6 Tips for Immersive Worldbuilding in Fiction
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Worldbuilding has given us unforgettable vistas: The three suns setting over the deserts of Tatooine; The wintry forests of Narnia hidden inside the wardrobe; The bucolic Shire in Middle Earth. Luke Skywalker, Tumnus the Faun, and Frodo Baggins are all products of the places they grew up. To fully resonate with their fears and dreams, we need to understand their worlds.
Worldbuilding is creating the scaffolding and set dressing where the action within a story takes place, including its culture(s), time period, level of technology, and so on. On a deeper craft level, the world becomes a character in itself. Just as you might figure out a character’s backstory, you can figure out your world’s history; you explore the characters’ weaknesses just as you explore the world’s limitations. These decisions determine not only what’s possible in your story, but also the impact and feeling the setting lends to the action.
Worldbuilding need not be fantastical, though. Setting underpins all fiction genres, like the hidden sigils littered throughout real-world art history in Dan Brown’s thrillers, or the intricate social ranks in the sequestered but peaceful (and fictional!) Highbury in Jane Austen’s Emma.
So how do you make a place feel real to its readers? Here we’ll discuss some tips that can be applied to any genre of fiction writing that will help your setting come alive so it can best serve your narrative.
Scope
Figure out where the story will mainly be taking place: in a single town, a journey across a continent, or on a specific starship? How much of the outside world will appear in your story? How remote or interconnected is your setting to the world around it?
If it’s a small place that’s fairly isolated, you don’t need to pay much attention to the world outside. Instead you’ll pay more attention to specific locations within your setting: businesses, characters’ homes, a specific cliffside where the climactic action takes place.
If the scope of the setting is larger, you’ll want to have specific locations where the action happens more fleshed out, but the stretches in between that are passed in condensed travel can stay looser. This will help the reader focus on the crucial information without getting bogged down in distracting detail.
If your setting is expansive (such as in epic fantasy or space opera or multi-generational historical fiction), contrast will be important. Distinguish cultures or locations by counterpoints between them, such as in climate, cultural mores, or species. You can also juxtapose these differences through objects, distinct characters, or information that comes in from outside. Anchoring to specific details can prevent the reader from feeling unmoored.
Detail
It can be tempting to try to know absolutely everything about your setting, but most of that research won’t actually show up on the page. Will your 16th Century Italian maestro need to know the exact details of the buttresses in the cathedral where they’re performing their latest composition? Probably not. That means your reader probably doesn’t need to get that deep into the details either.
The level of detail can depend on your genre. The more contemporary your setting, the less you need to explain concepts or locations that will already be familiar for your reader. The more alien or fantastical your setting, the more you may need to explain what exactly a “Hobbit” is or why everyone shivers at the mention of “going to Mordor.” The page-space needed for more exploration is why certain genres (like fantasy and science fiction) have longer acceptable manuscript lengths — but note that this isn’t license to fall into wandering exposition for twenty pages.
The best way to deliver details is in the context of a character. For example, rather than just telling the reader how bitterly cold the weather is on a planet in perpetual winter, Ursula K. Le Guin continuously draws our attention to it through how the characters survive in Left Hand of Darkness: the seal-like local people with natural insulation against the cold, massive fireplaces at the centre of every home, our protagonist spending his last money on a portable heater rather than food because freezing is the worse fate.
By finding ways to link the character to their environment, crucial worldbuilding details will be delivered seamlessly.
Environment
From biomes to mood-setting weather, worlds feel lived-in when the environment underpins the action. To avoid the “talking heads” weakness of many new writers, anchor your characters in the space they occupy. Use their body language to interact with the things or spaces around them: picking up a steaming teacup while waiting for a paramour to arrive, a door swinging open at a dramatic moment to interrupt an important conversation, pelting rain falling down just as a character realizes they left their umbrella on the train.
Consider how the environment changes over the course of the story, too. Changing weather can help settings that must be revisited feel different and real. The progression of seasons can add to the mood of the story. A story starting in the gloom of winter and ending in a refreshing spring garden feels quite different from a story starting in the sweltering heat of summer that descends into the rot and decay of autumn. Certain places don’t have the four seasons that sweep through Canada, though. Consider the opposite seasons of Australia, or the dry and wet seasons of the Serengetti, or the seasonless dark side of the moon. Remaining consistent with these details will lend authenticity and settle your readers into the world.
Weather and natural events not only affect your characters and lend mood to your story, they also act as a progression of time. If there is an important event pending—a deadline, an approaching disaster, a magical full moon—it can create tension and suspense for your plot. Each scene that brings us closer to (or deeper into) an environmental event can heighten the stakes for every action the characters take.
Aesthetic
There are certain details that readers of your genre will expect, like some sort of clockwork in the Steampunk genre or cowboys and horses in a Western. By how do you make your world feel different from others in your genre? It helps to have a guiding aesthetic.
If you’re a visual person, you can build moodboards for your settings with key colours, architectural styles, local fashions, seasons or weather, or other details that capture the vibes of the place you’re trying to convey. If you’re not a visual person, you can keep an idea web or notes file with key details so you can keep them consistent. These ideas might be vague like “lots of gemstones” or very specific like “1800s Venice… but in space!”
A guiding theme or motif can also help your worldbuilding feel cohesive. The answer may lie in your plot. Is there a twist you want to work into your story that will affect the mood and feeling of your setting? If retelling a classic tale, focus on what you’ve changed; Baz Lurhman’s Romeo + Juliet was set in ’90s L.A., which changes their swords to guns and their “houses” into gangs. If you’re doing a mash-up of genres, like Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, you now have to integrate zombies into a romance of manners. Or, perhaps you have one crucial element that informs all your other choices, say, a protagonist who cannot die, but the world is ending…
Culture
Culture is inextricably linked with the place it comes from. It seeps into how local people think, what they value, how they speak, and what resources are available to them. As you build out your world, make sure the choices you’re making properly inform your characters’ personalities, views, speech patterns, and goals. After all, the world’s history and culture will have directly affected how they grew up. Likewise, as the plot progresses, how do their actions impact the world around them? Do they fix things or break them? Does the world roll on, unaffected, but their perspective of it entirely shifts?
Consider the fantasy worlds by friends and colleagues, J. R. R. Tolkein and C. S. Lewis. Both were writing their fantasy epics at the same time (and even made nods to the other’s work in their own books), but the feeling of Middle Earth and Narnia are quite different. Both have fantastical denizens (elves versus fauns), sweeping landscapes (Rivendell versus Cair Paravel), and powerful magical objects (the One Ring versus the Stone Table). But their internal cultures are quite different. Tolkein’s work is second-world fantasy with its own history and mythos and languages, while Lewis’s work is a portal fantasy where his contemporary Earth still existed. This impacts what is considered wondrous to the characters, what outside knowledge they have, and which skills they bring to the adventure.
The cohesion of how you present the world’s culture(s) matters. If your setting is entirely egalitarian, characters perpetuating stereotypical gender roles or prejudices doesn’t make sense. A world without trees would need to find alternatives for all the things we normally make of wood. A historical setting may not yet have typewriters or bars of soap or doorknobs! These kinds of inconsistencies can kick the reader out of your story.
It’s hard to know what you don’t know (and it’s easy to go down a research rabbit hole!), but learning more about your inspiration settings/time periods/cultures can help prevent anachronisms from sneaking into your work. Getting feedback from outside readers or editors helps catch inconsistencies in worldbuilding.
Culture is not always static, either. Consider differences between characters with different backgrounds and how this might change their assumptions or aspirations. If a disaster happens, consider how cultural norms are disrupted. How would this impact characters’ access to food, clean water, or tools to repair things that break?
Development
The good news is you aren’t expected to just magically know all of this worldbuilding information before you begin writing. Some of the things you’ll need to figure out only crop up in the course of storytelling. Other things you’ll only be able to improve or flesh out during revisions.
The important thing is to ask plenty of questions:
Why do certain cultural or worldbuilding elements exist this way? Is it just the default of what you’re familiar with or is there a crucial reason that impacts the plot or characters?
How can you be more specific and intentional with your worldbuilding? Rather than a farm, maybe it should be a tannery, or a mill. Rather than settling for a “car” specify the kind, make, or state of it.
What further research could you do to be able to write from a more natural and informed perspective? Consider nonfiction references, interviews, or workshops — don’t just rely on a quick online search!
If Rome wasn’t built in a day, there’s no reason your world needs to be rushed! Allow yourself the time and creative space to build out your book’s setting. You’ll soon find all of your characters and their interactions gain deeper meaning and vibrancy as your setting comes alive.
