What is good worldbuilding?

[Yora]

I know, a perfectly harmless and uncomplicated question, right?

Worldbuilding is an element of fantasy that everyone agrees is important, but on which there is a wide range of opinions on how it is used well. Some works seem overloaded, others anemic, some are seen as amazingly creative and others as underwhelmingly bland.
But most discussions I see on the topic are either about the right amount of complexity and exposition, or whether specific elements are sufficiently creative or overdone.

Yet one aspect of worldbuilding that interests me is its structure. I think good worldbuilding is always more than the sum of its parts. Worldbuilding gets noticed when the various elements are mutually supporting and building on each other and when they have direct visible impacts on the plot. I believe when people are talking about too much worldbuilding (and when people complain about worldbuilding in general they really just mean too much exposition), they are talking about elements that don't seem to contribute to the plot or make the required background information too complex to easily follow the plot.

I think the main focus of attention when doing worldbuilding for fantasy should be on making the major elements interconnected. Not necessarily making the entire setting revolve around one single thing, but to look for ways how the various major elements are affecting each other.

 

[Ban]

Good worldbuilding to me, must be able to make me believe that there is a fully worked-out history/culture/ecology/etcetera beyond the confines of the story. Whether this is actually the case or not depends on the author's preference and artistic vision.

 

[CupofJoe]

For me [ a self-confessed World Builder] I think it should be a bit like the music in a film or game. You should almost not notice that it is there, it just gives you that added dimension to your enjoyment. When you get to the point of noticing the world building, then I think it is too late. Not a perfect analogy I'll admit as there are some great film scores that completely dominate a film [try imagining Jaws without the "Shark" theme]. One of the best at not showing you how they world-built was Terry Pratchett. He just leap in and let you catchup when you could. I'm sure he could have told you what shop was on any street of Anhk Morpork but he didn't have to explain it.

 

[Devor]

In my opinion, you can spot good worldbuilding when it shows in the personalities of the characters.

I don't have time to elaborate so I'm just going to let that sit.

 

[Writer’s_Magic]

In my opinion, good worldbuilding must have two requirements: an excellent plot and awesome characters. That’s very important! I mean, how shall I dive into this world when the story is bad and the characters are a horror?

And the rest is a good description. Nope, vivid description!

 

[Yora]

Neither plot nor characters are worldbuilding, I would say.

Plot and characters have to obey the worldbuilding to prevent them from appearing random and unpredictable. Which in turn means that the worldbuilding should be done with whatever kinds of plot and character being planned in mind.

 

[Heliotrope]

I can only answer as a reader, because I don't like world building myself and usually write fantasy that takes place on our earth.... but as a reader, I love the small details that make things feel 'real'. I could care less about large structures, such as religion or politics, or gender roles. I want to know where to the find the best beer. Who makes the bread and where does the wheat grow? What are the clothes made out of, and why? If someone were bored on a Sunday afternoon, what would they do? What do people do to pass the time? That is the stuff that makes a world feel 'real' to me.

 

[pmmg]

I've done a great deal of world building in my own little world of the corner, but I fear my whole story may pass and the readers will never see it, as the characters are mostly not really interested, they have bigger problems to sort out.

I think I fall along the lines of Cup of Joe, and I like his depiction of it being like music for a film. I feel this is an aspect that shares a symbiotic relationship with the characters. Why are the characters the way they are? Well, it has a lot to do with where they are from and how they view things. Why do they view things the way they do, well...the world was such and that helped shape them, and made all the complexities around them. So I feel, I want the world to seem rich, and real, have a sense of far away places, and histories that are both the common history everyone understands and histories that no one remembers anymore. And I want cultures that make sense for where they are, and people that make sense in them.

And I think all of it bleeds down to who makes the bread and where are the wheat fields, and encompasses everything else like gender roles and religions. And all of it spins around each other, shifting and testing itself, and all to make the world seem a real place. It really a big task, but it comes in small pieces.

I wish all of that was a big part of the focus of the world I am writing in, cause I spend a lot of time on it, but honestly, I don't think my set of characters care what the bread tastes like, and they don't stop and wonder why this fallen statue is here on this hilltop and partially buried by time. And I do feel its important to tell the story the characters need it told, so it may not really be a part of their story. But then...it is, cause they would not be in the direness of their situations if the world did not at some time shape itself in to a place where it was dire. But there are many pages left to write, so maybe it will come out.

 

[skip.knox]

Not uncomplicated at all. It's a question that can drive a person crazy because the operative word there is not world building, it's "good."

What is quality? Ask Robert Pirsig. He wrote a whole book about it. Here's my take.

It's two things: what satisfies the author, and what enchants the reader. There's no objective definition; it is solely in the clauses of the contract between author and reader.

I say "satisfies" because the author is never enchanted with his own work. This author isn't, anyway. But I have to be satisfied with the world building myself first before I can even dare to put it before the reader. That's me as an author. As a reader, I don't care a whit about the world building the author has done. I care about the story. If the story is done well, then I will be enchanted by the world.

What do I mean by enchanting the reader? Well, the gold standard is my memory of how I went all fanboy with Middle Earth (this was in the 1960s, so I may perhaps be permitted some leniency). More recently, it's the world spun by Josiah Bancroft in his Books of Babel series. Or it's the world(s) of The Expanse. We all have our own versions, so there's no need to elaborate there.

To take the converse: the world must have no false notes. That's terrifying to me as a writer, but as a reader I'm pretty fussy on this point. The story I'm reading is like a symphony. I want to be caught up in the music, or at least I want to be entertained by it. Let the first violin hit an A# when it should have been a B natural, though, and I'm suddenly off stride. I may forgive it once or even twice, but those false notes will sound in memory more strongly than a hundred correct ones. Let too many of them sound and I start looking for the exit. So, good world building means not too many false notes. Yes, this is going to vary from one reader to the next. But there really is such a thing as too much of a bad thing: you'll know it when the whole audience has left.

It really is as simple and impossible as that. Satisfy the author first, then enchant the reader. There's nothing in that formula to guide you on how much or what kind of building to do. Trust your judgment first, then do all you can to cast the reader under your spell.

And pay attention to your editor.

 

[Yora]

Good worldbuilding to me, must be able to make me believe that there is a fully worked-out history/culture/ecology/etcetera beyond the confines of the story. Whether this is actually the case or not depends on the author's preference and artistic vision.

What do you mean by fully worked out? There's always more you can add. Perhaps the better question is, what does it mean for worldbuilding to be insufficently detailed?

In my opinion, you can spot good worldbuilding when it shows in the personalities of the characters.

I don't have time to elaborate so I'm just going to let that sit.

Please elaborate. I feel this requires some explanation.

 

[skip.knox]

>what does it mean for worldbuilding to be insufficently detailed?
I can answer this for myself as a reader. The world building is insufficient when I keep asking why. Why did this happen? Where did that come from?

The world building is insufficient when it feels to me that the characters are moving through an empty canvas, or are moving through a generic landscape, where nothing of interest appears or happens. This is, imo, a chief failing of most fantasy novels--the author hasn't taken the time to bring the place to life. That usually means they have not immersed themselves in the world, so they cannot pull me in either.

The world building is insufficient when it is inconsistent. The author has thrown ingredients into the pot without caring (or knowing) if they go together well. We spot this gleefully in movies--kilts at Stirling Bridge sort of thing--but I hear it less often with novels. The most frequent criticisms concern armor, but it really extends to social relations, political structures, economic systems, all of it. Most of the time I have to tell the historian in me to hush and go sit down. I give him a nice Scotch.

If the story is very strong, I can overlook much of this. I have rarely found it to be the case that a writer can tell a good tale while doing a poor job of world building (that's different from choosing not to build out a world in detail).

 

[Yora]

The world building is insufficient when I keep asking why. Why did this happen? Where did that come from?

The world building is insufficient when it feels to me that the characters are moving through an empty canvas, or are moving through a generic landscape, where nothing of interest appears or happens.

I think you can always ask how something came to be, simply out of idle curiosity. But you get a real problem when the audience thinks "I am pretty sure this only came into existence after the previous chapter".

Foreshadowing can do a decent job to disguise this, but it probably always works better when it feels like a natural extension of what is already known about the world.
I think towards the end of The Lord of the Rings, Aragorn gets assistance from what I remember being described as primitive cave men that live in the mountains of Gondor. Those feel completely out of nowhere and don't mesh with anything else from the established setting.

 

[Devor]

So, I was born in California. I went to High School in North Carolina, by the Marine Corps base. I went to college in NYC. I live in northern NJ. All of these places that I've lived have helped shape the kind of person I am today, in ways that are so subtle it's taken me a long time to realize.

One of the common mistakes that a rookie author makes is to take a "modern" personality and put it in this new world where it just doesn't fit. At least part of a person is shaped by the social environment they're part of.

It's great to have crazy monsters and wild magics and a country with a king and a long history of warfare. But these things need to be reflected in the cultures and the people who live in them, and that culture needs to come across in the characters you create.

Good worldbuilding shapes your characters. That's my position.

 

[Yora]

I think that's actually the main function of worldbuilding. And why everyone who says they are not doing any worldbuilding, even when it's set in the real world, are talking nonsense. History and geography are entirely optional, in writing you can also ignore clothing and any other visual design. But you can not not worldbuild. Defining the social environment is worldbuilding. The most important part of worldbuilding.

 

[Mythopoet]

I think the main responsibilities of worldbuilding are to create an environment of possibility for stories and characters and to create a mood and atmosphere to aid in the immersion of the reader into the story.

 

[DragonOfTheAerie]

I don't think it's an "amount" question. I don't think it's best answered how many or how much.

Worldbuilding is really important to me as a reader. A blandly outlined world will put me off a book easily. But having lots of details doesn't necessarily make a book feel fleshed out, either. So...the answer has to be something different than just the proper amount of worldbuilding.

The best fantasy world are those I feel like I have visited. I feel i have breathed the air and various allergens therein, i have spent nights there in the world's equivalent of a crappy motel and awakened to the cacophonous ambience, I've scraped the streets' mud off my boots. I feel that the world persists outside of my visits and the familiar places I know are still there when I am not reading. Everything from the grimy tiles on the floor to the sun on castle turrets on the mountain across the lake feels like a familiar fact. You know how when you have lived somewhere its details seem to slip through the cracks of your brain, renewed so many times they are now worn too smooth to be noticed? You've seen the same house with a dog tied to a tree in the front yard, the same Shell station, the same weirdly bent tree overhanging the creek so many times that you don't really see them anymore. Because your brain has adapted to the shape of this place. Because you're home. Like that.

I'm not enchanted by the facts I know about your world. I am enchanted by the things I have seen, felt, heard, tasted and smelled. I want the small and tangible. The noises, the colors of the light illuminating notes of dust. I want to sink into the familiarity of its cozy corners and bask in the eeriness of its liminal spaces. The best worlds feel like other days in other homes and other times and places that are somehow spliced into my everyday.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

As a reader I look most toward the cultural and historical, how organic things feel. Not just long timeline history, do the characters have history and does it make sense? I don’t know if I can pin it all down to any one or even several things, it’s going to depend on the story being told. ASoIaF needs a lot of history (micro and macro) to really shine... but I do think Martin goes overboard in details here and there which lends to my skimming swaths of his books, LOL.

Too many details that don’t matter and I yawn. Unusual details that seperate our world from that of the book... and do so in a way that doesn’t scream “Alien! Foreign!” and matter, those are what I want.

Other than that, in the end, I don’t have a satisfying answer, heh heh. So much will depend on the story being told.

 

[Chessie2]

I think the main responsibilities of worldbuilding are to create an environment of possibility for stories and characters and to create a mood and atmosphere to aid in the immersion of the reader into the story.

This says it all.

 

[elemtilas]

Foreshadowing can do a decent job to disguise this, but it probably always works better when it feels like a natural extension of what is already known about the world.
I think towards the end of The Lord of the Rings, Aragorn gets assistance from what I remember being described as primitive cave men that live in the mountains of Gondor. Those feel completely out of nowhere and don't mesh with anything else from the established setting.

Right. But the foreshadowing (or perhaps side-shadowing?) is indeed there! With Tolkien, as with the Bible, you really need to read his four novels with authoritative guidance: the HoME and the Appendices by your side ready for consultation. Perhaps even a copy of Letters! There are a lot of things about Ents and Tom Bombadil and Pukel Men (and even Numenoreans and the Men of the North) that become much clearer after reading further than the actual story.

That's a lot of worldbuilding! While a reader does not need to delve into the histories of Men of earlier ages to enjoy the story, all that is there for those that do, and I think it will enrich the experience. I've read loads of fantasy over the years, and have often wished the author would have cared enough for the worldbuilding aspect of her craft enough to immerse me all the further into the experience.

 

[Yora]

Which brings us to presentation. It's not enough to create content in advance and connect it to the rest of the world. You have to apply it in ways that the readers can see the connection. When a story requires external sources for everything to fit together, it's a failure of the author to make proper use of the medium of novel.