Worldbuilding 101: Setting is a Character, Too

Worldbuilding is more than just set dressing for your story. When used well, it embellishes the narrative that your readers are already creating in their minds as they read your work. It’s meant to inform that narrative, augment its power, and allow the author to express their ideas in a fashion unrelated to plot or character. Like costumes and sets in a film, they help suspend suspension of disbelief as the reader immerses themselves in your creation. It also adds a personal stamp to the work that is separate from plot and character, yet enhances both.

If this sounds like a lot, that’s because it is. Worldbuilding is a crucial element in certain fantastical genres, such as science fiction and fantasy. But it can be applied to all genres, and is limited only by what the author deems necessary to tell their story. It’s easy to get carried away with worldbuilding, divulging pages of exposition. It’s also easy to gloss over, and its absence makes it easier for your story to get lost amidst the millions of others that people can read. Worldbuilding is an opportunity to make your work stand out, as well as say something about what matters to you, and your characters.

In this regard, worldbuilding/setting is its own character, and deserves just as much attention as the other elements in your story.

There are two key delivery methods of worldbuilding: narrative exposition and character dialogue. Exposition can come across as passive, while information revealed in dialogue can feel more organic and meaningful to the characters. Both can be executed masterfully, or overused.

Narrative Exposition

Before I get started on exposition, I’ll include a sample of my own writing where I utilize it. This isn’t an advertisement for my work; unless I can show you how I do this, then I shouldn’t be offering advice.

This excerpt is from EDEN DESCENDING, the first novel in my science fiction, post-apocalyptic trilogy:

Morning on the savanna allowed Reyes to experience an unfolding of sunlight unlike any he’d seen. The tall beige grasses split each ray into thousands of smaller yellow beams, as if each came from a separate star meant for a tiny world hidden in the sward. A breeze stirred the expanse like invisible fingers brushing a lion’s mane.

For a fleeting moment they traveled through a world of gold. He smiled.

Lofty acacia trees cast long shadows where gazelles gathered. Their horns were serrated, and some possessed an extra set of jaws. Few resembled the ancient stock he’d studied in the archives. All were beautiful but skittish, often fleeing before Thanata’s steady yet brisk maneuvering.

Ruins littered the grasslands. A few research outposts, ceilings fallen in, walls cracked. Sometimes a small town, the few working lamp posts flickering off as dawn came. Dysfunctional repair swarms had tried fixing some structures, only to fabricate imitations of the wrong thing. A house crudely rebuilt with dead gazelles, bones and hide lumped together in pseudo-bricks. A bridge fashioned from steel girders and sage grass, held up by twisted humanoid figures with zebra-print skins. Though he knew they were the creations of nanites—entities operating on algorithms rather than emotions—the spectacle hinted at just how much the swarms had evolved. Creating nightmares no human had ever intended. Strangest of all, nothing dwelled in the structures.

Nothing he wanted to meet, at least.

In this scene I tried to present Phoa, the planet in the EDEN books, through Reyes’s eyes. His perceptions color what he sees, and what he thinks of it. From this excerpt you learn about Phoa’s twisted wildlife, the nanite swarms that plague its wildernesses, and that Phoa harbors the remnants of a previous civilization. I went for an immediate feel, based on what Reyes saw, rather than dumping paragraph upon paragraph on the reader to relay the same information.

Less is more. Remember, the reader already has a great imagination of their own. Let it do most of the work. You supply the trappings, the story, and the people they care about. Their mind takes care of the rest. That’s the magic of prose storytelling: the audience is as much a creator as the narrator.

Sometimes you want to add specific details that either the story requires, or you simply wish to include because it’s important to you. Never overdo it; your reader wants a story, not a conspectus specifying the minutiae of your world. Spread details out across the narrative, and introduce them at pertinent moments. If your characters are resting, where do they do it? In a building, or outdoors? On a bedroll, or in the limbs of a tree? Do they eat, and if so, what do they consume to nourish themselves? What do they discuss over their meal? Every one of these is a worldbuilding opportunity.

Granted, worldbuilding needs differ from one story to the next, as well as one genre to the next. Epic fantasy readers want to absorb the totality of your world, so you’d better be prepared to tell them, in measured detail, about what cultures, belief systems, cuisines, architecture, and the many other things inhabiting that world. This will typically present a greater worldbuilding need than, say, a horror story set in the modern day, but even then, you should still spread it out in an organic fashion. Keep it pertinent to the scene, to the character, and to the story.

Here’s an example of how I did this in my first LitRPG novel, HERO DAWN ONLINE, set in an epic fantasy MMO game:

Later, in his lodgings, Drake devoured all three books in a non-stop reading session. He took care in turning the pages, his thief’s hands as precise as a surgeon’s.

First, he read the Songs of Dahral Fahr. It detailed how Zesstra’s people fled their homeworld due to a massive daeklor invasion, a thousand years before the current era. The Dark Heirs who survived and escaped to Rathos, via an ancient, more powerful Gate, hinted that the creatures had been summoned by one of the Heirs themselves. One section in particular intrigued him:

Vessthran said to the astronomer, Serohul,

“If we but call upon the Daeklor,

Dahral Fahr will shelter their ships.

The Heirs shall know their star arts,

our children shall see other worlds,

and we would claim our birthright.”

He sighed heavily. Zesstra’s people had sought knowledge, and found destruction instead. No wonder she didn’t speak of her history much.

In that excerpt, Drake learns that the Dark Heirs fled their world due to an invasion of horrible creatures; that they were a star-faring civilization (hey, don’t judge my Spelljammer fetish), and that they were partly responsible for their catastrophic, forced exodus. Again, keep it relevant. Imagine you’re that current POV character: why would they care about that information? How does it relate to them? In that scene, Drake is learning about Zesstra’s history because he’s in love with her, and because he’s curious about how others came to Rathos; a static MMO world he cannot escape. If the worldbuilding has meaning to your characters, and your readers care about those characters, then they will likely care about the worldbuilding, too.

Character Dialogue

I’m a big advocate for worldbuilding through dialogue. And not in an ‘as you know, Bob’ sort of way (where characters discuss things, at length, in a way that people who already know those things wouldn’t say). Dialogue, in real life, is communication, and that is one of the first ways we, as humans, learn things. Plus, the way characters reference the phenomena of their world underlines that character’s personality. Do they mention the temples in the dead jungle in a positive manner? Are they negative, regarding the genetically-bred pilots from a backwater star system? Do they revile food from the southern kingdoms? Maybe they prefer the softer, looser clothing worn by advocates of the air pantheon? You get the idea.

Here’s how I deliver exposition through dialogue, in a scene from the first installment of my space opera trilogy, REDSHIFT RUNNERS:

Deadeye and his comrades edged away from the screen, but Talon glowered at it as if she wanted to reach across the light years and choke the MEC news anchor.

“You know who runs that fucking colony at Sirius?” Talon smiled with grim contempt. “Lineage noble houses, that’s who. MEC gives them whatever they want, since the nobles control manufacturing, and the best miner facilities. MEC gives them the people to work them, since everyone’s still scared shitless that the Prestige will show up and hack the bots they should be using.”

“I thought the Prestige remained within the Boundary?” Deadeye asked, though that wasn’t his real question. Hadn’t he flown against those automated craft before?

“More MEC propaganda,” Talon said. “The truth is, they fought a war against the Prestige, suffered heavily, and managed not to piss them off again. Meanwhile there’s overcrowded colonies where there’s not enough food or housing, and MEC tries to police migrations with guns rather than diplomacy.”

“My people ain’t learned the lesson either, they keep on sending poor families out to settle every speck of rock out there,” Runabout said. “Then MEC comes in, all pissy and powerful, and takes over the settlements that make it.”

“Is that where those hydroponic labs are going?” he whispered in Talon’s ear.

“They’d better be.” Talon hurried from the bar, where the crowd booed the report.

In that scene, you learn about the precarious, interstellar civilization that Deadeye and his shipmates live in. It’s easy to discern that Talon despises MEC, the controlling government, and that she cares about the plight of people living under MEC’s irresponsible control. You learn a little more about Runabout’s people, and about Deadeye’s memory issues, since his question was fishing for information related to something he was trying to remember. Of course, these excerpts make more sense if you read their respective books, but these samples are enough to illustrate my points.

Intent

What do you want to impart with your worldbuilding? Is it enough to simply enumerate the particulars of your world? Or should these details represent something of substance to you, the author? How do these details make you feel, and what do you want those elements to instill in your reader? Like anything else in art, if you imbue the content with things that matter to you, then the reader will pick up on that. They are likely to respond to your story in a more positive way. In this regard, you shouldn’t hold back. Tell us about your favorite foods, or why those flowers are important. If you like sunsets, or fine wine, or music performed with lots of hand percussion, then let your joy of those things shine through in your work.

Here’s an example from my upcoming space western, DELTA DEPERADOES. Since it’s not available yet, I won’t include an excerpt, but rather the ideas I put into a specific moment. I discussed this in a Facebook post some time ago; I use it again here:

I’m adding a scene to this space western that takes place on an abandoned space elevator (planetside). It’s symbolic in several ways. Humans rarely leave something they’ve built, unless they no longer have need of it—or assume that they don’t.

A space elevator, regardless of its feasibility in reality, symbolizes the hopeful drive to not only explore the void, but to live there as well. To find such a device in disrepair is meant to evoke the loss of that hope. It could also represent the emasculation of human arrogance in terms of botched colonization (with all that word implies). They reached for the stars, but created a tomb instead.

On a more personal level, I’m fascinated by ruins, and those familiar with my work have come across abandoned cities or derelict ships while reading about Kivita, Reyes, Deadeye, Rachel, or other characters in my novels. Those remains are tangible links to the past, but they leave more questions than answers: who built them? Why did their occupants leave them behind? And most importantly: did those people feel what I feel when I lay a hand on a rusty railing, a compromised airlock, or a chipped brick edifice? It’s human connection via an inanimate object, much like we connect with someone’s art who is long dead. They were mortal, but what led to the creation of those sites, and to another’s discovery of them, lives forever.

In this fashion, your worldbuilding could be the tip of a much larger iceberg. Some of it might never come through in the narrative, nor is it meant to. In order to build a house, you need to dig the foundations; when others see that house, the foundations are invisible. That’s how research works for fiction writers: you might read an entire book on a subject, yet only mention it once or twice in the entire story. But, it’s important to be aware of the rest, so you’ll know which parts to present to your audience. Worldbuilding is the same. The information you don’t reveal can still inform the details you share with readers. So all of those thoughts about ruins and space elevators are merely hinted at when Steelgrave and Ori Jo comes across that structure in the novel. This way, your worldbuilding leads the reader to subconsciously focus on those things, without having to spell them out.

In summation, worldbuilding is an integral piece of modern storytelling. The fantastical has become the norm in popular culture, due to the success of science fiction and fantasy. It’s become such a typical component that some may take it for granted. But never take your story and characters for granted—or your setting. Make it unique, gift it a life of its own, craft another reality that readers lose themselves in so easily, they don’t even realize it’s happening. If you can accomplish that, then your characters and story will feel even more real to them, too.

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