Worldbuilding Geography Guide: How to Design Fantasy Worlds and Why the Details Matter

Join Drake and Marie as they discuss creating the geography of your world.

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Transcript

So, my approach more than know your story is, is more know the feeling of your world. If you understand what you want your world to feel like, then you will be much more able to write and explore your world through your writing and invent things that still feel cohesive. So if you think about like a feeling for your world could be something like, I want a steampunk world that's got a kind of Regency feel, or I want a medieval world that's kind of set in the high medieval ages with,

some kind of magic system on top of it.

Like, understand, I want my world to feel grim, dark. I want my world to feel noir. I want my world to feel crap sack, you know, what is the flavor of your world? What are the tropes that play into it? How does it feel to live there? Because if you understand that part, you can do exactly what you said,

You can write your story, you can explore your character backgrounds. You could even do discovery writing or pancing And your world will still be consistent because you will be aiming at that North Star that you understand what your world feels like. You've got something to aim.

Releasing your inner dragon.

So, Marie, since today's topic is something that you've been running a YouTube channel for for years, and a and and I'm actually writing the book on the subject. What do you think the hardest thing about world building is for somebody just starting out?

I think the hardest thing to grasp about world building is the understanding of when to go deep, when to really like, consider there. How would this have impacted the agricultural revolution? What changes would it have made to the societal building you know, in terms of the spread of information, the growth of civilization, the development of identities and groups and and group politics, and when to just go shallow and go, you know what?

It's not that important to just skim over the surface like a bug running over the water. All you need to do that understanding once you grasp when to go deep and when to just skim it. You you've basically got world building down.

But but is there an actual method to that or is that really subjective?

There is some guidelines, right. But like most things it's subjective and it depends on how much what you're world building for. Like if you are world building for yourself because you love world building, go deep everywhere, you're gonna love it. But if you're world building to write the story, then the golden rule for me is the world building serves a plot.

Everything that you put into your world must be about that, about serving your plot, your theme, your characters, your story, and so on. When you go deep, it is in service of your story. When you go shallow, it's because the world isn't that important to the story, or this portion of the world is important to the story, and it's just the backdrop that the reader's going to skim right past.

Yeah. The thing the thing that I think about that, that I try to teach because I do think a lot of it is subjective. So, like, I hate politics. And so, like, you love at least you love politics and fantasy. We don't I don't know if you love politics in the world, but you definitely love the interactions between the politics stuff.

I hate it, I hate it's just mind numbing to me to try and actually create all of that. Which is why, I mean, my first published book was called Farmers and Mercenaries. It wasn't called Princes and Kings or, you know, whatever. It was, you know, I, I tend to write that type of stuff. So that's one thing, is what the author does.

But the other thing is, is once you've figured out your story to. So you said, because I want to just go deeper on what you said because you already said it. I just want to take it a step further. You've already figured out your story. So you said, you know, world build on what matters to the plot, what matters to the story.

But just take it one little step further. What that means is ask yourself, does the reader need to understand this aspect of this fictitious world to get the impact of the story, to understand the story? And so and I know that's what you mean. I'm just taking it, you know, one step further. I think a lot of people don't take it to that step of, oh, right.

Because they go, oh, but my plot needs it because I need it for my story. But there's the reader need it.

So there are there are two parts to worldbuilding the scene and the unseen. Okay. The scene is what your reader know, what makes it onto the page. Now, the thing is, this scene part of worldbuilding is very important, and every piece that you put in there a has to be true, okay? It has to be. Well, it can be.

It can be fake, but only if you have a plan for that, for that falsity. Right. If you're giving the reader a false impression on purpose, but it is can when it comes in, right when it's written on the page. And the second thing.

I would push back on that.

But go ahead. No, no. So so that's why I said it can be false can it. And it can be adapted. But then you need a plan for that, right? You can't just go contradicting it right. You know once once it's there, you can't contradicted unless you have a plan for that contradiction to serve a plot purpose.

And the reason why I said sort of, is because I know what you're saying. You're saying the actual worldbuilding stuff. The reason why I was pushing back on, I said, I'm sort of pushing back on it is because, you know, you and I write in a limited POV, which means the character is the narrator and they only know what they know.

So and on there they can have them, they can have a misunderstanding, which can be explored later and all the rest of that 100%. But that needs to be planned for incorporated into, etc., etc.. But the the point is that the scene part is what your reader understands, and there you only go deep if the reader needs to understand what is being shown to.

But then there's the unseen part of world building that is your notes that is between you and your world building nuts. And really, you know, no one should ever see those unless you're like, publishing a wiki. And in that case, you want to edit it and make sure that it's perfect and so on. Now, the thing about the unseen notes is here.

You need to go deep. When you need to understand the impact of a thing that you're introducing so that your plot makes sense. Okay, let's say that you do something like you introduce, magic that is combat magic. People can throw fireballs, okay? They can also shield against fireballs. They have like DMD style magic. Okay, now let's take this back.

So people, people learn to do this at the same time as their cavemen. They did this like, as shaman, as as, shaman wandering around the countryside. All right. Cool. Now, here's the problem. Yeah. Our society evolved from import, men being better at working together with their family groups. Right. So when when all the men in the village are related to each other, they are better at defending the village.

Right. And so Apache locality marriage was introduced where the woman moves away from her family to move in with the man's village. Right. Which means that the groups, the bonds between men were much stronger in the village and the bonds between women. And slowly out of that, when they a disagreement between a man and a woman, the man can call on his family and say, no, actually, all of my family says you're wrong.

But the woman doesn't have any. You know, she only has the wives of the other men, so and their bonds will be closer with their husbands than with her. So when it becomes too like an inter gender dispute, it, it became one where the men predominantly won. Right. And that's kind of one of the building blocks of why the system became patriarchal after the agricultural revolution.

And so, again, I'm not throwing stones here. I'm just explaining like one of the one of the reasons I posit why, you know, why it became a male dominated world? Because of that, the role of the male in defending the village. Right.

Okay.

But now if your woman can throw fireballs and lightning bolts and everything else, would the same battery locality occur?

I would argue probably not. Like it would probably be a more even thing where you're who moves to whose village becomes a different discussion based on, you know, needs, etc., etc. because you don't have to have a group of strong young men who are all related to each other and can work together well to defend against the raiders who are coming for your grain.

Yeah. So but another, wrench in that monkey. And let's say men can't use magic in this world. Yeah.

So, so if you if you flip that, if you say men con men can't use magic or women can't use magic, so you might get a gender divide. Now let's say you say women of.

Nature fireball in your fireball example. So now the only ones that can cast fireballs and the only ones who can block against fireballs are women.

Yeah. Then instantaneously probably end up with a more centrist stick and matriarchal system where men would be moving to women's villages because it would all be about the women setting up the defenses, and your entire civilization would turn on its head.

Because you're not very afraid of a man invading the village, because we'll just turn him into a crispy critter like you care.

Exactly, exactly. So that's that's the kind of. So. So that's the times when you need to go deep, all right. Or let's say your magic system enables the storage and retrieval of information and the reliable storage and retrieval of information on a regular basis, as well as facilitating long range communication. Okay. Something which lots of magic systems do.

The Renaissance was fueled by the invention of the printing press. Because of the spread of information and the reliable and the reproduction of information. If you introduced that at a way earlier side of your civilization, you might entirely skip an agricultural revolution because you could stay at a hunter gatherer level with this kind of information and still build a massive civilization that still has technology.

You know, because you don't necessarily need the surplus of agriculture or the kind of like planning of agriculture or any of the rest of it. So these are the places where you really have to go deep and think about the effect of your. So you're taking a world like ours, let's say, or people like ours, you know, whether they're ours whatever.

And then you put your fantasy elements on top. What are the five, the five big kind of things, the groundbreaking things that have happened in our world, the agricultural revolution

the Renaissance, the printing press,

set up,

guns was because guns are a massive change in weaponry.

and the internal combustion engine.

Yeah. So if you if magic intercepts in any of these areas, what changes?

Yeah.

You know what, what changes in your world. And there you should go deep. And that is a new unseen. That's this is the place where you need to think about the impact of what you're doing. And the reason you do that is not because it serves your plot, okay. It is so that it can serve your plot and feel realistic to the reader.

Yeah, yeah. The thing that I teach in my worldbuilding class is to focus really on three aspects of society or not society itself, because society is one of them. But three aspects. So society, government and religion, because those are the three things that are interconnected, and each one literally shapes the other. So you can't just, you know, you can't just have religion without it also shaping government and without it also shaping the society that the peoples come from.

And so this is where a lot of motivations come from. Moral compass comes from,

how they act, you know, what are they going to do in certain situations? Like in that class, I talk about, let's say we take it, let's say we have a main character who comes from world that is 100% men. There's literally not a single female they've never seen.

They've never seen a female.

How the society runs is underground. There's these bunkers that all females are kept and they're artificially inseminated. And if it's a male child, it's immediately taken as soon as this morning, handed to a dude. On the surface, if it's a female, it just stays down there. And so this is where one of our characters come from.

And then they teleport to our world, where we grow up loving our mothers and knowing our mothers. And, you know, the vast majority of us, and we care about the female side of our species. Well, a story like that would be great to show the growth arc of that character. Going from, you know, I know females exist because it's where we come from.

But they don't mean anything. They're literally not even human because we don't even get to interact or see them. And then coming to our world. And so, you know, if that character and a character from our world is walking down a street and they see a woman getting mugged, you know, how they react to that situation is going to be very, very, very different.

And understanding that understanding where that character comes from, their background, their society, their religion, their government is going to help you understand how they would react in that situation and not how you would react in that situation. So I do think about that. And then the other thing from what you said is the interconnectedness of everything.

You know, I in that class, I talk about,

the death of a chandelier.

And I always ask, you know, does does anybody know what a chandelier is? At one point, they were the richest, most powerful people in almost every village. And everybody's like, I've never even heard that word before. Like, you've never heard of the person who was the richest, most powerful person in almost every village that existed. And they were like, no, it's a chandelier.

And I'm like, they made candles because we still have chandeliers. There are still Chandlers today. Yeah, they're not rich. They're not powerful. But they kept that a secret. They actually literally hid how to make candles from people. But it was at a time before oil. And if you wanted to do anything after the sun went down, you bought a candle.

There was no other option for. But they were dangerous. You know, any open flame that you're going to use for light in your home is a stupid thing to do. And so as soon as kerosene came out and the oil lamps came out, which are still dangerous, is all you know. But wait, less dangerous than a little wax candle sitting on a table.

But also it's also about the quality of the light.

So to a certain.

Okay, so, so don't let me get started because I did a whole video just on light. How you like your home going to technology level, right.

Not going down there. What I'm saying is, is that when we go through history, technology, which is our magic technology, went from candles to kerosene to, gas to, rudimentary electricity to halogen to led to like technology has has changed that. Yeah. Technology branch tremendously. So if we have magic and magic creates light and we have the ability to, you know, grab an item and cast a light spell on it, and then, you know, you can touch the, the stone and it's bright light and then you can touch it again and it's, you know, off.

Then you know what people also must like. And look, you don't have to go this deep. I just have this obsession. The thing is, if you introduce something like a stupid, simple light spell, okay, you aren't just making it possible for characters to see in the dark.

Right?

What you're doing is you are extending the productive hours of your civilization from 12 to 18. Or 25 or 24. But but, you know, people do have to sleep, so per person. Right? And that is a dramatic impact.

Yeah. So just to finish that up, the things that I try to tell people when you have magic in a system, or in a, in a world, it's going to affect the main things that if you just look at our technology and think of it as magic, what is our magic effect? It affects communication. It affects food production and storage.

It affects travel. It affects, there's something else that I'm missing because I think there's five, but there might only be for offense.

Defense?

Well, war for war was one two, but I thought there was something else. So,

It could. Yeah. Construction and everything like that. Depending on on how you do it.

But anyway, so just think about the basic needs of a human being. We need food. We need to communicate. We need. We need shelter. We need protect ourselves. When you introduce magic,

just think of magic as a substitution for technology. So like in the Genesis saga, I don't even talk about it.

It just he just uses it. And it's only used a couple times in the entire saga. But at one point, Cletus goes into his kitchen and he opens a coal box, and he pulls out a pitcher of chilled milk. There's no electricity in this world, but why would you have a lake? Why would you ever need to invent electricity, or freon, or refrigeration or any of that stuff?

If a mage can just put a permanent cold spell on a box that's two foot wide and three foot tall, that always keeps everything in it at 32 degrees, or, you know, whatever the equivalent of that is in celcius. And it was a refrigerator. Run it in Celsius.

Probably about, just about zero. So 4 or 5 degrees.

Okay. Because the air is freezing. Yeah. Be the freezer.

Yeah. So we would probably run it at like four degrees.

Like, okay. So yeah. So why would you ever invent Freon? Nobody would sit around going, I'm going to make $1 billion inventing a refrigerator that's going to run off of an electrical outlet when a mage can just make. And so, yeah.

But it's also it is also really important to consider how that impacts your history, because again, like storage, storing food has been a massive problem until this or not this last century. Yeah. And has been a huge part of, of the management of societies has been the storage of food and its surplus and managing that surplus somehow.

So yeah, if you, if you have refrigeration available to like Neolithic farmers of the Stone age, man, I promise you society's going to look different. Like not a little bit a lot.

Yeah.

And maybe that doesn't matter to you, but, you know, somebody like me might read your book and go, okay, but but why is this exactly like our society? Except people have magic.

Right? Like we're throwing lightning bolts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's the thing. And again, what we're talking about just to to bring us back to that, we're talking about what we're creating for ourselves, not what we're putting into the story. So like that, that cold box in the story, he literally it's it's a throwaway line. He walks over, opens up, it takes a picture of himself, puts it back in.

I think his cook does say something like, you know, we need to get a mage over here to re-up that because it's not, you know, it's it's not as cold as it used to be. And he's like, fine, fine, tell the so-and-so and he'll get somebody to work on that. You know, basically, yes, we need a plumber to come in and fix that.

So we'll call a plumber, because in this world, magic is very. Yeah. Carpenter. So mages are under there is no fireballs or lightning bolts, but there is refrigerators and, and, you know, communication devices and stuff like that. So it literally is more of a, technology that, yeah, than a whatever, but, but it just depends on what you're doing with, with your magic and how it fits into the story.

So I would say that what we've discussed now is kind of my, my golden rule of worldbuilding is think about the impact that your fantastical elements have on your world, and make sure that you understand them. And remember, the world serves the plot, not the other way around. Yeah, you're not a GM. You're not creating a world. And then your players interact with it.

And the world is the story, right? You you're you're an author. You are choosing what goes into your world. Your choice is what goes into your world to write your story.

And one of the things that breaks my heart when I, you know, I speak in a lot of writers conventions and inevitably I talk to you about the stories that they're writing or whatever. And I would say every single time I'm at a writers convention, I'll be talking to somebody and, you know, they're like, oh, yeah, I'm I'm wanting to write fantasy.

And it's like, oh, okay, great. You know what's what's going on in your story? Where are you at? Oh, I haven't started working on yet. I'm still just working on worldbuilding, like, oh, how long I've been working on that. 17 years. Like, oh, you're not a writer. Like, that's not you can't world build for seven years and call yourself a novelist.

If you've never written the novel. It's like at some point you have to write the story. And so that's why I stay focused on what does the reader need? Because you also mentioned, you know, like, like a bug going over water, you know, just just bracing the surface. I call it flare. So like in Genesis and this is the one I just use for when I'm teaching this Genesis has holidays and they're mentioned throughout.

They're constantly, you know, oh, there's this holiday that just happened or there will be this holiday in the future or whatever. I have never fleshed out a single holiday for that world. Not once. I don't know what they are. I don't know why they exist. I don't know what rituals happen during them. You know, I make it up on the fly.

So like once. So, like, I know this one culture, celebrates something called, the festival, the Silver Tides. And I know they put out lanterns on ropes during that because that's what I wrote. And so that becomes canon. But I don't know why they put out the lanterns on ropes. I don't know why it's called the The Festival of Super Tides.

I don't know why they celebrate or anything like that, because the the actual festival has never happened. During the story. Like in that case, it happened. It ended last night. In that particular instance. So it allows me to, to have this town that's just finished a celebration. But the reader doesn't need to know what the festival is over tides is.

It doesn't affect the story in any way other than the decorations that are in the town. Yeah.

My my go to example for for skimming versus not skimming is is the same author. It's George Amo. Okay. And I'll illustrate. All right. If if you think of Westeros, the port where the main storyline takes place, right, you can probably list at least five things that they've eaten because he describes the meals in details. You know the houses, you know what their words are.

You know where they come from. You know about the small flag. You know about the brown that they cook in King's Landing. You know about the history of King's Landing. You know about the history of the King. That the knick, which is the connecting piece between star clans and the rest of, you know, all of these details, all right.

Because that is where the story takes place. Name one meal that they eat in Essos. I can name one horse, heart, because it's the only one that's important to the story. When Danny eats the horse heart as part of, like, this whole ritualistic experience.

Yeah.

Nothing else. Because he skims essence because it's not important to the story. It's just background.

Yeah, it's just the dark cloud hanging over. I mean, it's.

It it's just pretty background. It's just the background elements. So, so to interact with like the unsullied and you build out the unsullied a little bit, but there's no real. How did the unsullied come to be? When were they first? What? You know, none of that. Why? It's not important.

Yeah, but because we know that.

That's not where the story's.

You know, they eat. We just never really. Yeah.

You know, they eat, you know, that they do have a history, you know, that the how the training works and so on. But he doesn't give you the the amount of detail that he goes into in Westeros.

Yeah. Because as the reader does. Yeah. Yeah. That's a yeah. Yeah.

And that that to me is a really because because it is such a and I mean for most readers of of A Song of Ice and Fire, you can see that difference very clearly. Right. And it's not to say that he couldn't build out a source. Of course he could, but he doesn't need to. So he doesn't.

Yeah. Yeah, that's a good example. Yeah. All right. What else about worldbuilding? What are.

Okay, so, we spoken about the Golden rule. I suppose we can talk about hard versus soft. AI or, you know, I don't even like hard versus soft as magic systems. Because the thing is, people get hung up on the stuff and they don't. They're so like, oh, hard. A hard system doesn't break its rules or whatever. No hard soft.

It all serves the purpose of the writer, right? The only difference between a hard and a soft system is in a hard system, where the reader knows the rules, you need to make sure that when you break the rules, you make you break them in a way that makes sense to the reader. That's it. You just have to find a bit more reasoning in a soft system where the reader doesn't know the rules.

You can break the rules, but you just have to be more careful of not being deus ex machina. You can be Deus ex machina in both of them. You know, like, people get so obsessed on this hard versus soft. I like to roll this, so I like it's a scale of the amount of knowledge the reader has. And some worlds like Spirited Away is a great example.

It is Aki wrote to me. Look up that name quickly.

Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away you know, I've seen spirited play is a it's a very it's a very soft it's a, eastern movie, very soft worldbuilding. It's kind of dreamlike. It's got a lot of unexplained magic. It's a very fairy tale. Like what? You know, and the soft worldbuilding there is fantastic. Once upon a time, I'd also say, is softer worldbuilding.

How does the magic Kingdom work? Who knows? Who cares? Right? It's not that important.

Like right?

It's about the fairy tale, etc., which is hard world building system like, say, tall computer. You know, it's hard. Those magic was fairly soft, but but the world is got lots of like richness and detail and rules and so on. George, Robert Jordan, of course, very, very hard, world building. You know, your world. My world.

Does it seem like they've got things that the reader knows more about and the reader understands the world more? So it just it's about that sliding scale of definition. How much does the reader understand?

And I agree with everything you say, except for I do think that it's important to understand the difference. And you've touched on it. You said, you know, the worry about the Deuce ex Machina, basically the way, you know, I try to push people to understand it is and I don't like the term hard or soft. I like what exactly what you were saying.

Defined or undefined. That's really what we're talking about here. If you define it, then your characters can use it to overcome elements of the story.

Let me just sorry. Let me just specify if you define it for the reader.

Right, right right right right right.

You you in your unseen world can have infinite. You can have as defined or undefined. Is it. All that matters in this case is how much the reader understands. Yes.

Yeah, yeah. And that's exactly it. And that's a that's what I'm talked about when I say if you define it, I mean, if you have defined it to the reader, if the reader understands it, you can use your character can use those elements to overcome obstacles in the story. If you don't and you use those elements to overcome the story, they are unearned.

They're the epitome of do sex machina. It's sort of like Lord of the rings. How does magic work in Lord of the rings? We have no idea. No one can tell you how you know what spells are, or any rules, or what you have to do to learn it or use it or anything like that. So how would it be if you know at the beginning of Lord of the rings, Gandalf shows up to Frodo's house and he's like, hey, you got that ring?

He's like, yeah, give me a second. And he teleports to Mount Doom, and he throws the ring in the lobby and he teleports back to Frodo and he's like, hey, do you want to go out to dinner? Like, yeah, why can't there's no why couldn't he do that? We don't know anything about magic. Absolutely. He could have done that.

No he couldn't. That's a thing. Right. So so here's the thing. We don't know that. No, no, no, but it's about what the reader knows.

Right? No, I'm just saying.

What is not the cause. Remember the author, the vision of the world is the author's vision of the book. Unless the author puts the fantastical element into the world, it doesn't exist. We do not. In Lord of the rings see Gandalf teleporting. Therefore, it's not valid to say that he could do that. No, no, no. But I'm getting to that same point, right?

So what do we know about the one Ring? We know it makes you invisible so the characters can and do use the fact that it makes you invisible at various stages in the story. And this is why I push back on the hard versus soft, because I would say that, you know, Tolkien probably didn't have very many rules for magic.

I don't think he had very many for much in his unseen nuts. Okay. Yeah. I've to a store of rules for magic in my unseen nuts, but I don't think that my readers see them because I don't show them right. And that's the thing is, like, it depends on what the reader knows. And so you can have a soft as a motion system and still not have deus ex machina as long as you set up what the effect of the magic is.

And then use the effect of the magic. Look at this. Introduce Jacqueline Carey, and I asked I straight up Auster whether she defined anything about our magic system, and she looked me in the eye and said, no, not a damn thing. But yet it never felt like this ex machina, because she set up every single time that there was magic.

She said she set it up right and then right.

And that's my point. So because it wasn't set up, the author could have just went, you know what? I just want Gandalf to teleport in the ring and drop it and mount doomed. I mean, there's no reason why I can't do that. Well, the reason why you can't do that is because the reader would then feel cheated. So you are correct.

You haven't set up any rules for your world, for your society, for your government, for whatever. Because you don't want to, because you don't feel that you need it for your story, you know, whatever. That's perfectly fine. But you have created one rule for yourself. It means that your character cannot use any of that crap to overcome anything in the story, because when you do it that way, it feels exactly like, well, someone in the peanut gallery had said, actually, why couldn't you?

No, Gandalf have called the giant eagles to, bags in and then just flown the giant eagle to mount and do because it's the same thing.

And.

When you have so like, like as an example, the Giant Eagles is a great example of this. And I, you know, again, I don't know if he thought this deeply about it. He was the first epic fantasy writer. So he didn't really have anything to look back on to make mistakes. So you do the best you can. And then when you make mistakes, you don't do them again.

Or if you're a smart person, you look back on everyone else's mistakes and you don't do those. But he did it right in the because Gandalf didn't call the giant eagles to the tower to save him when he was trapped there, he actually found a moth, and he used the moth to then go out. And so by just talking to the moth that establishes, oh, some part of magic means I can communicate with animals.

And then the animal went to got the eagle. He jumped off. When the eagle showed up, it was like, oh, the moth connection. He earned that little bit. We we kind of set it up and then we capitalized on it. So you can decide, I want to run a, you know, soft world. I don't want to spend all this time like, you know, marrying Drake or talking about and create my societies and my governments and my religions and all the different things.

But it definitely means you can't use them now to solve the story. They become fluff. They become like my.

Like, it's like your politics. You can't use politics to overcome your story unless you specifically set up specific political gimmicks or plot devices to use, because you don't you don't show any of your politics to the reader. Now, I show my politics to the reader. Politics to me is a tool that I can use for my stories.

Yeah.

So I can use politics to overcome plot devices all day long because I've got a plethora of political tools available to me.

Yep. Yeah. And in the third book, when politics does come into the Genesis saga, it comes in as a useless wet noodle. And they go, well, because, you know, they do kind of turn to it and it's like, you guys are worthless. Let's go take care of this. Yeah. So yeah. And it's because I don't I don't need that for my story.

My story is not about that. My story is much more about salt of the earth people, you know, rising up to, to take care of the ultimate evil. And I don't need government to come in, because if I did, if the if you know the characters through the first couple of books, did, you know, fought tooth and nail to get what they're doing, and then, you know, all hell is unleashed on the planet and the government is like, all right, kids, step aside.

Because now the military is coming in and the government and everything else, and we'll solve this whole problem. Go home. Like that would be terrible for my story. So the government can't do anything. And so they're kind of useless in my story.

So I would argue that the government could still do something and your heroes could still be heroic, but that's that's me and I have I have different perspectives on it because one of the tropes that I don't like is like the government inevitably is useless. I'm like, okay, but then how do they maintain the government at all?

Like, the government is useless for this situation, because the government of this world is just crawling out of a catastrophe, and it's a bunch of small little city states that are basically just one step of one step civilized above warlords. And so they're never going to work together in any type of fashion to handle something that is a a massive world crisis.

So that's the reason, in my notes of why they're never going to do anything. The world is not.

The say, you know, you can make you can make it work. I've just like I've just, you know, there are tropes that annoy me when people like bring them in, whether whether they like, introduce these political tropes, that's like, come on, come on.

Yeah. But again, I want to stay, you know, it's what you want to do as a writer. And for me, the Genesis saga is about more salt of the earth people rising up. Yeah, we know when called in a time of need and becoming the heroes that this world needs, even though they don't have the resources and they don't have the the backing and they don't have the official seals and they don't have anything that would normally entail them to do whatever they're doing.

yeah, I it's just that's the story I want to tell that I'm interested your again much more with the with the single Chronicles is much more you're exploring politics. You're exploring the the machinations of Malcolm alien, you know, type environment because that's what interests you and that's what you want to explore. And that's that's kind of the point is there is that limitation, that you have things that you're interested in.

And so you need to think about that. But it also means that I put the limitation on myself. I can't use government.

Yeah. You can't use government because you haven't set it up and and that that's what you have to bear in mind with the whole of world building. Right. You've got two options. You can set up specific devices like let's say you did for some reason, decide, okay, I need this one political device. Okay. Now you don't have to build up the entirety of your political system.

You can build this one political device out in the same way you build up any other plot device, you introduce it, you taint it, you water it, and you harvest it. Right? And that still gives you your your use of that political plot device without building the thing or you can be like, okay, I'm going to build up the entirety of my political system, and it is all available to me to draw in, like like my character sword wielding ability or my character's magic ability.

I can draw on my character's political abilities in order to create a solution to a problem.

Yes. Yeah. So that's the big thing to keep in mind. It's just.

If you're trying to be a novelist and you've got to keep in mind that you're writing a novel, and so all of your worldbuilding should be for that purpose. So if you're writing epic fantasy like us, the world is going to become way more involved in the story than not. So epic fantasy writers are going to spend more time creating their worlds.

They just are, because it is more integral to the to the plot, because usually the plot is some type of big world affecting thing. You know, that is the plot. If you know your plot is like, let's just use like the fundamentals of caring. If you're writing the is caring and your plot is about a guy who had a personal tragedy, and the story is about his journey to self-forgiveness.

Then you don't really need the world. The world doesn't matter to that story, and they don't flesh it out. They don't. You know, he does volunteer to take care of an invalid. And so they did flesh out what is it like to go to the government offices and get those paperwork and what you know, what, certifications do you need to be able to get that job?

And they explored that in the story, very briefly. But, you know, it was there was mentioned that he went through this to to get the legal right to be a caretaker. Other than that, that's about all the thing they did, like everything else was just him and this kid and him trying to forgive him. You know, punish himself is really what he's doing in the beginning.

It's. Let's talk about $0.06. Yeah. How much building did they do in six scenes? How do ghosts work in six scenes? You have no idea. And you know what it doesn't matter. Yeah, because that's not what you need to understand in order to consume the story. Six inch worldbuilding is very soft. That doesn't make it a bad story.

It makes it a great story. What they set up, the one thing they needed to set up, which is that the little kid might or might not be able to see dead people.

Yeah.

And then when the twist realization comes with the energy like, mind blowing.

Right.

And that's like, so.

But there's no religion in that story. There's no other life discussions. There's no.

Nothing like, because you don't need it.

Yeah. I mean, the funny thing is not you mentioned that, what is is it ghosts? The new sitcom that's been running for a few years. I think it's called ghosts.

They have more world building in that sitcom.

I mean, they're a TV series, right? You know, I'm just.

Saying, even in the pilot episode, there was more worldbuilding about why ghosts are here, where they go afterwards. You know, why is there a few that get caught and all this other stuff? That's all in the pilot episode. So that's in the first 30 minutes or 22 minutes of the show, and it's more worldbuilding than they do. Then in this example, I mean.

The Patrick Swayze, movie ghost also had like a very detailed exploration of, like, ghost, a much harder system on like how it works and so on. But the thing is about Sixth Sense is it actually would.

Have.

Harmed the story.

Would.

Because the story requires the softer world to tell, because you are in this dreamlike state of this dude dealing with his own death through talking to the boy.

Yeah.

And that's basically like, why the world is the world building is so soft so that the twist can be so dramatic.

The story is not about the afterlife. The story is not about. Death. It's not about, you know, ghosts. You know, it's not like they're an integral. Whatever. So again, it goes back to exactly what we said at the beginning of this. What does the reader need to understand the message of the story? That's what we're going to focus on.

That's we're going to we're going to create everything else can really be more flair, more fluff, more stickers. Another way to think about it that I talk about is the old Western movies where you'd have the Western town, you know, the one horse town with the thing.

With a tumbleweed.

Yeah. If you actually walked around like the saloon they built all the way out. So it was an actual building with walls and ceiling and all of that. So the cameras and everything go inside, but the store next to it was literally just a facade, and behind it were just boards that held up the facade. There's the door doesn't even open.

And so like but on the other side it looks like, oh, there's a saloon and it's got actual businesses sitting next to it. Let's go into the saloon, man.

Do you remember live action? Lost action hero.

Oh, yeah.

It was so like, talk about worldbuilding. Just on the topic of world building. Because because they were world building. A behind the scenes action movie. When Arnold Schwarzenegger goes into, like, House, there's nothing there because he never visits.

Right?

So it's an empty set, which was just such a great like it was such a beautiful piece of world building for that world, showing how empty the character is when the camera is off.

Yeah.

It was just your facade reminded me of that.

Yeah. Oh, and you know what was his when the kid asked about what was his response, he's like, well, I'm never here. Like, damn it. Was it was the way the world work. Tell us we got the joke. Yeah, but, you know, no one ever built that set. But to him, it would be odd to have anything there.

Like, why would I have anything here? Yeah. So, yeah, that was, that was I want to I want to watch that movie again. And movie is actually better than people give it credit for.

I, I, I enjoyed that movie I did. It has a warm spot in my heart.

Yeah, it's a good one.

Okay. So what is your best tips for beginners?

Know your story. I think it's important to at least. And I don't mean, you know, you have to know the theme and you plot it out. Every little aspect of it and anything like that. Because the thing about story building for me is you're going to create everything all at the same time. There is no chunk. I'm going to do this.

And then and then all of that will lead to this and that will lead to this. It's more of a okay, I know generally this is going to happen. I'm going to go here, you know, this is the big bad. This is the climactic event. And then just start thinking, all right, what am I? What are the elements that I'm going to need to tell that story and then start fleshing those elements out.

So when you have that plan, when you have I need to know these things to tell this story inevitably as you create this thing. So like you go, okay, well, the opening scene, I'm going to need to know, you know, I'm going to start off in the hero's home village. So I need to know that. Well, that's going to inevitably lead you to questions like, well, what are the other, you know, how does this village survive around the other villages and everything like that?

And then you can explore those or not, but. If you don't need it, just knowing, oh yeah. There are other villages around or oh, there's a bigger city over here that the government has and, and whatever is enough, usually until you're in the story itself and then you're like, oh, wait. In this scene, a tax man has to show up from the government.

I don't know anything about the government. All right. Let me take a step back and let me figure that out real quick. And then once I figured that out, I can come back to the scene. I mean, we've been doing that through magic Falls since the very beginning. It's like we figured out a bunch of stuff in the beginning.

And then as we move forward and I say we a lot of it is you,

will then go and figure out kind of the, the,

The finer details, right.

The finer details behind it.

So

my approach more than know your story is, is more know the feeling of your world. If you understand what you want your world to feel like, then you will be much more able to write and explore your world through your writing and invent things that still feel cohesive. So if you think about like a feeling for your world could be something like, I want a steampunk world that's got a kind of Regency feel, or I want a medieval world that's kind of set in the high medieval ages with,

some kind of magic system on top of it.

Like, understand, I want my world to feel grim, dark. I want my world to feel noir. I want my world to feel crap sack, you know, what is the flavor of your world? What are the tropes that play into it? How does it feel to live there? Because if you understand that part, you can do exactly what you said,

You can write your story, you can explore your character backgrounds. You could even do discovery writing or pancing And your world will still be consistent because you will be aiming at that North Star that you understand what your world feels like. You've got something to aim.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it makes it a lot less scary when you're like, oh my gosh, I've got to create an entire world for this story. You know, you've got to create. I mean, you're going to start in one scene. You know, like I said, maybe you're starting off in your character's home village. Okay. Create the village. Yeah.

Create that. Create how it operates and why it's there. And and you know, how what is life like within that? And then now you have everything you need to know to write that scene. Yeah. And then you can continue to move out from there.

And my the one exercise I always recommend to people is when you create a character whenever you've got like a character like a, like obviously not all of your tertiary characters, but your primary and secondary characters go through the exercise of doing one day in the life of what happens when the character gets up. Do they eat?

What if, like, what do they stand up out of? You know what? What have they been sleeping in? What? What is their house like when they walk out the door that they go to work? Do they go to school? Do they go, you know, what do they do? Do they eat the midday? Where do they go to bed?

What happens if they're attacked? So there's a couple of what if scenarios are, you know, how do they defend themselves? How do they travel? How do they communicate? And so I run through this kind of like day in the life of exercise, and that helps me understand what the character interacts with and therefore what I need to will build, because I'm going to show some of the yeah.

That, that that is my top tips for beginners day in the life of and understand what your world feels like.

Okay. What do you think a writer has to know about their world? Preferably before they start world building, I guess, or before they start writing.

I'm asking. You've already said it. What tone are you going for?

I think you also do need to understand your fantasy elements. Like not in depth. You don't need to fool magic system or whatever, but you do need to understand how your magic works, because what people can do with your magic will dramatically alter your world. So you do need to think about that a little bit. You know, like if magic is commonplace, you need to know if magic is commonplace or rare, and then you need to know what it can do, because magic is commonplace and you can, for example, heal all diseases.

I promise you, you have a dramatically different world, like staggeringly different, because diseases until this century was a massive limiting factor in our lives. So like, so, you know, go, go look at things like the, the, the black plagues, death, right? And stuff like that.

Yeah.

So, so I would say that you do need to understand your fantasy elements a little bit, and, and then your feeling of your world. So

we've spoken, I guess, about how to plot your basic worldbuilding.

Yeah. I mean, we fit most of these. There's.

There's one here. Important notes about worldbuilding for discovery writers, which I think I've hit on. You've got to have that North Star, because the biggest problem with discovery writing or pantsing is that, you sometimes get into a situation where your worldbuilding starts feeling disjointed because you didn't know you needed it, and now you did. You do discover that you do need it, and now you need to go back and put it in.

And maybe you don't go back and put it in and so on, depending on kind of how you publish and so on. And that can lead to kind of disjointed worldbuilding, right. And having a North Star will help you not have that disjointed feeling, but also like go back and edit your stuff. If you're a discovery writer, you're going to spend a fair chunk of time editing when you go back and fix things from having reached the end of your story.

I guess the other tip that I would give is practice believing that it's done and done right when you come up with. So like, let's say you're in chapter 15 and you're like, oh, I need plot device X, but I don't have plot device X in my story. But you know what? There's a place in chapter three that I could introduce it.

There's a place in chapter seven that I could, you know, bring it back up in again. And there's a case in chapter nine that I could also then go to chapter three and write a note, you know, in, you know, introduced plot X here. And then go to chapter seven and say revisit and then chapter nine and revisit.

And that way you can go back to chapter 15. And you don't have to waste all this time editing. You've thought about it, you go, okay, this is how I'm going to incorporate it. This is what it's going to be. And then just continue writing as if you've already done it. Yeah, because it's so hard to reach the end that we want to reach the end.

And then remember where you needed to go. Put that in.

That's why I said put those notes right at the top. So the next time you go to that chapter, the note at the top is in, you know, introduced plot X and you were like, oh, right, right, right, right. I totally forgot about that. I do need to do that. And then go through and do it. Yeah.

It's just it'll save you from getting into an editing loop where you're constantly just doing that as opposed to you need to move forward.

And I do a fair amount of that. You know, because my, I do plot, but I also discovery, right? I kind of fall somewhere in the middle between the two. And so I do a fair amount of that where I'm like halfway through, I'm like, oh, actually, this plot no longer works for me. I need to change from blah blah.

And then I'll just leave a comment for myself in my word document and be like, change this when you come back to edit. Because if I stop writing, I'm going to interrupt my flow of words. Yeah. So I don't want to do that. I want to keep writing, reach the end, and then I'll go back and edit the world building in later.

Exactly.

Yeah. And then like my last tip to anybody would be go to my channel. And that is a shameless plug. But in all honesty, I have a plethora of videos where I cover all kinds of topics like multiple suns, multiple moons, magic systems, every magic system you can think of, and how they could impact your world. And so if you're looking for a way to do a specific thing like go search the internet, my channel is there for you, but there are other places as well.

And check out how people would implement the thing that you're looking to implement. And, you know, take inspiration from other people.

Yeah, if you guys aren't subscribed to Just in Time Worlds and you have an interest in worldbuilding, it is insane. I mean, you've been doing it for several years. It's how we met because you invited me on to that channel. So you've known for at least five years? Because we're in our fourth.

So, like, you're just put out.

You put out so much content and you think so deeply about each one of these aspects of worldbuilding. It's it is a treasure trove of worldbuilding information. So it really is something that everyone should go through. And, you know, I don't watch every episode, but I'm like, oh, that's an interesting topic. Let me let me check that out.

Let me check this out.

It's something I highly recommend.

Thank you. But yeah. So, you know, there's a lot of resources available to you. You don't have to, like, try and think of all the stuff yourself. You can leverage other people who think of this all the time.

Yeah.

And I think that is a good note on which to end this episode.

We will see you soon for another one.

Bye.

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