As a writer, I’m not fond of world building. It’s one of the reasons why (almost) all my fiction is realistic rather than speculative. But as a freelance editor, it’s one aspect of story that I pay especially close attention to, because getting it right can mean the difference between engaging your readers and confusing them.
There’s a delicate balance between fleshing out too little of your world and cramming each chapter with information that isn’t actually relevant to your story, and that balance will vary from book to book. A high fantasy novel or a novel set in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic world will require more world building than a contemporary novel set in a real city during a time period that most readers should be familiar with.
No matter what kind of story you’re setting out to tell though, you’ll want to keep a few general principles in mind.
1. Stories don’t–and can’t–exist in a vacuum. A story that takes place in a modern day prison will feature different characters and different types of events and have different rules and a different feeling than a story that takes place in a small California beach town in the nineties. Even if you, like myself, write almost exclusively realistic fiction, you’ll still have to devote some time and effort to world building.
2. World building is so much more than just setting. Although the physical location where your story takes place is important, a well-rounded story world also encompasses the political system or systems that your characters live under, their cultural and personal traditions, the holidays they celebrate, their religious beliefs, the things they value, etc. In fact, I’d argue that almost any factor that impacts who your character is and how they live and why they live that way has its roots in world building.
3. The story you put on the page–the story that readers have access to–must be supported by all the little details about your characters and their back stories and the story world that your readers never learn. This is more commonly referred to as the iceberg theory, because readers only ever see what’s on the page–or on the surface of the water–but it’s what’s underneath that makes the story world and its inhabitants feel real and that holds the story–or iceberg–together.
The majority of writers I’ve worked with understand these principles in practice, but many still struggle with knowing how much world building to do and which details to include. And that’s understandable. Because world building is so specific to each individual story, it can be hard to apply big ideas to your story. That’s where a good freelance editor comes in, and it’s what I aim to do when I’m working with my writer clients on improving their books.
Here are three of my best editorial tips–and three strategies I use in my own writing–that will help you find the balance between providing too little information and info dumping in your world building.
1. Identify what you as the writer needs to know vs. what the reader needs to know.
Most writers come up with at least some information over the course of their brainstorming or drafting processes that helps with their understanding of their story world but doesn’t actually need to appear in the book. (I know I do.) If sketching out the order of succession within your fantastical empire helps you write political machinations more clearly and engagingly, then do it. If drawing a meticulous map of your fictional outpost planet shows you how your characters might escape when the renegade militia shows up to arrest them, then by all means, draw the map.
Just make sure you don’t waste time and words cramming in unnecessary details when you could be focusing on an assassination or that escape attempt instead. You might think your reader needs to have all the information you have, or that your characters would have by virtue of living in the world you’ve created, but if you’ve done a solid, thorough job of establishing the parts of your story world that are relevant to your story, you can safely leave everything else out without confusing or misleading anyone.
2. Determine which aspects of the story world are relevant to the particular book that you’re writing.
So, how do you determine which aspects of the story world are actually relevant to your story? You start by getting really uncomfortably honest with yourself. It’s tempting to pretend that the interesting bit of back story you’ve created for a fantastical group of people or the awesome transportation system you came up with need to be included just to up the cool factor in your book. But if your protagonist never interacts with–or has only surface level contact with–that group of people, then you don’t need to waste time or words on their collective back story. If your characters never use the awesome transportation system, there’s no reason to include it.
The lines get blurrier when your protagonist does get to know that group of people or has an opportunity to use the transportation system, and this is where necessity comes into play. You only have a finite amount of pages to tell the story you have in mind, and you want to tell it in the most direct, most attention-grabbing way possible. Is the information you’re attempting to include crucial to your plot or to one of your main characters’ arcs? Is it setting up or foreshadowing something that becomes hugely important later on in the book or in a later book in the series? If you can immediately explain why this particular piece of your world has a key role to play in the story you’re telling, then it’s probably okay to leave it in.
And even if you can’t, that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to cut that world building ASAP. There’s room for extraneous details in just about every book, so long as those details add depth and substance to your story and don’t just come out of left field, but they need to be brief. Can you have a member of that fantastical group sum up their history in a sentence or two? Have one of your characters remark on the most awesome thing about that transportation system while they’re taking it to their destination? Then do it. If you can’t, you might want to consider leaving that information out.
3. Consider opportunities/strategies for revealing information in scene rather than through narration (i.e. through showing vs. telling).
Despite the constant pressure to reveal details in scene (showing) instead of spelling them out in narration (telling), there are still times when telling is the better choice. Need to convey an important point or two in the middle of a fast-paced or highly emotional scene? Probably better to just slip it in as seamlessly as possible and keep the story moving rather than pause everything and have your character explain the weird traditions at her high school, or whatever else you need to include.
Generally speaking though, your story world will feel richer if it’s allowed to develop as organically as possible on the page. You don’t need to explain how the bartering system works in the magical market if your characters have to spend time there haggling for a magical item they need. You don’t need to write a meandering monologue in which one character gives a few others a history lesson if you make that history so crucial to your story that your protagonist is forced to uncover it as they work toward achieving their goal.
This is why knowing what information is necessary for your story and important to your reader can be so helpful in your world building. When you as the writer have a firm grasp on what matters and why, you’re likely to find cleverer, more exciting ways to incorporate those details and waste much less time on explaining everything else. And given enough time and revision, your story will be all the stronger for it.
What strategies do you use to make world building easier? Leave me a comment and let me know!