How to Let Your World Build Itself

“The world isn’t perfect. But it’s there for us, doing the best it can. That’s what makes it so damn beautiful.” – Roy Mustang (Fullmetal Alchemist)

Today, we'll be discussing worldbuilding! Unlike my other posts thus far, which have been focused primarily on helping Dungeon Masters plan their roleplaying games, this conversation will be more focused towards any creator. So if you found your way here and aren't planning to run an RPG, you'll still want to stick around!

Art posted by FantasyWorld143, Reddit

What is Worldbuilding?

For anyone not already familiar with the term, "Worldbuilding" is a pretty straightforward idea: it's just the process of making up a world. Generally speaking, you can divide Worldbuilding into two components. The first is inter-narrative Worldbuilding, which is the way you present the world to your audience and teach them more about it. The intro narration for Avatar: The Last Airbender is a good example, though most of the worldbuilding will take place over the course of the work. The second is extra-narrative Worldbuilding, which is the work that you do on your own to create and flesh out the world.

Of course, if you're the creator, you have to do the second before you can do the first (so mayhaps I should switch the two around?), which might seem odd if you, like almost everyone else, have predominantly been the audience throughout your life. It's certainly not the simplest process, regardless of the medium you're creating the world for. Luckily, whether you're planning a D&D campaign, writing a book, scripting a movie, or creating any other narrative work, you can make it easier. All you need to do is let your world build itself.

But what do you mean by "Letting the World Build Itself?"

I'm glad you asked, random internet stranger! What I mean is that you needn't agonize over every little detail of your world before you start writing. If you're the type of person that enjoys fleshing out the minutia of your world before writing the work proper, then more power to you, but it isn't generally necessary. In fact, it might be a bit detrimental. Deciding every facet of your world beforehand carries the risk of resisting changes to those plans as your story develops. That isn't to say that you shouldn't plan at all - you need characters, a setting, some history and locations, and some key events before you get started - but you needn't fully develop all of those things right off the bat. Details for those elements can always be added - and changed - later on. And in the course of writing, things will change from your original plans - especially when you're working with an interactive narrative like a D&D campaign.

Letting your world build itself involves accepting and immersing yourself in those natural changes as you write, and they can manifest in a variety of forms. Sometimes they come as a result of noticing a contradiction in the lore that you've written, or an inconsistency in the actions of a character. Sometimes they come as a result of the conversations that you imagine characters having (or the conversations that you imagine having with your audience, as the case may be). Sometimes they come as a result of your changing vision of how the story will progress and/or end. And sometimes they come because something just randomly pops into mind. It's easy to ignore some of those thoughts since they don't fit the story that you planned on telling, especially if you're dedicated to seeing your original vision to the end. Why be so rigid, though? Ultimately, you want to create an organic world - a believable world - that your audience can connect to and immerse themselves in. It's much easier to do that when you allow your ideas to progress and evolve naturally as you're writing.

It's all comes down to mindset: don't treat your characters and world like things that you can just manipulate on a whim. You initially created them and the world, certainly, but now you can just observe. "Watch" what they do, and the "retell" what happened. Start with a inciting incident, that event that kicks off the story. How would the characters react to that event? How would they interact with the world because of it? What would happen as a result of those interactions? How do the environments manifest as you imagine all of those moments? As you allow the imaginary scenario to play out on the page, you'll start to see where your characters seem to develop and how the story should unfold, even if it unfolds in a way that you didn't initially plan. As you continue to write, you can start to flesh things out. Answer those questions of "why does this work a certain way?", "what events would need to have happened in the past for this to make sense?" or "what would it take for this character to do X?" and modify your plans to accommodate. As your outline comes together, you can add the ideas that come to you on a whim and think about how they'd affect the world. If you like where it would naturally end up , keep it! If you don't, then that's fine! Just rewind and try something different. As you go, you can keep adding to or adjusting the lore that you're developing to justify certain changes or address certain elements of the story. There's no guarantee that those changes will stick forever - plenty of things happen while editing - but at least you'll have something to work with and develop. You certainly won't be stuck. And you know what the best part is? In the process, you'll have already gotten words on the page.

Won't that take a while?

Well, yes. Worldbuilding is by no means a quick process. It will take a long, long time to settle on the ideas running through your head, and even longer to refine them to create a truly living world. It's easy to become overwhelmed or disheartened over the time and difficulty involved, especially if you look at a blank page and think that you haven't gotten anything done (even if you have). But the payoff - the moment when you can see your imagination manifest on the page, dripping with potential that only you can bring out and share with the world - cannot be overstated. My hope is that this way of approaching the worldbuilding process will help ease the difficulty involved, so that you can see your vision come to fruition and experience that unbelievably satisfying moment.

But maybe you've already started worldbuilding and have a method that works better for you. Maybe you have some good organizational techniques, or fun ways to brainstorm. Whatever way is most enjoyable for you, please feel free to leave it in a comment! I’d love to hear your input and I’m always open to questions or critiques! After all, we’re here to learn together!

All that's left to say, then, is best of luck! I can't wait to see the worlds that you create! See you next session!

-Joseph