Activity

@e-k-seaver Here’s something I wrote up for a friend on another writing site, answering roughly the same question. Hopefully it helps. 🙂

M’kay, so worldbuilding. Start with what you need for your story. What is the culture like directly around your main character(s)? How is that culture different from or similar to the other culture around it? (E.g. if your character is in the lower class, how does that differ from the upper class. Or if your character is in the eastern part of the kingdom and the western side is different, how do they interact or mesh or clash?) What is important in your main character’s culture, and how does the main character feel about those values? (E.g. if you have a character who lives in a culture steeped in tradition, do they value tradition, or think it’s just peer pressure from dead people, or some balance of the two?) How does this cause conflict with those around them? That’s the core of the large-scale stuff: figuring out how things work on a large scale and what conflicts arise from those workings.

And then there are the mid-scale things, which I think actually tend to be the “extraneous” stuff that’s super fun to work out but doesn’t actually have a whole lot of bearing on the story you’re telling right now. (Could be wrong, though. This is kind of all off the top of my head, so I could be overlooking things. XD)

And then there’s the small-scale stuff, which is what brings your description and your story to life. Things like what the material of your MC’s favorite dress feels like, or who runs the bakery down the street and how well they know the MC, or where that perfect hiding place is when the city kids are playing hide and seek in the streets.

That’s a huge generalization, of course, but… hopefully it gives you a start? Honestly, my method of worldbuilding is just to figure out what I need to know for starters and then to follow the questions from there. My brain tends to generate tons of spin-off questions once I get going, and then I can end up going down a total rabbit hole. XD Depending on what your exact purpose is for worldbuilding, that could be a good thing or it could be something to keep in check by just asking with each thing, “Is this relevant to the story I’m telling now, or can I write it down as an idea to work on later?”

It’s kind of tricky for me to pin down “how to worldbuild,” as a big thing, so feel free to ask follow-up questions if you have them. ^-^