World Building for Plotters
Plotters like to establish the details of their characters, world building, and plotlines ahead of time, but that doesn’t mean your worlds should be two-dimensional or predictable. Read on for tips to help you create a compelling world without getting lost in the weeds of world building!
Last week, I talked about world building tricks for pantsers. Now, this week is for the plotters!
It might seem like plotters have the edge when it comes to coherent world building. And yes, there is an advantage to figuring things out in advance, but there are also pitfalls that can derail your first draft.
First, plotters can fall prey to “world builders syndrome.”
That’s what happens when you spend all of your time world building and never get around writing the actual story. Wondering if you or a writer friend is suffering from this condition? You can usually identify it by the stacks of books that still need to be read for “research,” and a world bible that is expanding past the 100k territory even though you haven’t even begun to start working on your outline, much less a draft of your story.
Plotters can also run into problems when they start writing their stories.
When you’ve thought up your world in advance, it can be tempting to show off your hard work by including every single world building detail you’ve created. This impulse can lead to the dreaded info-dump: long passages of dry exposition that grind your narrative momentum to a halt and bore readers right out of the narrative.
Now that we’ve established the pitfalls, here are three techniques that plotters can use to avoid these issues:
1) Identify the essential information you need to create a draft and stop there
It can be tempting to spend months ironing out every little detail, but you don’t need to know everything about your story’s world before you start writing. In fact, there are things about your story world that you may never need to know at all.
Yup, you read that right.
You can create an immersive story world without knowing every single little detail about the way that world works. Here’s why—you’ll never be able to convey all of those details in your story (at least not without creating an encyclopedia instead of a novel).
Because you can’t include everything, you need to focus on the aspects of the world that are most relevant to your story. Consider the characters, themes, and conflicts that you want to include in your story and focus on developing the aspects of your world that are necessary for those elements to work.
For example, my current WIP deals with themes of religious zealotry and the evils that people justify in the name of their beliefs. For this particular project, I’ve spent a lot of time establishing the religious beliefs and customs of the cultures in my world. Because religion plays such a central role, I know exactly what various people groups believe and where those beliefs come from. I also know how those beliefs have changed over time and what variations exist within the communities that practice the various religions of this world.
In contrast, I’ve spent almost no time developing the the food for this world. Why? The main setting for this story is a city that has been cut off from the rest of the world for centuries. Food options are incredibly limited. As a result, people in this community food as sustenance, and occasionally an aspect of celebration. People living here pay attention to food production, but not much care is placed on taste or preparation—after all, they’ve been stuck with the same few choices for generations. While I sketched out some essential details about the food in this world, it’s not a major focus and I didn’t spend a lot of time on it as I developed the world of my story.
Had I stopped to develop those details in advance my time would have been time wasted. By skipping the nitty-gritty food details in favor of the more important parts of the story, I’m able to work efficiently. Someday, if I need more information about the diet or food systems in my world, I can always go back and develop new details to fill in the gaps.
Full disclosure, I am a pantser, which means I hammered out all the details of my world after producing a first draft. World building after producing a draft makes it easier to establish what is or isn’t important—but, the same concept could be applied to the outlining stage if you have an idea of what you want to focus on in your story. You may misjudge which world building aspects are important, but if you get stuck while drafting, you can always go back and continue world building if you need to!
Immersive, detailed world building is a must, but go too far and your story will be weighed down by weighty info-dumps.
2) Lead with characters, conflict & culture
I recommend sketching out your ideas for the characters and plot before you start world building.
Why? Characters drive the story and having a general idea for your plot can help you determine which aspects of the world building are going to be most relevant.
As you work on world building details, focus on the elements of the world that will best support characterization and conflict. Though the physical world impacts characterization and conflict, I often find that the most important world building occurs when you develop the culture of your world.
Determining the customs and beliefs will help you determine how characters behave, react, and approach the conflicts of the story. Culture can also create conflict if your character has beliefs or desires that contradict the expectations of their culture.
Think about the aspects of the world that would directly shape your character:
What customs give structure to their days?
What causes them to feel shame? To feel proud of themselves?
Which situations cause them to feel powerless or powerful?
What beliefs give value or purpose to their life? Do their beliefs shape their actions? Their thoughts?
Are those beliefs religious or ethics or another vision of morality?
Your readers see your world through the eyes of your characters. Figuring out the culture that has shaped those characters will enable you to craft that lens and help you create a character who reacts consistently and plausibly to each situation your plot throws at them.
3) When drafting: resist the urge to explain
While the first two tips apply to the planning process, this tip comes into play when you are drafting or revising your novel. As you start introducing your world, resist the urge to explain. You cannot include every detail you’ve written in your world bible in your story. You just can’t.
That doesn’t mean you’re wasting the work that you’ve done. It simply means knowing what to prioritize and allowing elements of your world to stand on their own. It might be helpful for you to know the exact coin denominations for your society, but there’s no need to provide a lengthy description of each coin’s relative worth, size, shape, and weight. At least not all at one time. You may touch on each of those coins over the course of the story, but that information should be dripped out, little by little, as it becomes relevant.
Readers don’t need a treatise on the monetary system. Instead, we should see how those coins are used so that we can learn about their relative value as we see what characters are able to buy with them or what they are willing to do to procure more. Ideally, that information will be doled out in moments of conflict when the value of a silver vs. a gold really matters to the characters—either in determining whether they’ll be able to eat that night or perhaps whether they’ll be alive to see the next morning.
Tell us what we need to know when we need to know it. The rest can wait or be left out completely.
As you revise, pay attention to large clumps of information. See if you can weed some out and allow the rest of the world building to stand on its own. When in doubt, give us the flavor of the world, not the recipe. In other words, let us see the effects of the deeper culture, history and politics you’ve created, but don’t give us the full backstory unless it’s truly needed.
Show us that two people groups hate each other by having two characters trade world-specific slurs with each other when they cross paths. Through their conflict and the nature of their insults, readers will be able to infer the deeper cultural issues in play. What we don’t need is one thousand years of historical conflicts summarized on the page to explain a thirty-second bar fight.
Conclusion
I hope these tips help you on your world building journey. Whether you’re a pantser or a plotter, you can create a coherent world that works for your story.
I’m not a plotter myself, but I’ve worked with my fair share and I hope these tips help you create a coherent world without getting bogged down in the process. Keep your eyes on the true prize—creating a compelling, coherent story—and you’ll keep world builder’s disease at bay!
Happy writing!
Need help making world building decisions as you revise your draft?
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