Ask A.K. #2
I want to create a fantasy world, but how much worldbuilding is too much?
I wanna write a book and I need to create a world for it, but I'm afraid to get stuck on irrelevant details when worldbuilding. Like what trees would grow in a region with this or that soil and climate, which is completely irrelevant to the story itself, or get stuck naming things that don't necessarily need names. How did you decide what was enough worldbuilding for your book? Did you worldbuild alongside writing when it came up, or did you do it all before you started writing the story? Thanks!
Well, I think I should make something clear: I, too, get stuck on irrelevant details. If you see a detail “casually” thrown into a story I wrote, the chance is very high that I went on a Google dive for it. That goes for food, flowers, parts of clothing, architectural terms, animals, weapons. The list, unfortunately, goes on. I mean, for Dangerous Crowns, I went to the trouble of looking up what men shaved with in ancient Rome. I can be very granular when I let myself run free.
Part of that is just being curious about what men shaved with in ancient Rome. But it’s also about me wanting to have a more efficient writing style. When it comes to prose economy, “blue-purple flowers in big round bunches” is a lot of words. “Hydrangeas” is one. I’d rather nail down the name of the thing than grope around trying to describe it. Of course, your mileage may vary if you’re writing high fantasy or hard sci-fi, where “real-world” names for things might not be appropriate. (This reminds me of a worldbuilding thought exercise that I’ve seen put forth with a few different examples before. In a world with no Anne Stuart, what do you call a Queen Anne chair? What do you call French toast in a world with no France? You can drive yourself nuts.)
Anyway, when I wrote Dangerous Crowns, my worldbuilding usually fell into one of four modes:
“I think this would be nice.”
“I guess I need to come up with something for this.”
“I need to justify something.”
Pure research.
The first one, “I think this would be nice,” is the most casual. It often happens when I’m not writing, or in the early planning stage. Most of my aesthetic worldbuilding goes like this, as does anything else where the details are mainly up to the writer’s taste. I gave Dangerous Crowns an overarching neoclassical influence because I thought it would be cool. I thought its poofy sack-back Empire gowns would be pretty. I thought it would be interesting if the people worshiped a god and goddess who were lovers. I just asked myself what I liked and went with it.
The second, “I guess I need to come up with something for this,” happens when I’m in the middle of writing and hit a blank spot. For me, it tends to come up in places where worldbuilding and story collide, like names, objects that characters handle, or in-universe facts they should know. In Dangerous Crowns, when Livia opens the letter from Mother Clementia, it has a wax seal on it with the emblem of the Church. That’s the part where I went, “Oh, great. Uh, what should that seal look like?” Or later on, “Oh, great. They’re going to the opera. What’s the show about?”
The third one, “I need to justify something,” can feel self-indulgent, but it’s also a lot of fun when you’re able to harness it. The Three Continents’ permissive attitudes about relationships came about because I wanted Marcus and Livia’s relationship to be normal. I set out to write a world where couples could be intentionally childless and unmarried without people thinking twice about it, let alone disapproving of them. It sounds simple, but that’s the kind of thing that can really grow legs. It affected everything from social mores to religion and inheritance laws. Before I knew it, I’d changed the rules about name-taking in marriage, done away with primogeniture, and come up with a fictional contraceptive plant. To start!
The fourth one, “pure research,” is what it says on the tin. I hit the books, I hit Google, I see what I can find. This is where I got many of Dangerous Crowns’ names, especially things like the Proscenium: a proscenium is an ancient stage, or the space in front of a theater curtain. That said, sometimes I need to remind myself that I’m working in a fantasy universe, because the research stage is where the granular instincts can kick in. For example, there’s a scene where Livia uses a sulfur-tipped match, which I later read that they didn’t have in ancient Rome. I agonized over it for hours, but decided I was being ridiculous and kept it in. After all, it’s not the real world. It’s Histria.
To finally come around to the first part of your question, I can tell you a few concrete things:
If you know you tend to get lost in the weeds and don’t trust your instincts, you can always stop once in a while and ask yourself how you’re doing. “Are these details still adding to the story, or have I hit a point of diminishing returns where they’re slowing the plot down?” Or it may be easier to let yourself run wild at first, then do this questioning in the editing phase. Everyone’s different.
A teacher told me that - in general - things only need names if they’re important or will come up all the time. The main setting could use a name. Every village around it? Probably not. Your sidekick needs a name, but if you name a random townie with one line, the reader might think they’re important and be confused when they don’t appear again.
Going back to my own preferences: I like when a story’s worldbuilding is just put there. Most of the time, I don’t need it to be explained. It’s enough for me to see that a forest is full of blue bushes. I don’t need to know that they grow in loamy soil unless it affects the plot. If people eat garlic bread, I don’t really need to know that elves taught humans how to cultivate garlic a thousand years ago.
But as far as deciding where the other parameters are? What’s “enough” for your story? You’ll have to be the final judge. In my experience, the depth of a story’s worldbuilding is just one of those things that comes down to intuition and taste. One of my early frustrations with high fantasy was how inaccessible I found it before I got into its genre rhythm. I felt alienated by books and games that would throw piles of jargon at me without the context to understand what any of it meant. Because of that, I wanted Dangerous Crowns to feel approachable for non-genre-initiates, and I just chose not to pay a huge amount of attention to things that I didn’t need for the story. I have no idea what their days of the week are called, or even what the majority of their holidays are about. I figure I’ll cross those bridges if I ever come to them, and it’ll be Worldbuilding Mood #2 on the list above.
But that answer isn’t going to please everyone, especially not those who are used to darker, more speculative genre work. Many people don’t feel the barrier that I felt with fantasy. In fact, a lot of them find utilitarian worldbuilding dull. Some readers love lore! Some readers devour Tolkien’s notes for fun. Other readers will always fidget for you to cut to the chase. It’s all a matter of what makes you feel like you know your world. How much of that will make it into the story? The only way to find out is to write it.
- A.K.