Worldbuilding: Notes from When Words Collide

What to say about World Building? There’s enough info (and opinions) to fill, well… a whole new world! I was honoured to be a guest panelist and speak to the subject at When Words Collide 2024 in Calgary. Even though world building is already intrinsic to pretty much every single thing I write, I decided to bone up on the subject.

Here’s some links that I found helpful.

Building a Fictional World: A Novelist’s Guide – The Darling Axe

Fantasy writer Michelle Barker has a ton of great advice and links for things such as questionnaires to help you flesh your work out. One of my key takeaways here is her advice “The world is not the story.” Don’t overbuild it, but if you do, that’s OK. I tend to go deep: for me to know why and how things happen, I need to know a lot of stuff. BUT: The reader doesn’t. Only share what is needed to advance plot, character, story and keep the rest in your pocket until you need it. Among other reasons, you may need to evolve your world as your story develops, and it’s a pain to have to backtrack and change things that no longer apply, especially if you didn’t need to explain it in the first place.

15 Worldbuilding Tips for Writers (Templates and Examples) (kindlepreneur.com)

Writer Dave Chesson has a very well-developed section on this, built especially for sci-fi and fantasy writers. I especially like that he explains how avoid clichés and traps that so many of us coming from Euro-centric-type fiction and cultural backgrounds easily slip into. And like Barker, above, he says “only use 10% of your world-building.”

Worldbuilding 101: An Exercise (substack.com)

Nicole Peeler is a novelist, essayist, and Director of the MFA in Writing Popular Fiction at Seton Hill University. I especially like how she addresses the fact that even a literary story set in modern today might need some world building. She speaks to subtleties that writers creating giant, universe-spanning sci-fi epics might gloss over, such as furniture or why the protagonist might live in a particular, real-world city where the story takes place as opposed to some other city, and how that choice impacts character and story.

Questions? Opinions? Contact me. But be nice, please?