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Every story requires worldbuilding, but writing in the fantasy genre presents a unique set of challenges. Your task is to create a world unlike our own, and it’s up to you to design everything about this world. This can be overwhelming, to say the least, so it’s important to jump in with a few key concepts in mind
Revise Tropes
Tropes are the building blocks of storytelling; they give a story structure, significance, and an ancestry. And like building blocks, they can and should be arranged in new and interesting patterns. It’s when writers copy tropes verbatim, without specificity or nuance, that they become cliché and lose believability.
Consider, for instance, the fantasy trope of the magic portal. Any story that includes a character travelling from a normal world to a fantasy world definitely includes one. They can be metaphorical, like when Frodo takes his first steps out of the Shire, or they can be literal, like when Harry Potter runs through a train station wall to reach Platform 93/4.
One of my personal favorites is the rabbit hole that Alice tumbles down. The trope works in this instance because it’s distinct, detailed, and specific. Carroll transforms a mundane object into one of wonder. Essentially, he takes a well-established trope and puts his own spin on it.
So, when creating your own fantasy worlds, try to identify which tropes you use, and consider how you can make them different. When you’re making something new, you’re halfway there to creating a dynamic and exciting world.
Magic Needs Rules
All right, you’ve created something new. Now, how do you render it believable? I don’t mean by this that it must be realistic, though I don’t not mean this either. When something is believable, that simply means that it’s coherent and that the reader trusts in its truth in the world of the story.
To render your tropes and world believable, make and keep rules. This particularly relates to one of the more obvious hallmarks of fantasy, magic. It’s crucial that you give your magic boundaries and rules. Simply put, explain how it works. This relates back to making your tropes specific. The more time you devote to building a unique, detailed world, the more believable it will be.
One example of really great worldbuilding in this regard is Dana Terrace’s television series The Owl House. In it, the magic system is expanded upon at length, which not only renders the world more interesting and engaging but also makes it feel real. We know precisely how magic works, who can use it, what its limits are, and how it is used.
In this way, the story avoids creating over-powered characters (and plot holes), and also creates a world that the writers can shape with confidence since they understand exactly how it works.
Sweat the Small Stuff
Worldbuilding does not just mean creating vast geographies, cultures, and political systems; it also means deciding how your characters get their breakfast, what they learned in school, whether their mattresses are hard or soft. It means thoroughly creating a world, with all the minute details that comprise daily life.
The best way to do this is to start on a character level. How are your characters shaped by ordinary life? How does its disruption (since story always means disruption) impact them? Your world should become its own character, one that is just as dynamic and detailed as any other.
No one does this better than Tolkien. He shows not only how his characters adventure, but also how they live in Middle Earth. His cultures have a vast history, in a macro and a micro sense. We learn as much about family squabbles as we do about vast political conflicts. This is important, because all of these things are what compose daily life, and are what make a world believable.
Diversity Exists Everywhere
One trope that you do want to avoid is Planet of the Hats. This is when all the characters of a specific culture look and behave the same. This rids your worlds of nuance and believability. Sometimes, especially when you only spend a brief amount of time in a particular world, this trope is unavoidable. But you should still endeavor to show the internal diversity of your worlds, especially when you have multiple cultures in the same story.
This brings me to my second point: you should have multiple cultures in the same story. A world of monolithic people is not interesting. You should strive to represent a diversity of viewpoints and characters in your story.
Avatar the Last Airbender is a great example of worldbuilding with an understanding of how culture functions. The world has four distinctive, but overlapping cultures, which also have internal diversity. Not everyone from the Fire Nation looks, acts, or believes the same things, and the same is true of the Earth Kingdom. When creating your own stories, consider how your characters are shaped by their cultures, but also how they behave as individuals.
Adapt as You Write
With everything I’ve presented so far, it might seem like you need to know everything about your story’s world before you start writing. While it is true that you need to have a good grasp of your world going in, it’s okay to still have some gaps in your understanding.
Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the greatest fantasy writers of all time, suggests that a writer “believe in” their world, and trust it to reveal itself to them.
When writing the Earthsea novels, Le Guin admits that she didn’t go in knowing everything; in fact, she often wrote about events that she didn’t fully understand yet. Nevertheless, she trusted that the world of her story was well-developed enough that it would adapt with her. So, take your time and plan with caution. Don’t be too rigid in your world-building; you never know what discoveries it will reveal to you if you let it.
Worlds of Words
I’ll leave you with what I believe to be the most important part of understanding worldbuilding. You are making a world composed entirely of words. To quote Le Guin, “Exact and vivid words make an exact and vivid world.”1 Your world can only be found in what you write. This is a difficult task, but it’s also an endlessly rewarding one. The world is literally what you make of it.
About the Author: Kaitlyn Connors is a rising senior at Smith College studying English with an emphasis in creative writing. She is fond of coffee, Shakespeare, light breezes, the sound of crisp page turns, moths, goosebumps, bad drawings of cats, and the general vibe of autumn. She is currently studying abroad at Oxford University. More of her work can be found at www.thesunsetowl.com.