I’m seeing a lot of posts about world-building, doing too much or too little or trying to figure out what information is actually needed. It’s a tough process, but for now, let’s answer one question.
What is world-building?
World-building is:
giving your story a setting.
creating a world for your characters to explore.
learning about the general details of the world you’ve created.
doing research to find out about historical details to make sure you get necessary facts correct.
educating yourself on the culture of a fictional world.
figuring out the necessary information, like where the food comes from and how the government operates.
World-building is hard. There’s no way around it. World-building is learning about a world that your characters have lived in your whole lives.
World-building is not:
filling a notebook with information you’ll never use.
dumping mounds and mounds of information into your story all at once.
copying the worlds of other writers and stories with only a few minute details changed.
educating yourself to the point of being someone who’s studied the world in-depth for the past twenty years (unless one of your characters needs that information.)
A commonly overlooked concept about world-building is the concept of a wholistic development. You want to know all of the necessary details about your world (x) and maybe a couple of the unnecessary ones, too. But think of the process like going from a forest to a tree; you want to know what the whole forest is like — its weather, inhabitants, species, etc. — before you take the time to look at each tree individually. And if you get all the information you need from the forest as a whole, perhaps you don’t need to examine each tree individually.
Keep in mind one final thing: world-building is not concrete. Even in today’s world, things are constantly changing. So if, once in a while, you need to add or alter some details to your world, don’t sweat it.
Tl;dr: Do a healthy amount of world-building, but not to the point where you’re learning details that you will literally never use in the context of your story.
