m talking about is worldbuilding as part of the process of writing a fantasy story, whether that be a novel, a series, a short story, a video game, or whatever. For the purposes of my argument and all the advice within, worldbuilding is a part of a longer process, not something you do for its own sake.

Are we all agreed on the boundaries of this discussion? Cool. Let’s get to brass tacks.

STOP WORLDBUILDING AND WRITE YOUR &$?%@#! STORY

In a way, worldbuilding appeals to the exact part of our brains that makes us like fantasy in general, right? Fantasy is about escaping into another world, a world of thrills and possibilities that you categorically could not experience in the real world. Worldbuilding is the foundation for those possibilities–if you wish you could be a wizard, then worldbuilding lets you figure out why wizards exist in your world and what kind of stuff they get up to.

But, and here’s the dark side of why it’s appealing, it’s also the easy part.

Writing prose fiction is hard. The real thrill of writing spec-fic is writing the adventures of the wizard (or knight, or assassin, or whatever) in narrative form. But it’s hard.

Worldbuilding provides a taste of that thrill–y’know, the reason most of us are there–at a fraction of the work. Instead of the hard work of writing (and proofreading, revising, rewriting) a series of scenes that form into chapters and then books, you just have to imagine wizards doing cool stuff and write it in the form of notes, or extremely high-level narration that’s more akin to the blurb on the back (or opening narration in a video game) than actual prose fiction.

Then just keep doing that. For every kingdom, every guild, every dark lord, every great hero, every magical artifact. Keep filling the world, keep avoiding the story.

Now, to be clear, all those details you’ve created might be very cool and interesting, and might even be important to the actual story you’re trying to write.

And I’m also not implying that good worldbuilding doesn’t require skill, talent, and work. Many fantasy stories are crammed with sloppy or lazy worldbuilding, stuff that makes absolutely no sense if you stop to think about it for more than a second. In those cases it’d almost always be better if the story had no worldbuilding and just took place in a generic, nebulous fantasy world. So it’s obviously not just something anybody can unthinkingly do.

At the same time, it’s not the work of writing a novel. It might–might!–be part of that work, but it isn’t the work. And it leads many less-experienced writers down some dark paths.

How much writing advice have you heard that boils down to “don’t infodump on your reader”? Whether or not you’ve experienced a lot of stories that do this, the sheer ubiquity of the advice points to a reality that many stories have severe problems with either A.) balancing their worldbuilding against other elements of the story, B.) communicating that worldbuilding to the reader, or both.

And if you haven’t actually read a lot of stories with those problems, it’s because the pitching, editing, and publishing process filters a lot of it out. This problem is rampant among less-experienced, self-published, and amateur writers, and one of the things keeping many of them in that limbo. Participate in any writer’s workshop or local writing circle and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Both of the problems I mentioned above emerge naturally from the relative ease of worldbuilding as compared against actually writing the meat of the story. You’ve created all this information about your world, and now you naturally want to use it. But since you’ve been exercising the glamor muscles of worldbuilding instead of the core muscles of writing good narrative prose and then revising, the only way you know how to put all that info in is through a massive infodump that you are then hesitant to change or get rid of.

But all hope is not lost. I’ve compiled a handy list here of techniques designed to help you become a better writer and worldbuilder. Some of these tips will pertain to the worldbuilding itself, but most are actually tailored to the writing process–they’re for how to properly incorporate worldbuilding into your story. Y’know, the actual important part.

But before you even get to that point, ask yourself…

HOW MUCH WORLDBUILDING DO I NEED?

Let’s be careful here–in a very abstract sense, there really is no such thing as too much worldbuilding. If we were immortal beings who could spend unlimited time crafting our fictional universes and stories, then there’d be no case where knowing something about your world would be detrimental to a story set in that world.

But below that entirely-theoretical, highly-abstract level, down on Earth, there absolutely is such a thing as too much worldbuilding if it gets in the way of you writing your story, or your story being good.

I talked about this when I discussed an unpublished novel of mine set in the same fantasy world as my upcoming Seed of the Black Oak. I had way too much in there about the agricultural practices of my main character’s village.

I liked that material. (Still do, in fact.) It was nice slice-of-life content, firmly rooted in historical research, and it made me feel like her village was a real place I could visit.

It was also boring as shit! It’s not why people read epic fantasy stories!

But, as I mentioned in the article linked above, it was helpful for me to write it. I understood my own world better, which came into play when I wrote Seed of the Black Oak, set in that world but on another continent.

That world was always intended to be the setting of multiple epic stories with global scales, and relatively historically-grounded. In that case, a nice big hock of worldbuilding is appropriate and relevant, provided it’s threaded into the story well.

But what if your story is more gonzo? What if it’s more character-driven? What if it’s less rooted in history and more in your imagination? (All stories are rooted in imagination to some degree, but what if you aren’t using history as a self-imposed limitation like I was?)

In those and many other cases, you might not need all that much worldbuilding. Knowing how a village irrigates their crops might be a completely irrelevant waste of time.

Crop irrigation is an extreme example, sure, but the same could very well be true of the history of a kingdom or faction, or the origin of magic, or the intricacies of how some Maguffin came to be in some ancient temple, or whatever.

Learning about design has helped me conceptualize the place of worldbuilding (and other techniques) in my writing. What am I trying to achieve, and what is the effect of utilizing a technique? How does worldbuilding support my artistic goals for this book or story?

Do you want readers to have the sense that you could write an entire wiki about your world, with full articles for every city, war, tribe, character, and historical event?

Or do you want the reader’s mind firmly on your characters and their immediate needs?

Either approach is valid, as are many that fall somewhere between them.

Each also requires a different approach to worldbuilding.

Once you’ve figured that out and decided how much worldbuilding you actually need, then it’s time to start actually doing it.

START WITH THE BARE MINIMUM

This is the most high-level advice I can offer to help you get your worldbuilding done without becoming mired in it. When approaching worldbuilding as a discrete task (rather than something that emerges through writing), you want to start with goals and do the bare minimum to achieve those goals.

If you’ve got a whole fantasy world with lots of different countries and empires and factions, that’s fine, but if your story is only going to deal with two or three of them, then just focus on those right now. Yes, it’s fun to design intricate and interconnected histories between many different groups, but you’re writing a story, remember?

So if your story takes place entirely in the Kingdom of Daffodils, and the main group involved is the Thieves’ Guild, then those are the things you need to be sketching out during your worldbuilding.

Maybe the neighboring Kingdom of Lilies is also relevant to your story because the history of both kingdoms is shaped by recurrent warfare between them. So you need some level of understanding of the Kingdom of Lilies in order to understand the Kingdom of Daffodils, right?

Well, maybe, but you don’t need that to start writing the story. Worry about the Kingdom of Lilies later. “The two kingdoms have a rocky relationship” is enough to go on at the beginning; for now, only worldbuild around the Kingdom of Lilies as it pertains directly to the Kingdom of Daffodils, the actual setting of your story.

This doesn’t mean that your finished story can’t and won’t contain worldbuilding elements related to other kingdoms or factions or characters or customs or whatever. It just means you don’t need them to get started.

This will actually help you in the long run, because worldbuilding can act as a straightjacket in much the same way that outlines can. If the needs of the story change, or you come upon a need that you didn’t anticipate, having aspects of the world hidden behind a fog of war allows you to bend those realities to your newfound story need rather than trying to fit the story into a preconceived worldbuilding element.

This leads into the next piece of advice…

WORLDBUILD AS YOU GO

Drop elements into your world as you write the story. Your protagonist meets a character who’s a member of the Thieves’ Guild–now start fleshing the Thieves’ Guild out. It’s okay if you already know a lot about them going into it, but often the most important and interesting aspects of a world are the ones that emerge through the telling of a story. Maybe a character detail occurs to you as you’re describing that character–a verbal tic, a specific way they move their body, a tattoo. Could that characteristic be related to an element of the world? A hidden verbal cue or coded message? The result of a very specific style of martial arts training? A guild tattoo?

You shouldn’t do this for every single character trait your characters have–some quirks should be personal, or mysterious–but always be asking yourself how you might connect the disparate elements of your story to maximize their utility.

This applies to scenery and set dressing too. Purple curtains? Well, why does the Thieves’ Guild use purple? Does the color represent something in the culture of your world? Is it because the first “big break” that put them on the map was a daring heist of a huge shipment of rare purple snail shells used to make dye?

Or, y’know, maybe the curtains are just blue. I’m not saying you have to do this every single time–just when it makes sense, when a good idea comes to you, or when you feel that the story does need a little bit of worldbuilding.

This kind of thing should start coming naturally to you once you learn to…

THREAD WORLDBUILDING INTO THE PROSE

Think of worldbuilding like seasoning. It’s an integral part of making a tasty dish, but what spices you use and how much depend on the experience you’re going for. In the majority of cases, you’re looking for seasoning to enhance, meld, and amplify the flavors of your ingredients, not cover them up.

While we often think of worldbuilding in terms of big infodumps, you get the most bang for your buck in the accumulation of small, even tiny, worldbuilding elements scattered throughout your prose like seasoning in a really good sauce. You don’t taste the individual grains of salt or cracks of pepper; instead, the sauce is smooth and those elements contribute to the overall taste.

Here’s a few examples from Seed of the Black Oak. In this scene, Epi, a commoner, has come face-to-face with princess Alywael for the first time. Here’s the narration setting the scene:

Their parents–from Epi’s farmer father all the way up to Princess Alywael’s father, King Lur–were a short walk away, in Lweyn’s Grove, leaving offerings for the great god. The commoner children, who stood at the back of the crowd during such rituals, had sneaked away to play-fight with sticks, girls versus boys.

In an earlier draft of this, I might’ve described who the god Lweyn was, what offerings were being left for him, and why. That would’ve been an intrusion onto the scene, though, which is really about Epi and Aly. Since I’m using a close-third-person POV, all I need to describe in the narration is what Epi would think–she knows who Lweyn is, and now the reader knows that he’s an important god who her people leave offerings to. (You can see we’re also adhering to the principle of “how much worldbuilding is actually needed?”)

Much later (chronologically), Epi is riding through a town called Cohern. Her arrival is narrated thusly:

Spring had arrived by the time Epi reached the town of Cohern, and the night sky wept above her. She had traveled through this town on her way south, when it was part of the Betwwylth, but hardly remembered it. Now, it marked the furthest reaches of the Solaran Empire in Arraldyn, indicated by the foundations of a Solaran castrum on the outskirts of town.

The worldbuilding element present here–that the Solaran Empire is encroaching into Arraldyn–is presented as Epi’s observation. It is something she sees as she goes into town, and it is left somewhat implied–on her way south through the town, the castrum wasn’t there. Now, on her way back, it is. The world is changing around her; the Empire’s reach is expanding.

One more, from an unpublished manuscript set in the same world:

A stone counter ran along the inside of the temple upon which were set up three shines, one against each wall. On the left as you entered was a stone statue of a slender woman crowned in gold, wearing a stola with one breast exposed; this was Solara. On the right was the bearded, toga-wearing and lightning-bolt-sword-wielding Konak, the king of the gods. His little stone sword had been broken, probably a long time ago, and looked more like an oddly-curved dagger. Both icons sat upon pedestals atop the counter, facing each other.

I am not describing this temple because I need the readers to know about Solara and Konak; I’m doing it because that’s what the protagonist sees when she walks into it for plot-related reasons. A couple of important things happen in this small village shrine, so the reader needs a sense of what it looks like, but through that description we know:

• This society worships multiple gods
• Religious worship is done in temples shared between those gods
• They build icons/statues of their gods
• Konak is the chief god, and Solara is also of high importance to the people of this village
• The protagonist, Hazel, notices the goddess Solara before the head god, Konak (revealing character)

Now, this might seem like very bare-bones information, but that’s the point. You do stuff like this twenty, thirty, forty times throughout the course of the book, and by the end the reader has a good sense of how religion works in your world, without you having to dump a bunch of expository narration on them at once.

Going back to the “purple curtains’ example, characters don’t need to explain elements as soon as they arise in the story. Note the purple curtains and move on. Then, later, when it becomes relevant for your protagonist to learn more about the history of the Thieves’ Guild, someone can tell them about the heist of the purple dye.

Which brings us to my next point. When it is time for a character (rather than the narration) to deliver some worldbuilding, do it with some care. Your thief character should not clear her throat and say, “These curtains are purple because in the year 436, guildmaster Geoffrey came upon a shipment of snail shells…” Instead,

CHARACTERS SHOULD DISCUSS THEIR WORLD NATURALLY

In most fantasy worlds, it doesn’t actually make sense for characters to explain aspects of their world in a way that a reader of a story in a different universe would understand.

Yes, there are times when it makes sense for a character to describe something about the world they live in.

But think very carefully about how often you do, or see, this happen in real life. Your characters are not pieces on a game board; treat them with more respect than that! If you want them to feel like real people, and your world to feel like a real world, then they should talk like real people.

I have a graduate degree in history and am a United States History teacher. So it’s actually fairly common in my day-to-day life for me to be explaining some aspect of history or society to someone, whether that be a student or a friend/acquaintance who knows my background and thus that I’d be a good person to ask about the political economy of the antebellum United States, or why Easter is named after an Anglo-Saxon deity.

Is that common for most people, though?

If your fictional world works generally like the real world, then people will only talk about that stuff when they have a reason to. Your job is to keep your eyes open for those reasons, and make good use of them when they arise.

Here’s one from Seed. Epi and Aly are traveling with Aly’s family to a set of ancient standing stones to complete a religious ritual.

The king spoke from the front of their retinue, just a silhouette in the fog. “The stones of ly gwennec are within the mist,” he called. “Dismount!”

Everyone obeyed. As she swung her legs off the left side of the horse, Epi asked, “Why do we have to dismount?”

When nobody responded after a few seconds, Aly plopped down on the grass next to Epi and said, louder, “Why do we have to walk?”

“To bring a beast beyond the stones is to offer it to the gods,” Magla said in reply, walking towards King Lur. “If we rode our horses in, we would be obligated to sacrifice them.”

Having child protagonists makes this a bit easier, because they naturally need adult things explained to them more often. But this feels more real (if I do say so myself) because the adults actually don’t answer Epi, because she’s a commoner and they don’t consider her important, so they don’t listen to her. It’s only when Aly notices this and echoes Epi’s question to pull an answer out of the adults that we, the reader, get the worldbuilding. (I’m also maximizing utility by revealing character at the same time; Aly pays attention to how the adults in her life treat Epi, and works to counteract it.)

BUT BE CAREFUL!

One thing you should not do is contrive reasons for characters to talk about aspects of your worldbuilding. The easiest and most classic way to do this is by having a viewpoint character who, for one reason or another, doesn’t know anything about how things work and needs to have basic shit explained to them.

This can work in portal fantasy and is a well-weathered trope for a reason. It’s also slightly more appropriate for younger protagonists, as above. But it’s also become highly visible to most readers/audiences, and if we’re being honest, it’s the lazy, cheap way to do it.

But there are even worse ways.

Any time I read a scene where a character is being verbally quizzed on things they already know, I know exactly what the author is doing. Or when a character has to read out some kind of predetermined expositional speech as part of a ritual or task they’ve been given. (Example–a character in a faction has to state the history of that faction’s founding as part of calling a gathering to order.)

Or, and I’ve been guilty of this one, having characters randomly get involved in some kind of debate or discussion about some element of the world’s history just because the author wants the reader to know about it.

Now, these kinds of conversations do happen in the real world. The problem is when they’re given to characters that have no actual reason for discussing this thing, or at a time when they have no reason to discuss it.

My brother and I are both very politically and historically-engaged people. At family gatherings, we are very likely to get into some kind of discussion at some point about current events or history, because that’s who we are. Our family members expect it.

Our father was not like that. He was endlessly exasperated by our conversations and actively avoided them. For him, they spoiled everyone’s good time. They got in the way of relaxing and being with family.

Now imagine a scene where the author wants to have some aspect of their world’s history explained. Me and my brother are not in the scene, but our dad is. So the author just has my dad get involved in that conversation, or contrives a reason for my brother and I to enter the scene so we can have it.

In the first case, a character is acting out-of-character. In the second, characters are placed in the scene just so they can deliver exposition.

In both cases, you are letting the worldbuilding get in the way of the story. Conversations should reveal character; making my dad have a conversation about history would be mischaracterization. Scenes, on the other hand, should advance the story in some way (story, not necessarily plot); putting characters into a scene who don’t have a diegetic reason to be there is muddying up the scene.

So you need to let the reader know about a current event that’s relevant to your story, but there aren’t any characters in the current scene who it would make sense to deliver it.

If that’s really the case…then are you sure you need that worldbuilding element in there right at that moment?

Maybe you do. I could imagine a situation where, for example, characters are doing or discussing something and you want to create some dramatic irony by having the reader aware of some background or lore element that changes their perception of whatever the characters are doing or discussing. (Maybe they’re bragging about how their king is going to conquer some castle, but we the reader know that that castle has an enormous dragon living beneath it who will surely annihilate the king’s army.)

This is a case where you probably need to go back and add that element to an earlier scene where it makes sense, or create a new scene taking place before this one where you can get that piece of information to your reader in a more natural way.

While it’s good practice to come up with answers to worldbuilding questions as they become relevant in writing the story, that doesn’t mean you need to introduce (or re-introduce) them every time they’re important for the reader to know. Trust your readers to remember important or interesting details. If an element of your world is important enough that it’s going to affect the plot, then it will definitely fit naturally into the scene you’re writing; if not, then it probably doesn’t really need to be there.

But that doesn’t mean you should cut out every element of worldbuilding that doesn’t affect the plot. On the contrary, you should actively and purposefully…

DON’T EXPLAIN EVERYTHING

Building on our principle that normal people don’t go around explaining their world in conversation, you should be willing and eager to drop elements of worldbuilding into the story and then never explain them. Not because they’re mysterious and unexplainable, but because they’re so obvious and well-understood that nobody needs to explain them.

Even when I am explaining historical things to someone I know, I’m still using whatever shared frames of reference I have with the person I’m talking to in order to help them understand. I may be telling someone about Dimitri Tsafendas, but I’m not stopping to explain the entire apartheid system before I do so.

Likewise, your characters might have a good reason to talk about some aspect of their world’s religion or society, but they’re not going to stop to explain every surrounding detail. They may be talking about an unsung hero who died in the Witch’s War, but if they expect their audience to already know what the Witch’s War is, they’re just going to go straight to talking about that unsung hero.

This is a good thing. Aside from making your conversations flow better, it’ll pique the reader’s interest. Either more detail about the Witch’s War will be given later and they’ll get a satisfying answer, or it won’t, and it’ll make the world feel bigger than whatever is happening in your story.

And in a lot of cases, the latter is actually better. Not to sound like a GenXer (I was born in 1992, I’m solidly a millennial), but The Clone Wars were fascinating to me when Luke and Obi-Wan referenced them as a past event in Star Wars (1977) without explaining anything. Clone Wars? What could that have been about? And there were lots of Jedi fighting in them? I want to know more!

Then the prequels come along and utterly annihilate the mystique. (Sorry, fellow millennials and younger; this is not a safe space for prequel revisionism.) After Attack of the Clones, and then that animated Clone Wars movie, the feeling of “Wow, that was a lot cooler in my imagination” was so potent that I never even bothered to watch the TV show (which I hear is good, but I’m not interested).

Let your world have things like that. Fallout: New Vegas director Josh Sawyer talks about this in regards to a reference that Chief Hanlon of the NCR makes to all his veteran rangers being tied up “chasing ghosts down in Baja.” This is never explained in or out of the game, intentionally. The point isn’t to fill out a wiki; the point is to give the player the impression of a larger world, and to characterize the NCR as overextended, with too many fingers in too many pies. That hasn’t stopped New Vegas fans from speculating about it for over a decade, though!

Wouldn’t that be so cool, as a writer, to have people obsessing about some little line you wrote for 15 years and counting?

Whether Sawyer or any other New Vegas writers actually know what that is referring to, there are many situations where even if you as the writer know the answer, you don’t need to put it in the story. Whether you’re putting in a hanging reference, like ghosts in Baja, or something that you’ll later come back to and explain, like the Clone Wars, it pays to…

COME UP WITH EXPLANATIONS FOR EVERYTHING YOU CAN

With the caveat firmly in mind that not all of this will make it into your story, you should still try to figure out explanations for as many elements of your world as you can.

And this isn’t just general advice, I’m going to give some tips for how to do this.

Of course I’m biased, but you should study history. Even if your world isn’t intended to be very historically-grounded, studying history gives you so many worldbuilding ideas it’s almost unfair you’ll never get to use them all.

Etymologies are great ways to start. For example, family names–many of them are based on occupations, right? Smith, Taylor, Miller, Baker, etc.

But that’s not worldbuilding…yet. Let’s push that concept a bit, all the way back to a world’s prehistory, when clans were the dominant form of social and familial organization, rather than nuclear or patriarchal families. What if a clan’s name originated due to a specific lifestyle that their ancestors practiced? Let’s take as an example, I don’t know…swineherding.

Again from Seed, here’s Epi listening to a conversation between Aly’s father, the king, and his brother.

“War with the Caor is upon us,” King Lur announced. He turned to his brother, who stood up. “Brother, tell Rinoget to travel to Oceleen and inform the boar clans to increase iron production for our smiths. Then you go to the Afydd with gifts and ensure they remain neutral. King Colain will pay for letting that infernal sorcerer loose upon our lands.”

Who or what are “the boar clans”? Epi doesn’t know, and this is not a situation where it’s appropriate for her to ask. So it goes unanswered.

But I know. It’s not a secret, so I’ll spoil it here–they’re a group of clans (extended-family units that are all members of the same tribe) whose distant ancestors were swineherders, and thus their names are related to that. By the time the story takes place, however, they’ve settled in a mountainous area and provide their tribe with most of its iron.

None of that is directly relevant to plot or story of Seed of the Black Oak, so it doesn’t need to be in there. It’s worldbuilding that I came up with, and dropped a hanging reference to into the story, but it doesn’t need to be explained.

On its own it gives the impression of a wider world, of a king who is more knowledgeable than the child Epi, but it also helps me as the author, because now I know how the Hwen get their iron. If that ever becomes relevant in a future story (and it will), I won’t get stuck or have to make new things up. I have a good sense of how my own world works.

Using history as an inspiration doesn’t have to mean making a fantasy version of historical events. Ronald Hutton’s work on the pagan history of the British Isles was a huge inspiration on Seed, but one of the big takeaways from that work is that we really don’t know very much about it! So even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have just recreated those societies but with magic and elves.

What I could do is look at what evidence we do have about those societies, and then use my imagination to fill in the blanks. My fantasy version of Britain, Arraldyn, also had a prehistoric precursor culture that built enormous megaliths that are the subject of wonder, awe, and religious devotion by the later, Celtic-inspired culture Epi belongs to. How did one give way to the other?

Well, I have ideas about how that might’ve happened in the real Britain, but I don’t know. Nobody on Earth does. We have ideas, and they might be pretty close to accurate, but we can’t know.

I do know how it happened in Arraldyn, though!

This means that when Epi gazes in wonder at the ancient menhirs she passes on the way to visit Aly, I know who put them there, and why. And if/when they become important, I already know what’s going on, even if Epi doesn’t.

Now, my background in history might make it a little easier for me to imagine things that are a little more historically grounded, but we’re talking about fantasy stories. They don’t need to be historically grounded.

And unless you really like reading academic history or primary sources, you can usually get what you need from Wikipedia and maybe a few supplementary sources as they come up.

You don’t even need to use real history! In fact, sometimes you shouldn’t!

The rudimentary writing style used by Epi’s culture is called Ictham, and it’s obviously based on the Irish Ogham. But when reading about Ogham, I discovered the (discredited) theory that it had originally been based on a form of sign language, and that its characters were best understood as representations of hand signs.

Historically, it doesn’t seem there’s any truth to this. But how effing cool would that be? It immediately went into the book–Ictham, unlike the real Ogham, actually is based on an ancient form of sign language, and while I can’t spoil any details, this had a direct affect on my world’s magic system.

So, yeah. Learn about history, including “wrong” historical theories. History is the coolest fucking thing in the world. It’s an endless treasure trove of ideas for worldbuilding. Steal from it liberally–just understand what you’re stealing, and if you’re going to change things, think through what would be different if that thing happened in your world.

Actually, I’ll have to do a whole separate article about how to use history for worldbuilding.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I know I spent a good chunk of this post railing against over-worldbuilding, but again, this is in the context of writing the story. It’s not that you can know too much about your world; the problem is having that knowledge detract from the story.

Knowing the answer to a question about your world will never detract from your story, provided you exercise restraint and good judgment about what information the reader needs to know.

I keep coming back to the idea of worldbuilding as seasoning in a really good sauce. You know it’s there, you can taste it in every bite, but it isn’t intrusive. There’s no texture to it. That’s not what it’s there for–the texture comes from the characters, the conflict, the story. The seasoning is there to enhance and bring those elements together.

Let me know your best worldbuilding tips, or about a bit of worldbuilding you’re particularly proud of, in the comments!