First Law of Worldbuilding
Finding the One Percent in One Hundred That Your Reader Wants
If you hearken back to my September article on Plot, Story, and Storyline, you will recall that I discussed the importance of building a solid plot to support your story even though plotting
Is not fun;
Is horrible; and
Is the absolute worst task in all of writing.
I don’t speak for the whole wide world of writers. I’m sure some of you out there enjoy plotting. I just can’t even get my mind around liking it. Just as I’m sure there are people out there who enjoy math, for example, or getting a root canal—I have no idea how or why they feel that way.
However you feel about plotting, today’s article is about its polar opposite. To wit: Worldbuilding. How is worldbuilding the opposite of plotting? Well it’s fun. But more important—where plot is at the forefront of your writing and visible to the reader at every moment, worldbuilding happens in the background. In the shadows. The real trick of worldbuilding is not to do it as thoroughly as you can, that’s the easy part. The hard part is using it to write your story without putting it all into your story.
That made sense, right? You understand exactly what I meant? I couldn’t possibly have been more clear? Right then, cool, let’s make like the Weyland-Yutani Corporation and get down to Building Better Worlds™.
What Is Worldbuilding
Worldbuilding is the creative act of constructing a fictional world or universe for your characters to inhabit.
Who worldbuilds? First of all, the MVPs of worldbuilding: The speculative fiction (eg, science fiction and fantasy) writers among us. They’re telling stories that take place in settings that are somewhat or completely different from what we experience in the real world. Think of the planet Gethen, from The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin—but also the larger universe of her Hainish Cycle. Or perhaps the unnamed fantasy world of Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, which resembles a medieval European setting in many ways but with key differences from our own medieval Europe, such as the existence of unicorns and tacos. And don’t forget those writers who build fantasy worlds that exist within the real world that we know, like C.S. Lewis.
Many other writers need to do some form of worldbuilding, too. Are you writing historical fiction set in Regency London or the Kingdom of Kush during the Ptolemaic period? Vampires notwithstanding, most of your readers didn’t experience life during those times so you’ll have to do some worldbuilding for them. What do the people eat? What kind of clothing do they wear? How do they travel around? What do they do for subsistence? You’re going to need to know a lot of stuff. It’s not strictly worldbuilding in the same sense as a fantasy writer who makes the world up from scratch. The historical fiction writer has resources to research and pull from. But both writers still have to be able to answer all the same questions to build a believable world in the mind of their reader.
Getting Started Worldbuilding
There’s a lot of guidance already out there for anyone getting into worldbuilding. There’s resources for and from fiction writers, naturally, but also a lot from and for the tabletop gaming community (Dungeons and Dragons), the live-action role playing (LARP) community, the video game-making community, and so on. I’m not sure that I have much or any unique information to offer you on the how-tos of worldbuilding so much as I do on how to use worldbuilding in your writing once you have done it.
My personal strategy for worldbuilding is to play a game of modified Twenty Questions with one of my characters. I usually have my characters in mind before I’ve fully developed the world in which they live. I’ll start out wanting to know about something in my character’s world. Let’s say I want to know about religion. I don’t just ask them random questions about religion, necessarily (although you could), but I ask my questions with a specific goal in mind. Instead of starting with the broadest question (eg, “Is it in this room?”) I’ll start with the narrowest (eg, “What religion do you follow?”). In a normal game of Twenty Questions you get narrower until you seize upon the exact object (eg, “Is it that tube of cherry chapstick?”), but in my version I work up to the broadest (eg, “How many gods are known in your world?”)
If you love posing theoretical questions and figuring out the answers, worldbuilding is definitely for you. Just keep asking yourself or your characters questions until you know everything there is to know. While I’ve got you here, I’ll just drop a few fun resources you can use to get started:
Inkarnate’s online fantasy map builder. Build the geography of your fantasy world from scratch. Pick a style and start with a blank ocean, then click to add land masses, geographical features, towns, cities, and castles. Really helpful for me since I cannot visualize this stuff in my head, and also just really fun.
30 Days of Worldbuilding, a set of 30 things to consider for worldbuilding, each with a short explanation of what it is and why it’s important for you to know it, and most with a 10-15 minutes exercise to complete to get you up to speed on that aspect of your fictional world.
Many moons ago, N.K. Jemisin (winner of three consecutive best novel Hugos) gave a presentation on worldbuilding for the Writers’ Digest Online Workshop and Annual Conference and then, because she’s one of the coolest people on the planet, she just made the presentation available for free on her blog. Therein, she talks about the “iceberg” premise, which is similar to what I’ll discuss below, and even name drops the same case study that I’ll throw at you.
The 99-Percent Rule
Anyway, when I talk about worldbuilding with anyone who is writing spec fic, I tell them about what I think of as the 99-Percent Rule. Actually, that’s a slight fabrication. In the interest of full disclosure I’ll tell you that I’ve been calling it the 1-Percent-100-Percent Rule of Worldbuilding, but as I sat down to write this I realized that is actually a terrible name and there is obviously a much easier and shorter way to say the same thing. So now it’s the 99-Percent Rule. Here it is:
In order to write a believable fictional world, you have to know everything about that world. You have to know 100 percent. Your reader, on the other hand, doesn’t need all that and definitely doesn’t want it. The reader only wants 1 percent of what you know.
People hate to hear this. I get it, it’s frustrating. You went through all of the time and trouble to create a really cool world with a logical government, a well-developed religious system, cultures, languages, customs, maybe even physics—and the reader doesn’t want it? What was even the purpose of doing it then? Why do you need to know all that stuff if only a tiny fraction of it goes in?
Because the knowledge that you have of that fictional world informs everything that your characters do and say.
Here’s an example: Have you read The Iliad? You know that part in Book 2 that goes on forever about what all Greeks are going to war with Troy, and what city each one is from, and which ship each one got on (the Catalogue of Ships)? Nobody wants to read that. That is boring. Imagine Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas but instead of getting on with the road trip Hunter S. Thompson spends 60 pages describing the car. If you haven’t fallen asleep face down in that part of The Iliad after a long night spent praying for death, were you even an English major? Don’t be that guy. Don’t be Homer. Be Tolkien.
Talking Tolkien
I don’t love Tolkien and his writing style doesn’t appeal to me. However, one thing I can say for Tolkien—that nobody can argue with—is that he was a master of worldbuilding. He also knew how to use that worldbuilding in telling his story without beating readers over the head with it. If you’re writing any kind of fiction that involves worldbuilding, you can take a lesson from this guy.
How many languages are there in Middle Earth? Tolkien knew. But just knowing there were 10 distinct languages in use wasn’t enough for him. He invented the languages—the rules, the vocabularies. You can learn to speak Quenya if you are so moved. He even invented whole scripts for those languages so they can be written down. You can learn Tengwar if you want to write a letter to a Quenya-speaking friend. Tolkien knew everything there was to know about Arda—absolutely everything. Consider, though, how he gave it to the reader.
Editor’s Note: Do not write me a letter in Tengwar. I don’t speak Quenya. This isn’t Elf Life.
Okay, look sharp. I made you a graphic.
Consider the 99-Percent Rule in Tolkien terms. The Hobbit contains about 1 percent of what Tolkien knows about Arda. Everybody loves The Hobbit. It’s easy to read, it’s enjoyable, it’s fast-paced. You get dropped into the story right at Bilbo’s front door in Hobbiton and Tolkien takes you for a quick ride to the Lonely Mountain and back. The Hobbit is Tolkien’s 1%.
When Tolkien introduces Glóin, does he already know that this guy will show up again at the Council of Elrond with his son Gimli? Does it inform Glóin’s character that he has a son at home? Is it possible that Glóin’s interactions with Bilbo are colored by the fact that he has a son at home who is only 11 years older than Bilbo? Tolkien doesn’t stop you, the reader, to tell you about all this because you don’t care. You don’t care about the rest of Glóin’s life outside of the story that’s being told right now. You care about the dwarves who are eating all of Bilbo’s food and you care about how Bilbo is going to evict them from his hobbit hole. What makes The Hobbit great is that Tolkien already knows all of that lore, and the lore knowledge informs everything he writes.
If you liked The Hobbit—everybody liked The Hobbit—then maybe you also read The Lord of the Rings. The trilogy is still reasonably readable. I’ve read it, and as I already said I don’t even like Tolkien’s writing. The Lord of the Rings (all three books together) gives you approximately 5 times the material of The Hobbit, but you still don’t even get close to 100% of what Tolkien knows about Arda. It’s more like 3%. Put The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit together and you’ve gathered about 4% of what Tolkien knows about this world.
You meet Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien doesn’t stop in the middle of the story to tell you about how she once led a rebellion to overthrow the gods during the Years of the Trees, before the sun was created by the Valar, for which she’s been exiled to Middle Earth and can never return to Valinor. You don’t need to know that about her to understand her role in The Fellowship of the Ring. But Tolkien had to know it to write the scene in which she declines Frodo’s offer of the One Ring. You’re getting the story from Frodo’s perspective, and he doesn’t know what he’s doing when he tries to give her the ring—but Galadriel knows what it will mean for her if she takes it and if she doesn’t. Tolkien had to know, too.
Next you have The Silmarillion. Have you ever tried to read it? It’s like reading the actual Bible only somehow less fun. The Silmarillion is about as long in terms of word count as The Return of the King, but it’s all backstory. It’s not hampered by a whole lot of plot, it’s just a big old lore dump. People who really love Tolkien get psyched to read The Silmarillion because, hey, more Tolkien! And then they start it and most of them give up. People absorb the most famous and compelling parts of it, like the story of Beren and Lúthien, but most readers—even those who loved The Hobbit and enjoyed The Lord of the Rings—can’t make it all the way through. It’s just too much lore. Almost nobody can tolerate that much lore. That’s Tolkien’s 100%.
Just kidding! You made it through The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion? Congratulations, you’re still only at 10 percent of what Tolkien knows about Arda.
The remaining 90 percent of Tolkien’s worldbuilding is in the Legendarium. That's stuff like Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth and the 12-volume History of Middle-Earth. Ever felt frustrated that the fellowship didn’t just get on the Eagles and fly to Mordor? You can come back and talk to me about that when you have done your Tolkien homework and you know who Manwë is. Tolkien Studies is an entire field of scholarship. There are a few people out there with PhDs in Tolkien, the key word being few. Most people, the vast majority of readers past, present, and future, do not want all of that exposition. Don’t try to give somebody the Legendarium when what they want from you is The Hobbit.
For the record, Catherine from Shelf Life does not have a PhD in Tolkien. (My PhD is in Internet memes.) But I am prepared to accept the possibility that I misspoke when I said I don’t like Tolkien.
All this to say that Tolkien was a master worldbuilder, yes, but his real gift was knowing what not to put into the story. He knew everything there was to know about Arda. But he only put 1 percent of what he knew into The Hobbit because that was all it took to tell the story well. The knowledge he had informed the writing without being included in the text. His characters have complex motivations that make them take compelling actions—like Galadriel when she refuses the ring—and those actions feel authentic to us when we read it because Tolkien had the information to back it up.
Maybe you’ve got an entire mythology in your head. Maybe your story—like Tolkien’s—will be so engaging and fascinating that readers 100 years from now will be studying your 100 percent. The trick is, you have to wait for them to ask. If you try to beat them over the head with all the little details of your world, they’ll never come asking because they won’t enjoy your story enough to want more.
TL;DR: Know everything there is to know about your fictional world, but don’t put more than 1 percent of that into your writing as exposition unless you want to put the audience to sleep.
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