Fessing Up: I HATE 'Worldbuilding'
It's time to come clean. My biggest pet peeve in story craft is 'worldbuilding'. Let me tell you why.
My name is Haly & I am the Moonlight Bard.
Author. Worldbuilder. Miscreant. Malcontent. Punk.
I’m the founder of Skyforge LLC and I write Fictations.
If you find joy and value in this newsletter…
I Abhore ‘Worldbuilding’
The word carries the stigma of Tolkien’s Silmarillion, the bloated prose of Martin, the entire canon of science and speculative fictions, and every pock-faced un-laid D&D nerd in your high school class. Worse, it staggers under tons of misconceptions: maps, constructed languages, and lore dumps.
We humans cling to our misconceptions like children. Nurturing. Pampering. Spoiling. Until they spoil us in return.
Writers of contemporary fiction, historical fiction — any genre that mimics, mirrors, or bases itself on our ideas of “the real world” — are skeptical of ‘worldbuilding’ because of these cradled false notions. They assume it’s unnecessary and useless to them. After all, they’re only making up characters and situations…and OK, maybe a town or a business or something. Still, it’s the “real” world, so they don’t have anything to “build.”
And non-fiction writers ignore worldbuilding, even though it is foundational to how we communicate weird new ideas from one skull-isolated brain to another skull-isolated brain: through story.
Do you see the problem?
Worldbuilding is how we construct coherent metaphors, similes, and other comparatives that make it possible for one person to understand the perspectives and experiences of another.
If I tell you I had a rough day, then you immediately think of what a rough day looks like in your life. Because you don’t know me that well, and you don’t know what my day is like. However, if I explain that on a normal day I hand-load steel parts into a machine the size of a full bathroom, you can begin to imagine a better picture of what a rough day looks like in my life.
This understanding, this experience, this empathy doesn’t happen without worldbuilding. And yet, as a culture, writers ignore its importance. Because of the stigma. Because everyone hated geography in school.
I’m determined to defeat the stigma.
Early this year, I sat down to write a newsletter very similar to this. All about the importance of worldbuilding. How all characters are products of their world. How all plot that’s worth anything is driven by character choices. Within a few weeks, everything I’ve been teaching for years at Gen Con turned into everything I’ve learned from 42 years at the gaming table and how it applies to every writer who aspires to tell a story, fiction or non.
In the months since, I’ve been workshopping and refining the core concepts. Revising the manuscript. Narrowing my thesis and building promises around it. Designing an online workshop. And, yes, checking myself before I wreck myself.
It’s time to subscribe.
Big things are coming. For two years, I’ve been iterating in public, struggling to state clearly the importance of building stories world-first. Yes, it easier to write. Yes, it’s kinder to your editing team. Yes, having a clear and coherent view of your fictional world is an endless source of story inspiration.
But here’s the real hypothesis I’m testing: I believe that constructing stories from the world up is how we make our writing stand out from the machines.
I may be helpless at constructing an elegant sentence, but I’m not selling craft advice. What I can say without vanity is this: no one who has read a raw draft of my writing has ever accused my plots or characters of being anything other than human-crafted. The way I approach both of these is world-first, and that approach is something I can successfully teach.
This newsletter is where I do it for free.
Summer Camp and Gen Con
The year is freefalling into the past. Regular readers and long-time fans will know that July is all about WorldAnvil’s Worldbuilding Summer Camp which heads straight into Gen Con at the beginning of August.
Much creative insanity ensues.
For Summer Camp, I am reclaiming a project that has thrilled me since I dreamed it up: the Black Box Casino. It has bounced around in my head looking for the proper way to be developed. I thought it was one thing. It soon became something else entirely. Now, she is revealing herself as what she’s been all along and why the earlier molds failed to contain her.
I’m also using it as an opportunity to guide you through my process as a worldbuilder. How my systemic approach builds story connections into the foundation. How characters are products of the world around them. How to seek stories in the places where the world grinds against itself.
In short, how I apply the same principles that I teach.
Speaking of teaching…my two worldbuilding classes at Gen Con sold out in the first hour! But did you know: you can hire me to teach you that class, over Zoom (or Discord), without the travel and crowds of a massive convention? Skyforge has a page all about it.
Join us for Verb Your Enthusiasm
The voting is over and Verb Your Enthusiasm by Sarah L. Kaufman is the Busy Writers Quarterly Book Club’s Q3 selection! Pulitzer Prize winning artis critic Kaufman promises to transform our writing with the power of verbs, and I’m thrilled at the prospect.
This weekend is the BWQBC’s quarterly brunch to discuss our Q2 read, Will Storr’s The Science of Storytelling. If you’ve read it, come share your thoughts. If you’re considering reading it, come gather our opinions! There is an event scheduled in the Blanket Fort Storytellers Discord server for Sunday, July 6th, 11 a.m. Eastern in the Schoolhouse Rock video channel. (Voice and video are optional, there is also standard chat!)
We’d love to have you join us!
