An Editor’s Guide to Fantastical Worlds (and How to Write Them)
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The varied internet searches writers undertake while drafting can be notorious. From poisons to muzzle velocity, authors need to learn about a motley of topics to write convincingly. But when your story is set in a fictional place, it can be harder to research the details that bring your story to life. You can’t look up translations when it’s your own conlang (that’s a “constructed language”), and there are no databases for your fictional cuisine, airship speeds, or intergalactic trade routes.
All of these details coalesce into worldbuilding, and doing it right results in a story that’s immersive, transportive, and inspiring. After all, the characters you’re writing about are influenced by the world in which they exist. Their problems and solutions are bound up in the resources available. But before you can incite change through breaking the world’s boundaries in plausible ways, you need to know how your world works.
As a developmental editor of speculative fiction, I all too often see gaps in the worldbuilding that break the spell the author is trying to weave. So, here’s my editor’s guide to worldbuilding: the things to keep in mind, the things to avoid, and some tips on how to take your setting to the next level.
Building Your World Bible
This term comes from the animation industry, but it especially applies to speculative fiction. Your world’s “bible” is your one point of truth. It should contain all important notes on your world’s rules (whether that’s the rules of a deadly game, the political climate, or the ways magic works). Crafting a whole setting is too much to just remember, so make sure to record the choices you make so you can refer to them later. This ensures your world remains cohesive in tone and internally consistent.
You’ll want to include unique terms (or your unique definitions for terms), key places and locations, information about any fantastical creatures that populate your world, what factions hold power, and rules for society, magic systems, technology, etc.
It’s normal for this document to organically grow as you develop your story. You may even want to include moodboards for inspiration, media touchstones, or commission a custom map to keep your places straight.
Following are some key topics you should explore in your world bible.
Biomes
Consider how different the settings are between Dune and Game of Thrones; the threats the cast of each story faces are vastly different and impacted by the world in which they live. Likewise, your biome affects what kinds of resources are available to your characters. The weather, flora, and fauna give your world shape, flavour, and innate challenges.
The biome affects everything from the kinds of clothes people wear, how their shelters are built, the food they eat, the local economy, etc. If there is trade with an outside region or culture, what do they provide? How accessible are those goods? Does your culture welcome these alien goods as a mark of wealth or status… or do they eschew them as foreign and suspicious? What’s the climate like? What seasons do they experience? How removed are your characters from the wild? These details will shape how your character interacts with their world.
Technology
Technology is most often associated with science fiction, usually in terms of “soft” or “hard” scifi, but even neanderthals were using (stone) technology. Your level of technology can loosely be equated to the various eras of development here on Earth: Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Industrial Revolution, Technological Revolution, Digital Revolution, etc.
Look up what kind of technologies were available in your chosen bracket. How would class or rank affect people’s access to said tech? How does technology affect travel, communication, and trade? How and from where are the finite resources required to craft this tech sourced and manufactured? Is there an environmental cost of the tech? Is there a human (or whatever sapient species lives in your world) cost?
Magic Systems
Magic systems can also be divided into soft and hard. Soft magic systems are seen in genres like magical realism, cozy fantasy, and steampunk. Magic in these stories is more mystical, remote, or poorly understood. It works, but its users may not fully understand how. They may not even consciously think about the magic that surrounds them. Hard magic systems follow strict rules, require specific ingredients, incantations, or sacrifices, and tend to have a trade-off or hard limitations. You’ll find this kind of magic in epic fantasy, sword & sorcery, and science fantasy.
If you’re working with magics — which can include science-adjacent alchemy, pantheons of meddling gods, or magical creatures with inherent abilities — consider how magic’s presence affects daily life on the individual level, social level, and globally. What problems does this power solve? What new problems does it cause? Is it well understood or a mysterious force? Is it known to the masses or only the few? How might magic’s use impede or enhance technological developments?
The Common Pitfalls
Contradictions
The good news with worldbuilding is that you get to make all the rules. But for your world to be believable, you need to follow the rules you set out. If your characters use a “fireball wand” in chapter 3 and they could solve a problem with it in chapter 8 but don’t, you’ll need to explain in the story why. Maybe it only had one use. Maybe it broke. Maybe they have to pay a cost to use it that they can’t afford.
When you establish a power, a limitation, or world knowledge, make sure you don’t forget about it as you write. These kinds of internal inconsistencies are easier to catch during revisions — or can be pointed out by your editor — but solving them may require you to adjust the rules of your world to serve your plot. Often when some conceit doesn’t make sense to a reader it’s because it wasn’t explained clearly in the story.
Be careful not to dump exposition on your reader to explain your worldbuilding, though. Establishing the way your world works is best shown through actions, dialogue cautions, or repercussions. Then your reader will have an expectation that similar rules will be adhered to in future instances. The bigger your deviation from known Earth conventions, the sooner in your narrative you need to establish your world’s normal to keep your reader invested and anchored.
Anachronisms
Anachronisms are things that do not belong in their time and place. While a fictional world can play by whatever rules you want, you need to establish those rules early. Consider the level of technology, the biome in which the story takes place, and whether there are magical elements. If you reference something that doesn’t “fit” within these parameters, you might find your readers taken out of the story. A penguin in the desert? An iron skeleton key on a space ship? Keep within a technological bracket for a specific culture and you’re less likely to leave readers feeling out of time.
This can be a rabbit hole, but quick searches of “when was [x] invented” can give you a sense of chronology. Think of door knobs, zippers, cellophane, combustion engines — depending on the needs of your setting, you may need to assemble some ground rules for what has been invented yet. If you want something to be arcane or special, having it be something not easily or commonly used is a way to make it stand out — but you’ll need to explain its provenance so your reader fully appreciates its specialness.
A caveat: If you’re writing alternate history, you can play with anachronisms a bit, but you’ll need to explain through your storytelling how a gadget was invented sooner (or not invented at all!) if you’re going to change history.
Inconsistent Language
While you don’t need (and likely shouldn’t) draft in Olde English just because you’re writing in historical settings, there are certain terms or words that can instantly snap a reader out of your setting. Especially if you tend to make metaphors to modern experiences (“it was a home run”), products (like Kleenex), or slang terms (it was “lit” or “sick”), these may not fit the setting you’re building. It may be easier to catch these inconsistencies during revisions, but you’ll want to make sure they don’t creep through. Beta readers well-versed in your genre can help, and an editor can flag inconsistent language.
Take especial care with dialogue, as this can be where your local, modern speech patterns slip through. You don’t want every character to think and talk just like you, even if your story is set in an analogue to your home town. Otherwise, your characters will lack voice and dimension. But if you’re planning a story set in medieval Europe or the far future, consider how language has changed — or will change. How might languages merge into creoles? What terms might need to be invented to describe something newly discovered? What curses might a character spout based on their beliefs?
The Advanced Techniques
Developing Conlangs
From Tolkein’s Sindarin to Burgess’s Nadsat, fictional languages make a world feel lived in and real to your readers. If you’re not confident in your linguistic abilities, you can stick with taking English words and altering them (such as by creating new closed compounds like lightsaber or changing spelling to an archaic variant like faerie instead of fairy).
If you’re bilingual, you might integrate non-English languages to either create a pidgin (as done in the Expanse series) or use the other language as the foundation for your worldbuilding terms, like the Italian influences in Tigana. However, if you’re not familiar with the language you’re working with, you probably shouldn’t pull from it; see the backlash on Fourth Wing’s creator for her misuse of Gaelic.
If you love languages, you can create your own! Conlangs have their own grammatical structures, phoneme sets, and potentially even scripts. Be sure to keep a lexicon to ensure you’re consistent in your own translations. The beauty of this option is you can play with the language to create different sounds, which may offer an alternative for profanity or pithy proverbs. You can pepper this language into your spell casting, inscriptions on ruins, or a scrap of poetry your characters recite. For places to begin, consider the International Phonetic Alphabet for a full list of the sounds human languages use. If your characters evolved from some other creature — say, snakes — how might that affect the sound of their language? Likely more sibilant sounds!
Futuristic Tech
Famously, nearly every technology dreamed up in Star Trek has either been invented in real life or is scientifically plausible with technological advancements. When working in a hard system (both magic and science), you can use your specialist knowledge to dive deep and explain how your creations work. This is most common in hard scifi, but in epic second-world fantasy it can also seep in (such as the inclusion of medieval sciences, poisonous plants, or steam-powered technology). Examples like The Martian are famous for how specific and accurate the technology is and the trials the protagonist faces are borne out of the real limitations of the resources and technology available.
This direction is recommended for those who have studied physics, engineering, chemistry, etc. A dabbler won’t have the depth of understanding to sell their inventions to readers of this genre, and hard scifi readers are especially vocal about incorrect applications in worldbuilding or technology. Things like FTL (faster than light) travel, wormholes, parallel universes, and time travel present notorious stumbling blocks that readers will expect you to explain to their satisfaction.
Spanning Timelines
Whether writing an epic that spans thousands of years, generations of the same family, or multiple points in a timeline, each specific point in time you explore requires its own world bible. Language evolves over time in both sweeping and subtle ways. New resources or technological advancements are discovered; species may go extinct and climates can change. Consider how much the world has altered in just the last 30 years!
Some changes may affect a smaller region, a limited number of people, or are only temporary. Others can be prompted by external pressures, such as environmental disasters, wars, alien invasions, etc. Certain genres, like cyberpunk, dystopian, or utopian stories are heavily influenced by how the world has changed or a vision of how the characters want to change the status quo. You’ll need to know both how the world was as well as what it needs to become to tell these kinds of stories. They are much more complex and require deft handling of language and setting to effectively deliver. A masterful example is David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.
This is just a starting point for items to review in your book’s worldbuilding. Paying attention to each point can help you deepen the reader’s immersion in the world you’ve created. The right balance of details will establish a setting that readers will want to dwell in — and read more of!
Astra Crompton (she/they) is an eclectic writer, editor, and illustrator with over twenty-five years of publishing experience. Her work has been published in anthologies, table-top RPG books, magazines, and in several novels. They have also successfully completed NaNoWriMo six times and counting. Astra is currently the Editing & Illustrations Coordinator at FriesenPress, where they manage, coordinate, and vet FriesenPress’s industry-leading editing and illustrations teams.
