The Mythcreant Podcast 504 – How Much Worldbuilding Is Needed?
In this episode, we have a very serious complaint session about all the goobers who try to gain clout by redefining worldbuilding as something it isn’t, then raging against it. After that moment of catharsis, we turn to the real topic: What level of worldbuilding must you actually do? Surprising no one, the answer is “it depends.” It always depends!
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Phoebe. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny. [opening song]
This is the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is—
Bunny: Bunny.
Chris: and—
Oren: Oren.
Chris: Now I’ve realized something since I’ve been pondering a lot on the nature of world building, which obviously is always about re-imagining how planetary physics works. So it is, I’ve realized, the cause of flat eartherism and hollow eartherism.
Bunny: Whoa.
Chris: If you worldbuild, you’re just gonna become a conspiracy theorist. Just inherently an anti-science practice. Worldbuilding is bad, and instead it’s just better to gently imagine the setting of your story. I call this world imagining. And it’s completely different from worldbuilding and totally superior to it. Any questions?
Oren: How come you’re still trying to crush my creativity by talking about worlds? I don’t want worlds in my speculative fiction. They shouldn’t exist. They’re crushing my spirit by existing.
Bunny: Well, I have a rival term, which I think is superior to yours and more conducive to the creative muse within us, and that is universe summoning.
Oren: Because then it can just be whatever you need it to be at any moment. And it doesn’t matter if it makes any sense or serves the story at all. Do whatever you feel like. Summon it into existence.
Bunny: Frankly, you’re being reductivist by reducing this to simply “worlds” or just whatever term you think will boost the thinkpiece’s SEO.
Oren: Yeah, I gotta get those clicks.
Chris: Internet discourse on world building gets really weird sometimes.
Oren: Yeah. Every couple of years, like on a schedule, we get this outburst of people being very weird about world building.
Chris: My whole bit, that was not based on a single incident. This has happened multiple times now where people have done this.
Bunny: The fact that there are many is distressing.
Chris: We’ve relentlessly made fun of world conjuring guy, but he’s not alone.
Oren: He’s not even the weirdest. They always have the same hallmarks. Like someone will define world building as something other than what it is, which is simply the act of creating the place where your story happens. That’s what world building is, and they’ll define it as something other than that, and then rail against that definition of it. And it’s a definition they always just made up. No one ever uses it that way, including them, because it’s not a useful definition of a word.
Bunny: World building is when you kick puppies. That’s why you need to do universe summoning.
Oren: The definition they’ve created is still wrong, but it’s not even bad. World building is when you figure out how dragons would work in your setting and it’s like, okay, I guess that’s one aspect of world building and I hate dragons. Why would you do that? What is going on? The farthest back I’ve been able to trace this is to an article from 2007 titled, “Very Afraid,” but it’s more commonly known as “The Great Galumphing Foot of Nerdism.”
It’s probably not the original, but it’s the oldest one I can find where this guy just rants about how bad world building is. At first he doesn’t define what it means, he just hates it, and he attributes all these problems to it. And he then finally gives us a definition where he says, “I refer to immersive fiction. Any medium in which an attempt is made to rationalize the fiction by exhaustive grounding, or by making it logical in its own terms.” That’s obviously a specific kind of world building, which is not bad, but he’s decided that’s all world building is and that it’s bad.
Bunny: So wait, he wants either realist or completely absurdist stories?
Oren: You know, I do not know. He says what he wants in there and I could not follow it. It is just nonsense. It only makes sense if you also have your head all the way up your ass and have internalized bullshit terminology and then it will kind of start to sound like maybe it means something, but it doesn’t. It is pure emperor’s new clothes over here.
Chris: I think all of this stems from the idea that world building is inherently like hardcore. That we’re not just talking about any type of world building, we’re talking about some kind of stereotype of a specific kind of world building that is super intense and super comprehensive and results in tons of exposition or something like that.
Bunny: Brandon Sanderson. You can just say it.
Chris: The voices of people who do that are pretty loud sometimes. Having some sort of backlash to that, to me, feels overblown, but I have encountered multiple books that are about fantasy or fantasy and sci-fi writing that just state, “here’s how you create a story. First start by creating a world.” There’s a certain assumption that you’re going to do some kind of thorough world building before you even come up with a story idea, and that’s just false. Some people do it that way, and that’s fine.
But it’s just as fine to come up with a story idea and build a world around that and do only as much as you need to instead of just mapping out all of your continents on an entire planet or something. They can be pretty loud. And so this is probably a backlash to that if I were to guess. But again, that’s just not entirely what world building is about. It does not have to be hardcore. You can do a tiny bit. And that’s why when we define it, we just define it as, again, anytime you make any choices about your world, that is not just, oh yeah, we’ve got Earth. As soon as you add vampires or aliens, you’re world building.
Oren: People are really loud about characters and how characters need to be a specific thing and can get pretty prescriptive about it. But I’ve somehow managed to resist going on a rant about how characters are bad and defining them as a kind of character I don’t like.
Chris: Now what we need to do is redefine character development.
Bunny: Character development is when you kick puppies. What you need to have is person be better…ing.
Oren: Yeah. This is the way.
Bunny: I think that there’s two distinct questions here, one of which is how much world building do you need for the purposes of a particular story, and one of which is just how much should you do in general, even if it’s just for you.
I kind of feel like the answer to the second one is just, oh, well, however much. It’s a much harder thing to determine how much you need for your story than it is to be like, how much should you do in general? And the answer to that just seems like however much you feel like
Oren: Yeah, I can’t give you an answer in world building units. It depends. Copyright, trademark, do not steal.
Chris: We didn’t go over what I would consider to be the most essential world building tasks as to, what do we usually recommend by default to people, even if they have a story that does not have a lot of world building? I would start there, what is the basics and also what are the basics for, right?
If people are intimidated by the idea of world building or just don’t like it for whatever reason, knowing, what do you get out of bothering? One is just add entertainment value. Same reason we do anything else, why we have characters or plot or anything. ‘Cause they can add entertainment value. Avoid breaking believability, and plot holes that cause headaches.
Again, if an author doesn’t wanna bother and they’re just like, yeah, I’m not gonna worry about potholes and I’m not gonna worry about believability, that’s their choice. But generally people wanna avoid those things.
Oren: Like everyone’s big on not world building until they run into a story that messes up something they care about, and then suddenly they’re like, ugh, how could someone make something so unrealistic?
It’s like, I don’t know. If you paid a little more attention to the setting you were creating, you wouldn’t have that problem.
Bunny: Yeah, it’s definitely important for that. You want internal consistency unless you’re doing something completely absurd.
Oren: No, that’s the great galumphing foot of Nerdery. It’s bad to do it for reasons.
Chris: And then the last thing that I would mention is just not spreading harmful messages or misinformation. And that depends on what you’re depicting. That’s gonna come into play for some things a lot more than others. If you do stories that are darker, I think that starts to become more important, ’cause then you’re covering some important and sensitive issues usually.
But that is another thing where when we talk about world building, sometimes we’re talking about, what does this say about how the world works and does that do good or harm?
Bunny: Yes. See our episode on bad metaphors for more on this.
Chris: Those are the basic goals. It doesn’t have to be like, create an internally consistent world that you feel is super real. Those don’t have to be part of your goals. The thing that I like to talk about first is usually theming. Again, if anybody’s super intimidated by world building, many writers do theming without even thinking about it. I think it’s still worth talking about because we still run into a lot of writers who don’t have themes by default.
And theming is just, make the world have a cohesive feel and a united impression, rather than being a collection of random stuff. That’s what it means, is to feel like everything comes together in one story, whereas collections of random stuff tend to feel hokey and unbelievable. And so that theming is just deciding what impression you want to create and doing that and adding things that enhance that impression, or if you have really disparate things, you have both elves and aliens in your story integrating to the point where it feels like they belong together.
Bunny: And a lot of that is aesthetic. Writers often also picture aesthetic without really thinking of it as part of world building. There’s a particular aesthetic that goes along with a lot of the -cores and -punks we’ve discussed before, and that is a kind of theming.
Chris: And I suspect a lot of the people who are like “world conjuring” or “world contextualizing,” whatever light term they make up.
Bunny: Universe summoning, Chris!
Chris: “Universe summoning,” theming is probably part of what they’re thinking of. Still probably thinking about what impression they wanna create and making things create that impression. Theming isn’t drawing every continent on a map and coming up with government systems and naming all the places, it’s just thinking about the experience and the impression.
Oren: And I would say for the people who like to do that sort of thing, who want to draw out a huge map and create all the governments and all that, doing things that’s fun is fine. You don’t have to justify doing something you enjoy. I would say that from a storytelling perspective, be careful because if you create your world and make it too rigid, you may find that you cannot tell the story you wanna tell in it.
So at that point, you’re gonna have to change something, be it the story or the world, whichever it is. And eventually you are going to need to write the story. So you can’t spend all of your time world building. But if it’s just a fun exercise you do, especially if it gets you energized to write, there’s no reason not to do it.
What is your process?
Chris: Besides theming, the thing that we usually emphasize is paying a little more attention to your magic and technology, just because those are the things that are almost always causing the plot holes and the headaches later on, if you don’t pay any attention to them.
Bunny: Especially in longer stories, probably wanna devote a lot more time to making your world internally consistent and smoothing over potential wrinkles that just putting tonal elements together might not cover because you don’t wanna set up something that will cause you headaches down the line in your series.
Oren: Yeah. And there’s gonna be a directly proportional line between how big a role your tech and magic plays in the plot, and how much you’re gonna wanna think about how it works.
If your setting has magic, but it’s very distant and mysterious and maybe your hero encounters it once or twice, okay. You probably don’t need to put that much thought into it. If your hero uses it in every scene, yeah, you’re gonna wanna know how it works. ’cause otherwise you’re gonna have the classic problem of why didn’t he do that earlier, which is not fun.
You don’t want readers supporting that. I guess if you do whatever, all the power to you.
Chris: Also, you’re just trying to avoid a transporters on Star Trek situation where that would just make everything too easy all the time, and so you’re constantly coming up with reasons why the hero can’t do that.
You don’t wanna deal with that later.
Bunny: The scale is also super important for this. Really, it’s centering what the story is about. If it’s a really small story that’s not kaiju-sized problems, like the Tea Dragon Society is about tea dragons and friendship and there’s magic in the setting, and there are like fantastical creatures, but that’s not really important to the story, which is mostly about cultivating relationships and raising little tea dragons.
Chris: If your setting is about, I don’t know, the social or emotional effect of magic, rather than solving problems with magic, you can get away with a lot more and you don’t necessarily have to worry so hard about figuring out what magic is capable of. If you do have a protagonist who’s gonna be solving problems with magic, you don’t necessarily have to plan out a magic system that’s logically consistent. I do think it’s useful to, when you create some new magic, maybe put it on a list somewhere and keep track of it, and then of course, by impulse, always just do the least powerful effect that you can think of that will take care of what you need in that moment.
That will be less likely to cause you headaches later.
Oren: You’ll need less world building if you do that.
Bunny: There’s an exercise, which I’ve actually found kind of helpful, even though it feels a little silly to do, which could be applied here as well, which is that whenever you describe a character, write the literal adjectives you use somewhere in a document that you can refer to to make sure you’re not causing an inconsistency, referring to them having brown hair or blonde hair, that sort of thing.
I think doing the same thing with your magic or your technology, what has it done in the past? What have characters suggested it might do? That could be really helpful.
Oren: Yeah, and we mentioned the scale earlier. The bigger the conflict, the bigger the plot that will require you to know more about your world.
If you’re doing a cyberpunk story that’s about a family trying to steal enough parts to keep their cybernetic implants going, that doesn’t need a ton of world building, right? You want something to make the world stand out a bit from every other cyberpunk world out there. But you don’t need a ton.
You don’t need to know the inner workings of the evil corporation’s board meetings. But if your cyberpunk story is about leading a revolution to overthrow the corporate oligarchy and spread your anarchist commune across the world or whatever, you’re probably gonna need more world building there.
You’re gonna wanna know how those things work, ’cause they matter all of a sudden.
Chris: Yeah. If we’re getting into what types of stories need more or less world building, the scale that the plot operates on, matters a whole lot. This is funny ’cause we’ve just been watching My Lady Jane, which is historical fantasy.
We’re re-imagining what happened to Lady Jane Gray and the ascent of Mary to the throne. It’s clear that whoever was just doing the plotting was not really prepared to understand how the politics of the day actually worked so that it could be used in the plot meaningfully, because I can just see the struggle. Historically, Lady Jane Gray was queen for like nine days. There’s a reason why she was deposed by Mary. There’s an actual power struggle.
What happened is they changed the world so that instead of having a Catholic-Protestant split, we have the magical people and the normal people. And of course we have an oppressed mages setting, or oppressed shapeshifters in this case, but it doesn’t work the same, and we have problems because then the main character is now the queen, and realistically, Mary overpowered her. And that happens in the show, but they just don’t know how to create conflicts where technically the protagonist is supposed to have absolute power as a monarch, but they also need her to not solve the plot instantly, and they don’t really understand how the historical political system worked well enough to actually explain what the constraints are on her power and why she can’t just behead the villains as soon as she wants to.
Oren: And there are other scenes where suddenly she can just give edicts and everyone has to obey her ’cause she’s the queen. I don’t know, guys. Which one is it?
Chris: Again, the conflicts, they don’t feel real. It feels really flimsy. You’re left not knowing what she can do and what she can’t. Everything is contrived because you’re like, why is she trying to prove that they’re guilty when she can just behead them whenever she wants? Okay, we really needed a better idea of how this world functioned so that we could have conflicts that feel robust enough for this kind of political intrigue story.
Oren: It’s definitely one of the shows of all time. Of all the shows that came out, everyone agrees that that was one of them.
Chris: If you’re gonna do political intrigue, you gotta think about it a little harder. That’s one of those things that calls for a little bit more intense thinking and research. And warfare can too, for sure.
You could have a story where you have one soldier going into battle and it’s just their journey and you’re not worrying too much about how the battles work or the war is going, but that is a larger scale conflict.
Bunny: No matter how much world building you do behind the scenes, it’s good practice to narrow the window of relevance as tight as you can for the stuff that’s absolutely necessary. We talk about focus on your darlings, center your darlings, and if you’re worried about having too much world building, doing this is probably the best way to reduce it.
Chris: It is worth knowing what you care about. Again, if you’re telling a personal tale and keeping the scope of the story down because you don’t wanna do world building, that’s perfectly fine with those kinds of, like, dragon tea parties.
Often the realism can be really low too, which is another thing I think that helps. You don’t have to do as much world building. So like a lot of, for instance, fairytale fantasy has like royalty everywhere and who cares what kingdom they come from. Their purpose is just to talk about who is betrothed to who and who is gonna fase that dragon and what quest they’re gonna go on.
That works partly just because we have a consistently fanciful, whimsical, surreal, you know, whatever flavor of low realism you like story. And in the sci-fi genre, space opera is often also low realism, where we just got lots of playful alien races from different planets and we’re not worrying about how gravity works on spaceships.
It just works a lot better if you are really consistent about that, ’cause once you start adding gritty elements, that’s when it starts to feel weird that we don’t know where the royalty comes from.
Oren: Or on Star Trek, one of the many things, aside from the transporter bomb that everyone on Star Trek loves.
There’s also a thing where some Star Trek writer every so often will be like, oh hey, what if, to stop an enemy on their ship, they just mess with the gravity? Like they turn the gravity way up or turn it off, and, okay, sure. But once you do that, you can’t have cool phaser fights on the ship anymore because turning off the gravity or turning it way up wherever the enemy is, is a way more efficient way to stop them.
You just have to be wary of stuff like that. I actually have a fun little cheat, ’cause this is my thing now. When we come up with a topic, I tell people a way they don’t have to do it.
Chris: Oh, a hack.
Oren: One weird trick if you want to avoid most of the problems of not doing a lot of world building, but you also don’t wanna do a lot of world building.
A good option is the fun subversion where you take a recognizable set of world tropes and a recognizable genre and you do something weird with it. You subvert expectations in some way. Right? Now doing this with D&D is very popular, where you have D&D characters running coffee shops or inns or what have you, Scalzi has done it a few times with space opera. This is how the Discworld books started. They were basically just a spoof of high fantasy.
Chris: You were not meaning to suggest that Scalzi wrote Discworld. I think that was just two list items blurring together.
Oren: Sorry. No, I did not mean to suggest that.
Bunny: Scalzi is usurping Pratchett!
Oren: Anyway, the point was, if you just ran a standard D&D world, it’s pretty boring, right?
People have seen that a lot, but you make it weird by having the characters run a coffee shop, which is the hot new thing, and that makes it interesting. But you also don’t have to spend a lot of time thinking about how the world works. So this is a way to save on your world building budget as it were, and not have to pay any of the costs that would normally be associated with that.
Chris: Works like a parody because the whole point is that you’re commenting on the original, so you wanna make it resemble the original. And if there are things that are unrealistic, that’s also something you’re commenting on.
Oren: The two downsides to this are, versions lose their novelty as more people do them. That can be an issue. It’s like, oh, hey, I’m subverting D&D adventures with a coffee shop. Okay, we have seen this before, but also this doesn’t tend to work for longer stories. That’s why Discworld eventually stopped being a spoof of high fantasy and started to have its own very distinct world building as the series went on, because otherwise it just wouldn’t have been sustainable.
Chris: Certainly the humor starts to decrease and then we need more tension.
Oren: Discworld’s always funny, but it starts to have its own very distinct flavor and stops just being, what if Lord of the Rings was a joke?
Bunny: Also, a third reason is that some people are obnoxious about the subversions and they do the subversion to gawk at the original and the stupid people who like it. Don’t do that.
Oren: Yeah, you could be mean-spirited about it. I would generally not recommend that.
Chris: As an example of when High Realism starts to become more demanding in the world building…I did a critique of this book, They Mostly Come Out At Night, in the Yarnsworld series, and it’s kind of a fairytale fantasy ish, but we set up what feels like is an intentionally gritty setting where people live in just, like a one room hovel. And then everything is really dangerous and they’re always hiding at night. This idea of, we’re impoverished and everything looks kind of ugly, the town is ramshackle and all those things. I start questioning the fact that the grain is sitting out, that’s not in a grain ark because we might as well just eat that.
And I start questioning the fact that a character says that berries are too sweet ’cause that would actually be a great luxury in that kind of setting. Like, people don’t have a lot of access to sugar. Whereas if this was not intending to be this kind of ugly poverty and it was instead more light and whimsical, then I just wouldn’t really worry.
Like whatever, we’re pretending, there aren’t mice that are gonna come and eat your grain during the night. Of course, people have access to sugar, even though historically they wouldn’t have because that’s the kind of setting it is.
Oren: One more thing I wanted to mention, since we’re almost out of time, from what I can tell at least, part of this weird animus about world building we mentioned earlier definitely seems to come from authors who want to do more surreal stories, which don’t have settings that are logically consistent because that’s not how surrealism works. As far as I can tell, if that’s the kind of story you wanna write and go for it. I think the question that comes up when I look at these stories in editing, is that really what the author is going for? Or is it just one or two scenes that don’t make sense? If it’s consistently surreal, cool. But if it’s a normal story and then suddenly it’s like, oh, well the plot here doesn’t have to make sense ’cause I’ve decided it’s surreal, that’s not gonna go over well, that’s not gonna land with any audience.
Chris: The last consideration about world building where some thought is sometimes called for is just doing what you say you’re gonna do in the story, so if you have a futuristic setting and your book advertises the setting as futuristic, it should actually seem futuristic.
And if it has tons of anachronisms in it, where culture hasn’t changed in like a thousand years, that’s not going to seem futuristic, and so that contradiction is just going to feel like a contrivance to readers. If you want to have an egalitarian setting, then it should actually be egalitarian, which means you should be counting your characters and looking at how many people belong to which demographic and how they’re distributed.
Because if you say it’s egalitarian and all of your characters are like white dudes, especially in leadership positions or something like that, you’re not doing what you say you’re doing. Finally, if you’re gonna depict oppression, please work on making it accurate to oppression. Otherwise, if you wanna fight oppression in your work, just leave it out and go for an egalitarian setting.
That honestly takes way less thought than putting oppression in your setting.
Oren: Well with that, I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close. We can stop world summoning now, Bunny.
Bunny: Ugh, “universe summoning,” Oren.
Oren: Oh, oh no.
Bunny: Brought to you by World Summoning Flakes.
Chris: Well, if we helped you with your world imagining—
Bunny: Boo.
Chris: Consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He is an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[closing theme]Outro: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.