Worldbuilding

The Holy Trinity and Why Worldbuilding Matters: An Essay

Many writers and critics before me have defined categories that make stories great. I call the most important aspects of a story the Holy Trinity: Character, Plot, and Worldbuilding. All three are important, but depending on the goals of the writer, one or two of them may be more important to the focus of a particular story. I personally am most impacted by effective worldbuilding because of the kind of reader and writer I am. Which in general do you think matters most to you?

CHARACTER

Well-developed characters feel more like real people than constructs. Readers often think of a well-developed character long past the close of a novel, and these characters can become something akin to friends. This is incredibly hard to achieve, and it takes a true artist’s patience. Character development is generally the single biggest difference between the work of a master writer and the work of a novice. While you may meet interesting people all the time, interesting characters are crafted, often in layers, similar to how artist paint people—in broad strokes, in highlights, in detail, and then more layers of things such as shadow or demeanor—though every writer has different advice and methodology on this.

Character is the world of the literary artist. Ever heard of literary fiction? Often that means two or three big things: attention to great detail in style and language, likely some sort of critique of people and/or society, and extremely well-crafted characters. Go read Bill Clegg’s Did You Ever Have a Family to see some excellent characters in a well-written book, but there are thousands of excellent examples.

Good characters connect you to emotion within a book. If you start to get to know a fascinating or relatable person, it neurologically (probably) makes you care more about what happens to them. Without good character(s), readers may like an adventure, but it will feel less urgent and real. Character may be most important to readers who read to learn about or experience life as other people.

PLOT

Plot is simply what happens in a story. Most simple stories and children’s fairy tales are simply plot strings. There was a girl who went to a town and did stuff. Then other stuff happened. One of the main factors with which plot gets judged is pace. Effective plotting is a bit like pacing in a sprint or pacing in a marathon. The pace should be steady but it must depend on how long a writer will as the reader to go. Pacing matters a great deal and this is a primary place where tension comes in.

A quick primer on the NARRATIVE ARC: Most Western narratives start in some sense with setup and a problem or situation. This is the primary engine of plot and tension (the page-turner-ness) in a book. Maybe there’s a killer on the loose. Uh oh. What happens? Maybe an evil wizard is about to take over the world from Mordor. Then we get to know our characters and yada yada, Hero’s Journey stuff (google it), but essentially it builds from the problem. It generally flows like this: Setup and PROBLEM, then STUFF HAPPENS, then we get to the big moment, the CLIMAX where the boss battle happens, and then some semblance of a RESOLUTION. That is the spine of the story within all storytelling.

Plot also often involves setting up a lattice of rules and situations and adhering to the rules. If the antagonist (a.k.a. the bad guy) has the ability to see the future, the protagonist (a.k.a. the good character) can’t just make a plan and surprise him at the end. Plot must make sense.

In an age where stories are ubiquitous and almost every basic plot line has been written before, plot should also be creative. If a writer wrote a book about a boy who wakes up on his 11^th birthday only to discover that he’s a wizard and has been invited to a boarding school to learn witchcraft and wizardry, most people who have been alive in 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s would say the book was a Harry Potter rip off. Successful books must reinvent what stories can be and what plot can involve. One cool librarian I know named Jenny Martin wrote a novel that combines elements from many stories. Combining variants of stories, by the way, is becoming a convenient path to creativity – a shortcut I’m using myself in my next teen book. Jenny Martin’s book Tracked combines elements of Speed Racer, societies on Mars, and class-based conflicts in a book where the female lead does not need a man to save her in the end.

Some great writers take a tired and overused plot and make it new, including situations like survival in a post-apocalyptic world. Yawn. I’ve read about 50 books that fit that description. But go read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or wow, Joe Hill’s amazing tale The Fireman. These post-apocalyptic survival stories feel fresh because the authors built plots with cleverly distinct variations. A more advanced writer can do that because they know all the pitfalls and what has worked and not worked in other stories.

Plot is fun, but some writers rely on plot too heavily. Escapist fiction is one category of storytelling, where you can forget about life for a while and escape to another story, and a lot of escapist fiction is plot-driven fun that really doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Basically “plot-driven” (which has become almost a negative word) stories just keep telling you what happens next and then what happens after that, before the bad guy releases a virus, for which the main guy has to quickly find a cure. So you never get a chance to ask, but why would this guy release a virus? How does that seem reasonable to a person who wants a “new world order”? And how in the world did he create a virus?” A lot of plot-driven escapist fiction is drivel and not re-readable, faceless clichéd good guys who fight bad guys.

Some escapist plot-driven fiction is better – I don’t mind Lee Child’s Jack Reacher business. They’re generally fun. He at least spends a bit of time making his characters more interesting. A bit. James Rollins has a series that he actually researches for. He told me at a conference that he spends a few months on the research part, reading about nanobots or the Jamestown Colony disappearance and then switches into writing, stringing the plot together around real science and history. Michael Crichton did similar researching for his exciting novels. He and Nelson DeMille (and many others) did something even better with their plot-driven fiction though. They spent time on worldbuilding also.

WORLDBUILDING

The younger sibling of the holy trinity and the one most often overlooked, worldbuilding is exactly what it sounds like, building a world in which characters and readers can live for a time. Worldbuilding is exciting because it allows readers to explore. And I personally LOVE to explore worlds, including other places, new cities, forests and jungles, lesser-used and abandoned buildings, space, everything.

FANTASTIC vs. REALISTIC: When many think of worldbuilding, they think of fantastic universes created by fantasy/science fiction authors, like the Dark Tower series from Stephen King, the world of Harry Potter, Tolkien’s Middle Earth from the Lord of the Rings, Frank Herbert’s Dune words, and MANY others. Great worldbuilding, however, can include realistic worlds too. I loved the detail in Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a book that takes place in the world of the United States before, during, and after World War 2, just as comic books become everything. This is an incredible book. Read it now if you haven’t yet. Some writers even combine our real world, well-developed, with fantastic elements. In Libba Bray’s Diviners series, party-going 1920s flapper girls and guys in New York City adjust to life with strange new abilities, like being able to “read” the histories of objects and dream walking. All of this worldbuilding where writers devote time, space, and language to the story’s world makes stories more habitable and rich.

WHAT EFFECTIVE WORLDBUILDING IS: Worldbuilding in stories involves really imagining all aspects of life within a world for the main characters and others, and finding a way to reveal just some of these nuances without boring exposition.

Building a whole world includes a number of components. Sure there’s scenery, but there’s also culture, language, religion, transportation, superstition, hygiene, intercultural/interspecies relations, magic systems, lore, commerce, professions, among others. Think about the things that make the United States interesting (sure, things like hope, freedom, conspiracy theories, and anger at oligarchs or people in power, populism, generational divides, varied geography, art and culture, an abundance of stuff and content that makes people complacent materialistic automatons, asinine politicians, etc.) Many of those components could be in the worlds of stories as well.

Think of some favorite screen stories, the ones people could watch over and over. The Matrix. Inception. The Neverending Story. Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. Or shows like Game of Thrones or True Blood. There are definitely exceptions to this, but in general, people are drawn back to worlds they enjoy more than just plots or characters, if these worlds are well-developed. People in Game of Thrones don’t pray to God. They pray to the Seven. Or some of them do, while others pray to the Old Gods or to the Forest Children or to the Lord of Light. In a broad world, it makes absolute sense that multiple religions compete for adherents. This makes Game of Thrones’s Westeros seem more realistic and curious.

Good worldbuilding, however, cannot be just listing an encyclopedia of facts. While some more devoted readers might enjoy a Wikipedia entry for every new race, religion, or mentioned war, many readers will be turned off by big and frequent lulls in the action. And because exposition and explanation get boring fast, a good writer will not try to squeeze every relevant detail into the story, even though effective worldbuilders know much, much more about their world than is actually revealed. Worldbuilding takes time to craft, like effective characters, but it generally works best if it stays in the background.

The best worldbuilders also find more effective devices for explaining things – maybe a neophyte needs to have magic explained by a master. Maybe a visitor to a new land struggles to interface with people, and fails. Also, not every aspect of a world needs explanation. Sometimes hints at a bigger picture are enough for the imagination to fill in gaps. In one of the greatest movie sagas and space worlds ever created, here’s how a large component of the world is explained, in just 20 words. “The Force is what gives a Jedi his power (#sexist). It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.” Sir Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi explains the Force in Star Wars: A New Hope, and Luke is like, “A’ight. Show me.” That was enough for Luke and for millions of people, so keep that in mind padawan worldbuilders.

WORLDS AS ESCAPE: Fictional worlds make for excellent escapist literature also. Think of some of the earliest escapist fiction, like Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne (go get it from the Kindle Store – it’s free) or the Time Machine by H.G. Wells. These stories are about imagining a world that we can’t get to ourselves. For more on older literature and where people’s imaginations wandered within literature, see Alberto Manguel’s The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. The stories it references chart the wonderful places that humanity imagined through most of the last 2000+ years of storytelling. I wonder how many stories came before we learned to write, and how many imagined worlds we lost.

One excellent example of a creative science fiction novel that uses effective worldbuilding is Becky Chambers’s The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, but not for why you might think. It was highly recommended by V.E. Schwab, an amazing writer herself, but as I started reading it, I kept thinking, “When is the action going to pick up?” I was halfway into the book before I understood the pacing. It is not a plot-driven escapist book like many science fiction books. It focuses on characters and worldbuilding, and the plot is simply people on a ship working. (It’s still an amazing book and worth your time, but not because it’s exciting. It’s amazing because you will want to live there and will imagine trolling the galaxy with Sissix and Rosemary, Ashby, Jenks, Kizzy, Lovey, and Dr. Chef, and you will wonder about the Wanderer and will dream about the sublayer. Just go read it. They even have a galactic Wikipedia. I loved it.)

So why worldbuilding*? Because this is where dreams are made. Literally. Great worlds are some of the most creative expressions of our human consciousness, and I can’t wait to see where humanity takes us. I can’t wait to take you all to some of my own worlds, too.

*A note on the word Worldbuilding: This is really two words, world and building, but I write it and love it enough that worldbuilding should be its own compound word. Homebuilding was used enough that it became acceptable to write it as a compound word, and so I’m stylistically pushing the one-word model for worldbuilding too. Yeah, that happens—style can change in a language because of popular use.