Genre: essay

When most people think of worldbuilding, odds are they think of it as a garnish on the full-course meal of any given piece of fiction. After all, in most books people read and movies people watch, the characters are meant to be the primary focus – how the setting interacts with them is a second thought. However, if the reader stops for a moment and thinks about those characters, some questions emerge from the miasma of the words before him. Namely, the reader begins to ponder why the characters think and act the way that they do in certain situations. 

Our living situation here on Earth affects various portions of the human population differently depending on where they live. Certain cultures, such as that of Tibet, are more accustomed to a life of scarcity on a harsh plateau, while in the Nordic countries fish can be found in some form on any given table. Similarly, the cultures of the United States and Russia are each shaped by their side of the Cold War, which ended over two decades ago. Why is that? Could it perhaps be that our environment and our history has more to do with how we live than we might believe? 

This is the key tenet of worldbuilding. When an author constructs their setting from scratch and really thinks about how their world works on a day-to-day basis, they are doing more than simply writing down a couple pages of ancient wars and dead religions. They are creating not only a series of characters that live in the story, but a series of characters that live in the world, and moreover have a reason to exist, a destiny of sorts to fulfill. After all, a character is flat without motivation. 

But ancient wars and dead religions aren’t the only way to world-build. Worldbuilding can be as simple as describing a little farming town in the flyover states or taking one historical event and flipping it on its head, or simply creating on the page the perfect evocation of the roaring ‘20s. Whatever form worldbuilding takes, it is a framework for the story. A good writer should not let their work become bogged down in history that does not contribute to the stories of the characters and the narrative as a whole. That’s where the Inheritance series by Paolini fell, but Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy excelled. There is a balance to be found, and that is the key challenge presented to the aspiring world-builder.