Sometimes when you’re planning your novel, you can have all the facts and figures about your world but it just feels clinical. Like a textbook rather than something on which to build a story.
Feeling like this can make it hard to make the leap from planning to starting to write. All those details can be overwhelming. And while worldbuilding is important, especially for science fiction and fantasy novels, dry facts need something more to feel like a world.
Here’s where you need to marry all that hard work you’ve done on building your world with the story itself, and more importantly, with your characters.
If you’re at earlier stages of worldbuilding, make sure to check out the rest of the worldbuilding series to get you started.
However if you’re got the details down, it’s time to make the world of your novel come alive for you, so that it feels like a real place that you know and understand.
Think of it like reading a dry travel guide versus visiting a place yourself. It’s your experiences that help you get to know somewhere, that make it come alive for you. You can use your characters in the same way. These can be your main characters, side characters, or just some random extras you make up for these exercises. Doing the exercises for different characters can be very useful too, as it gives you different takes and opinions on the places.
The bonus is that you get to know your characters better at the same time that you’re adding colour to your world.
Try some or all of these exercises, or make up some of your own:
- Write a scene where two characters talk about a big world event. You know those scenes that make you cringe, where one character says ‘as you know, the great war began thirty years ago…’? Yeah, one of those. This isn’t going in your novel, after all. This is just for you to get a handle on your world and its history with a bonus of working on your character voices.
- Write a description of a key location – a city/shapeship/castle – from the point of view of different characters. This will give you lots of detail about the physical location, and depending on your characters, it could bring in some of the history of the place as well. Think about what each particular character would focus on. Maybe one would notice a bullet hole on a wall from last year’s attack by alien pirates, while another reminisces about how their favourite fancy bakery is now a foodbank for the poor.
- Write a letter from one of your characters to another. Have them describe something that’s happened in a way that references the worldbuilding. Some examples: they’ve just visited a museum; they’ve been to a lecture; they’ve been to a place the two of them visited together once; they’re reminiscing about something that happened in their own past. As well as the worldbuilding aspect, think of the relationship between the two characters, which will influence things like how open the letter writer would be.
- Write a series of diary entries about a journey one of your characters takes (whether that journey takes place in the novel you’re writing or at another point in their life). Use those worldbuilding facts and figure to figure out how long the journey takes, the method of transport, any stops they might make, what things they see along the journey. You can even have them complain about the ship’s biscuit or about how the unseasonably cold weather means that they wish they’d brought a coat. You can put tons of worldbuilding in there, and it will really help you get into your character’s head. If this is a diary they’re not expecting anyone to read, maybe they will be more frank or whiny or grumpy than they would in the letter-writing exercise above. Alternatively, if this is something they might publish then maybe their tone is friendly, lecturing, or even pushes into propaganda.
Writing scenes like the exercises help me to understand how the world works, makes it feel like a real place – like somewhere I know. That makes it much easier to write the book – which is the ultimate goal of all of this!
Note that while these can help your world feel more real, it’s still helpful to have somewhere to look up those facts and figures when you’re writing your novel. I have a series bible for my fantasy novel where I put my maps, distances, city populations – all of the kinds of details that you might need to reference. This is a living document that you can add to and update when you’re writing, as new things will organically appear as you write.
As always, my Fantasy Writing Planner or Science Fiction Writing Planner have your back if you want to keep working on this.
And next time we’ll talk about the level of detail that you need to put in your novel, so sign up to my newsletter for a reminder (as well as a free character workbook!).