What is the purpose of your story?
Setting the stage in your worldbuilding can be a massive undertaking in writing a novel. You need to craft your story’s foundation for everything else in the story to grow out of. What is the core concept and purpose of your story? What is the overarching lesson and theme that your readers will be following?
I knew while crafting my world that the purpose in my story lies in alchemy, not just the physical alchemy magic but also the spiritual development that goes along with it. My characters must be progressing along the spiritual transition to full alchemists by the end of the story. It is their coming of age story. How did I want to craft that? I decided the best way to do that is to split each alchemical stage into one novel apiece. They would be learning a lesson in each book that takes them one step along the path to alchemical enlightenment.
Consider in this portion of your worldbuilding, what is the mood and genre of your story? Is it a warning about a dystopian world? A hope for salvation? A therapeutic fantasy? What truth about the real world is your protagonist showing the reader in your imaginary world?
What foundation is your story springing from?
The foundation of the story involves deciding upon the environment and geography, the history and culture, and the people or species. Is it future earth? An undiscovered planet? A past time and place? What is the physicality of it? Maybe it’s just a ship adrift and alone or a completely made up world full of races of people you have invented. Are the people primitive or tech savvy? Do they have religious beliefs? What is their social structure like?
In Greed and Calcination I designed a world where everything had been on the verge of complete annihilation due to climate change until the new government stepped in and took over. The children are taught from young ages how this was necessary and heroic. This is kept in mind in everything they experience throughout the story, how it affects them and the culture that has been built out of it as a result of that precipice the world was brought back from. This colors everything about their society. It’s culture, history, technology, social structure and beliefs.
Book One of the Tower of Alchemy Series by Krystle Phoenyx
What are the systems your characters live under?
The systems we live in affect most aspects of our life. It is important to determine what those are for the world your characters are living in. What kind of politics or religions exist there? Are there laws that prevent them from achieving their goals in the story? What kind of power dynamics are they participating in? Is there a magic system they have to operate within the boundaries of? You might consider the economy and whether they are wealthy or living in poverty. Does a monetary system even continue to exist? Perhaps the risk of going against the grain will bring drastic consequences, or your protagonist may want to upend the entire system. Alternatively the antagonist could be trying to alter or destroy the current system and this is driving your protagonist to act. There are many different things to consider when deciding upon the systems of your world.
In Greed and Calcination my protagonist, Zoe, is an alchemy student who is given no choice but to attend a school that will train her to become an alchemist, a station that would put her in a middle class above the slave laborers but still below the governing members. She is seeking to acquire power and money in order to find and save her mother who was kidnapped by the government many years before. She must learn to operate within the systems of the world in order to ascend the ranks and achieve her goals.
Are you spiraling into the abyss of continual worldbuilding?
Sometimes in worldbuilding we can become obsessed with the details of the world we are creating. It can take over so that we are eternally planning and building, but never writing. This is known as “the worldbuilding trap“. I recommend spending some time on answering most of these questions presented here, but do not let it consume you. It is always best to leave some things for the reader to imagine and sort out for themselves.
Not every detail needs to be pinned down, but you do need a plan to work with while you are writing your story. You can always expand more later if necessary, but remember if you spend all of your time planning and worldbuilding you will never have a story for that world to come to life. Writing will help you figure out the details, and editing will help you find the plot holes and contradictions within your world. You don’t have to have everything figured out down to the last slime covered toadstool.
[…] their motivations and emotions that causes us to invest in their part of the story. Go back to your worldbuilding and consider how the various aspects of this world contribute to how the character feels and […]