One of the things Iâve been most enjoying about worldbuilding lately is working back from the very beginning.
On one hand itâs a bad habit, because then I get bogged down in millennia of history and donât write the story. But other times the choices that people made in the very earliest days of the world inform the way that the world still works, which then tells me how to write the story.
Things like the widths of roads, or the fact that church-equivalent buildings have public fountains and beds in them, or that few of the earliest structures survive because not only were they old, but the first builders didnât know anything about the load bearing limits of stone and built walls thin enough that most of them collapsed before anyone thought to preserve them.
Or even the fact that there are still areas in certain cities where there are enclaves with streets that make absolutely zero sense because they were built before anyone had any idea what a city âshouldâ look like, and the buildings were just scattered about a roughly even distance from each other and just⌠stayed that way.
I feel like so many people over the years have encouraged me to get less in the weeds and to focus on the story, or whatever the final product is, and what Iâve increasingly realized is that writing the story isnât necessarily what I have the most fun with. The worldbuilding is what I have the most fun with: what the city streets look and feel like, what they smell like. What shops sell (or are banned from selling), how language patterns change in certain neighborhoods that are settled mostly by refugees, how government works, how public works are built and maintained.
I love making traditions (like Wintertide, which is held on whatever day snow first falls) or an as-yet-unnamed holiday where everyone walks door to door telling stories and receiving sweets in return if they are underage or alcohol if grown.
Donât get me wrong, I love telling stories too, because most people donât want to just read a Wikipedia on a created world from start to finish. (No disrespect to those that would, because I definitely would). Narrative is a great way to introduce someone to just about anything, and new worlds are no exception. But good worldbuildingâthoughtful, original, intricate, but not overbearingâis what turns a work from good to great.
I love it when there are genuine structural reasons for characters to do what they do, layers of cultural detail that come out in second, fifth, tenth re-reads that keep you appreciating books for years. And the only way to come up with that kind of material is to think about itâand write about itâa lot.