The World is your Overcomplicated Oyster

Fantasy world building can be tricky. On one hand, you want to make your world realistic and believable, but on the other, if you make it too much like the real world, it can lose a sense of the fantastic and mysterious. This isn’t too big of an issue if you just have a stand-alone novel, but if the scope of your story is more akin to The Lord of the Rings, or The Wheel of Time, then world building should definitely play an integral part in your storytelling.

I’m not going to pretend like I’m an expert on this topic, my first book hasn’t even released yet, and most of the lore and history of my world is still half-baked and sitting in several different word documents. But even I know one of the most crucial aspects to world building is making your reader feel as if there is so much more just below the surface. Now, whether or not there actually is more is entirely up to the author, but if the readers feels they are experiencing a fully functioning world just from the limited amount they see in your novels, you can consider your story a success.

There are many ways to elicit this feeling from your reader. The first and most straightforward is to actually construct the parts of the world that you know your reader may never see. I’m not saying you need to have so much depth in your society that you have everything figured out down to the types of parasites that infect the livestock, but if you put even a little time and effort into what makes your world unique, it will pay off in a big way. For example, do the different people groups in your world celebrate holidays, have games they play in their free time, venerate specific deities. Expanding on any of these can work.

It’s also good to find a middle ground between depth and variety. If you focus too much on filling your world without without laying the ground work, i.e. politics, language, monetary systems, it will feel shallow and lifeless. But if you spend too much time fleshing out every detail of your world you will fall into a never ending spiral of world building. Too much of a good thing can turn bad really quickly. It can help to draw from real world examples to reduce the workload of crafting your own society. Even using simple aspects of empires from the past, like their political system, can give the reader something to compare to. In small ways, show how your world is similar to ours, and the reader’s mind will fill in the rest.

It can help to go really in depth on a singular aspect of your world. Perhaps you enjoy brewing in your free time; describe how alcoholic beverages are produced and distributed throughout the nation you are creating. By putting a great deal of thought into just a few parts of your world, it makes it seem like everything has that much thought put into it. At the end of the day, no one can really tell you how much effort your fantasy world needs, only you can know. It’s up to you to find your own balance between depth and variety. Who knows, maybe you want to be just like Tolkien and spend your whole life working on one world. Regardless of how much work your world needs, keep at it, and one day you may end up with a masterpiece of your own. As always, happy writing out there.