The Art of Worldbuilding by Chloe C Peñaranda, author of The Bloodfire Oath

World building is often thought of as big picture elements such as maps, politics, and magic systems, but the art is in the subtlety. All of the major stuff can end up feeling like a painted backdrop, however elaborate, until the environment is affecting the people in it.

No matter the setting of the opening chapter, you can build the world around the characters’ every action to avoid paragraphs of exposition. What coin they’re using will establish the wealth of the world and their relationship to money. If there’s magic, the character observing that the fire is blue and they don’t know how it burns so long invites the reader into the intrigue of their moment. By keeping the protagonist moving and observing, we let the world paint around them. We want our audience living side by side with this character rather than having a story feel like the character has paused in their world to give us the run down we need to know before they get started on their role in it all.

Stories naturally center some big event––be that a war, political struggle, rebellion, a grand quest––but the world becomes convincing when we remember there’s ordinary lives operating around our protagonist’s goals. Someone is opening their shop in the morning, there’s hungry children on the streets for another day; incorporating these small details among all the action is what makes the world feel lived in. I love when the protagonist has a particular quirk that might be something like a love for baked goods where we might learn that particular spices are hard to import, or that strawberries only grow in winter far north. A fun part about world building is that we can flip expectations from our world.

Some of you might be familiar with Avatar: The Last Airbender and the iconic cabbage merchant. His frequent misfortune becomes a running joke, but he serves as a reminder that everyday lives exist around the chaos of the main cast, and that those lives can be affected by the events of the story. Characters like him are a very effective tool for world building. In gaming, NPCs often serve the same purpose by populating the world with people living their own routines and problems rather than existing to solely serve the player. It would be quite a shallow and boring world to explore without them, even though you often run right past them. While drafting, consider yourself the player in a game, get curious! You can have the most flawless magic system and a tight, incredible plot which falls flat if the world doesn’t have its quirks and mundane nuances.

It’s helpful to know your world deeper than what might ever make it onto the page. Like an iceberg, what’s seen on page is only part of the true scope. Having a broader understanding of your world beyond where the characters might go or learn avoids it feeling solely convenient for the characters. Knowing your world’s history, cultures, and past politics will help you understand why your characters behave how they do even if you never explain that directly to the audience. By knowing your world deeper than what’s needed for the main plot, you inadvertently build new character personalities and backstories as you write.

Finally, perhaps the most powerful thing fictional worlds can do is mirror our own in abstract ways. Inequality, war, environmental destruction, power dynamics, are just a few examples where, when examined through a fictional lens, provokes thought in our audience. The purpose isn’t to provide an answer or solution, it’s to open the discussion and invite reflection beyond the pages.

Overall, the art of world building is the art of creating a space where our audience can explore, evolve, and belong. It often takes months of brainstorming the important and obvious big picture elements, but I find some of the most interesting and fun pieces of world building come unexpectedly through drafting. A lot of the time, the best thing we can do is to finally start putting words to paper and let the art guide us.