Oh bless you Carol Berg! I was starting to feel terribly paranoid because I didn’t spend a year or two world-building before I started writing my book. I got the rules about magic, religion, and basic social functions down on paper, and I drew a detailed map. I had a basic plot. Then I just dove in and let the characters show me their world and tell me their story for almost 550 pages.

And I didn’t sweat the details that seemed unimportant. For example, I made up a sort of board game my characters play, but I did not work out ALL the rules of that game. I made up enough of it to make it work in the story, but if a reader ever asks for a detailed rulebook I am going to have to tell that person she is out of luck, lol. But honestly, I could have spent a month or two trying to write up the rules and details of that game. It wasn’t necessary to furthering the story.

I am sure there are weaknesses in my book that more world-building might have eliminated, but I know so many writers who never get around to actually writing because they spend so much time taking notes and drawing maps and such. I suspect that one can do too much worldbuilding as well as too little.

But I was very happy to hear a writer I admire say that she works much of it out as she goes along. Thank you!

1. “Where’s the bathroom?”

2. “Man, I’m thirsty. Is there anything to drink here?”

3. “Dinner? Sure, I’ll stay over dinner.”

3. “I had too much to drink, I can’t drive home. Is there a spare bed where I can crash over the night?”

Bathroom, water, food, sleep. That’s a good start in world-building.

It is also anxiety-making to see these castles and fortresses set within luxurious foliage, tall grasses, trees overhanging the curtain wall, blahblahblah.

Love, C.

Rather than spending years getting a world “right” before I write, I like to sketch out a few ideas and then develop them as I get to know the characters and how the plot is going to move, developing “rules” and history as I go along. This give me flexibility as the plot twists and turns. But if I introduce a castle, I will make sure I know what it has been built to defend.

When I teach worldbuilding, I always say imagine the world as an iceberg, where most of the structure is underwater. The reader will only see the spikes and pinnacles, but the author must make sure that it all fits together. So I begin with the spikes and pinnacles rather than creating the entire structure.

The world has to be such an intergral part of your writing that everything appears seamless. The world has to appear everywhere - except in an info dump. And getting your book to that stage? Well, that’s the fun part.

I think a big part of the problem is that too many writers base their work on the writings of other fiction writers or on movies, rather than on nonfiction works which by their very nature give a much better flavor to reality.

Another problem of bad worldbuilding is the prefab hovel, the idea that each building has been built for its express purpose, and even if ancient, has never been anything else. WTF? Even in America, land of the short term memory, you can point to buildings that started out as the courthouse, changed to the post office, became the town library, and is now currently the art museum or a coffee house.

And building materials. Unless you are very rich and are making a point of being lavish, you build stuff out of what you have at hand. Ditto clothes. To quote an old Siskel & Ebert review, “How come when we see so much leather in these films do we never see a cow?”