Worldbuilding can be an overwhelming process, especially if you’re working in a genre that requires lots of it. Some genres need more detail than others. For example, writing in a historical genre requires that you conduct lots of research on the society you placed the story in, but you don’t need to worry about inventing a new society or anything like that. However, for genres such as fantasy and science fiction, you might be constructing new societies, new cultures, and entirely new settings with rules unlike our own. That takes up quite a bit of time, and it can be hard to keep track of what you need to construct.

To handle an overwhelming process, it’s best to take things one step at a time. If you’re climbing a mountain, you can’t expect to climb to the top in one day. Organizing everything you need to world-build by importance in your story will establish a track for you to stick with. This will keep you focused not only on what you need to build, but also on what your readers will need to learn.

Here are three tiers of worldbuilding that you can work on before writing without feeling overwhelmed.

 

Tier One: What You Need to Explain Right Away

Before you even begin writing, you need to establish the core ideas of the new world you’re creating. You will need to be able to convey all of this information clearly, as your readers will experience this information for the first time as soon as they start reading the first page. With this in mind, it’s best to plan everything ahead of time in order to dive into your first draft when you’re ready.

I personally like to create worldbuilding documents on my computer that put all of the information I will need in one place. That way, I not only have everything organized, but I can also go back later and change or improve on any details if I want to.

Obviously, the major aspects of the world you need to create are unique to you. However, readers will absolutely need to understand the following right away when they are introduced to this incredible new place:

  • Setting –When you’re creating a new world with characteristics that are different from reality, readers need to imagine everything quickly. If you have a character walking around, say, a market in a fantasy world, what do they see? Are there strange purple fruits and vegetables that the vendors are selling? Are the sellers only allowed to wear red because of some ancient custom?
  • Important characters – Who does the protagonist come across in the first few pages? If they’re set to play a major role, make sure this character is a developed, three-dimensional personality and not just a blank canvas.

Keep in mind that readers do not need to know everything about these concepts. You wouldn’t expect your characters to know everything about your world as they explore either. You don’t even know all the information! Instead, be sure to let the reader organically learn how the world works a little bit at a time. A lot of writers do this by having a character exploring the world from their perspective at the very beginning of the book. This could be the main protagonist walking down the street through the village market, for example. Readers see everything through this one perspective, and they easily start piecing together the important information as the character interacts with it.

This tier of information is the backbone to the entire function of your world. However, you can’t place all the worldbuilding in the beginning of your story and ignore everything afterward. Next comes the second tier, which will add layers of complexity to the first.

 

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Tier Two: What You Need to Explain at Some Point

So you have the basics down, next comes additional elaboration on those basics. These are details that are important to the story, but they might not be details that are important to the beginning of the story. For example, suppose your protagonist’s main purpose is to reach a town to deliver an important message, but, as per the rising action, they come across new things in your world. This could be:

  • Additional characters or people groups – How are new characters developed to stand out from your protagonist and have their own voice? How might a new society you introduced have different customs than your protagonist?
  • A new setting based on your world – This goes along with new societies, but also new nature. What if the plants and trees look different in this part of your world?

For this tier, you’re describing the basics of a setting, person, or something else, but you don’t need to take notes on it right away. After all, you need to get the Tier 1 basics of your story down first. If you try to come up with everything in one sitting, things can become confusing and overwhelming. Prioritize the first few ideas, then add on from there.

 

Tier Three: What You Can Explain Later

Lastly, start worldbuilding some extra details that will be fun to include in your story. You can start working on this tier even while you begin your first draft, as likely most of the information won’t be absolutely essential to include. Additionally, these small details can be added at any time, even after you complete a draft or pass the part of the story you wanted to insert it in. These details could be anything from the meaning behind the colors of someone’s clothing to a cool plant a character might come across.

These details add more color to your world, but they aren’t things readers need to know right away. While this tier might be the most fun part for a lot of writers, this is where writers can get carried away. They end up spending all their time and energy on organizing these details without moving forward with the story, or they weigh readers down trying to include it all in their drafts. Remember that you shouldn’t focus on so many of these details that you distract from the actual story. You can have detail density, but everything you include should be relevant and keep your readers engaged.

It’s very likely that you want to change something in your worldbuilding later. By getting the big picture ideas down and organized first, you now have more time to sit on these ideas. If you discover something that doesn’t make sense about the way your world works, or you come up with a better solution to something, you now have everything in front of you to tweak things accordingly.

Having a mindful organization will help keep the overwhelming feelings at bay. This organization doesn’t look the same for every writer, but taking a mindful approach to how you world-build will not only organize every detail, but also better allow you to include more detail for your waiting readers.

 

 

E. M. Sherwood Foster is a fiction writer, poet, and graduate student at the University of Cambridge, St. Edmund’s. She is also the creator of the Foster Your Writing blog. Her work has appeared in over twenty literary journals, including Aurora Journal, Sour Cherry Mag, and Paragraph Planet. Her chapbooks have been published by Yavanika Press (2022) and Ghost City Press (2023). You can find more of her articles here.