How to Write a Novel: Setting and world-building: Where does the story happen?
All story happens somewhere. Your job as a writer is to evoke that setting in the mind of the reader.
It might be a space station in another galaxy, a claustrophobic apartment in an over- crowded street, or an underground city held together with magic. There are endless possibilities, which is why setting and world-building can be so much fun!
What is a setting? What is a world?
A scene happens in a setting.
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien opens as follows:
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
The setting is the hobbit-hole, and the reader is soon introduced to Bilbo Baggins, Gandalf the wizard, and a host of dwarves heading off on an adventure.
This setting is only one place within Tolkien’s sprawling world of Middle-earth, and his stories follow characters from the different races who live there. The reader experiences aspects of the entire world, but each character may only see a part of it.
If your story is set in the current world in modern times, you won’t have to go into as much detail as Tolkien. But you still need to evoke a sense of place in the reader’s mind, whatever kind of story you write.
World-building — how far should you go?
Some writers love world-building and will spend more time on that than anything else. Others will use a sense of place to underpin plot, character, and theme, but feel no need to create detailed maps and descriptions that don’t appear in the novel.
Once again, only you can decide what you need for your story and how much time to spend on it.
However deep you decide to go, consider the following aspects of world-building and how they might influence character and plot.
Time period: When is the story set? Or does the action take place across multiple times?
Geography: What are the physical features of the world? What are the most significant places? What’s the weather like?
Flora and fauna: What kinds of animals and plants are in the world? Are there any fantastical or magical creatures?
People and culture: What kinds of people populate the world? What cultural elements impact the characters the most? Consider religion, hierarchy and class tensions, gender differences, politics and government, education, business, language, law, and food. How has the history of the world affected what it’s like today?
Technology: What tools and technology are available? Consider weapons, communication, and how technology might affect the culture.
Magic systems: Is there a magic system and how does it work?
You can create whatever world you like, but it must make sense within the story you’re telling. If you set rules and expectations with your world or your magic system, you must keep to them. If a synthetic human with an AI-powered brain suddenly appeared in Middle-earth, it wouldn’t make any sense to the reader.
World-building can be a lot of fun, but beware spending so much time on it that you never write your novel. There is no point having hundreds of pages of notes about a fictional world when you never tell a story in it.
Discover the world as you write
You don’t need to spend loads of time creating and planning and drawing maps and world-building up front if that is not your thing.
As a discovery writer, I find aspects of my world as I write, and figure out how to make them consistent as I progress through the first draft, or even much later in the edit.
When I started writing Map of Shadows, my story idea was that some people could walk through maps into a world that we had written out of our own. As I wrote, I researched extinct creatures and put them into the Borderlands, and then further out into the Uncharted. I found places we had destroyed or written out of history, as well as groups of people who had stumbled over the Border as refugees, and based elements of my story world around them. I researched ancient places and spun them into new settings as I needed them.
My characters needed magic, and I am a dark little soul, so I made the most powerful Mapwalkers use blood magic. I’m fascinated by tattoos — they appear in many of my books — so the Blood Mapwalkers tattooed maps of our world onto their skin to protect the portals from the Shadow Cartographers.
I love walking along the canal in Bath, so I wrote a scene for one of my characters there, and discovered through writing it that she could mapwalk through water courses — oceans, rivers, canals — and use rain as a weapon.
There is so much more in my Mapwalker world, but I did not invent it until I sat down to write. I had the bare bones of an opening scene and created the world as I wrote. As ever, you can choose the method that works for you.
Use specific and sensory detail
Consider this sentence: “Max and Puja sat in a bar.” It has characters in a setting, but your mental image of what the people and the bar look like will be different to mine, or anyone else’s. Our imagination is shaped by our nationality, race, culture, and religion, our age and lifestyle preferences, and how the names of the characters resonate.
Your job as an author is to manipulate the mind of the reader.
You need to describe the characters and the settings so the image in the reader’s mind is what you want it to be.
Is the bar a dark cavern underground with sticky floors and peeling band flyers on the walls and the stink of tobacco embedded in collapsing furniture?
Is it on an open rooftop overlooking the ocean, with high metal tables and wild palm decoration, with the scent of frangipani flowers on the soft breeze?
I’ve been in both of those kinds of bars and they were very different situations!
When you write setting, consider all the physical senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. You can also include feelings, metaphors, or other aspects that bring depth to the setting.
You don’t have to include each of these elements every time, but consider what might be important for that particular setting within your story.
I am a primarily visual writer and my first instinct is to write settings that a reader can ‘see’ in their mind. But I am an introvert and sensitive to sound, so I often wear noise-cancelling headphones. My settings are therefore less vivid in terms of sound and smell in particular, and I often add elements during the editing process to enrich the scenes in this way.
How much detail is too much detail?
Consider how you experience the world.
There are hundreds of thousands of things you could pay attention to every day — but you choose what’s important and filter the world through that lens.
Do the same for your story.
Choose the details that matter to the characters, the plot, the theme, and anything else you want to underscore in each scene.
Readers instinctively understand that words on the page give weight to particular aspects depending on how important they are. As playwright Anton Chekhov said, “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”
Of course, you can also use this to send the reader off in the wrong direction by over-emphasizing certain details as red herrings. A classic technique of the mystery writer!
Character emotion and setting
We all have emotional reactions to a setting. Since you are writing from a character’s point of view, their emotional perspective will shape the description of the setting.
For example, the emergency room of a hospital would be experienced differently by a young mother of a child having an asthma attack than it would by an experienced middle-aged ER nurse who has worked there for years and seen it all before. Each character would notice different aspects of the hospital setting, and their emotional response would shape the description depending on whose POV you write from.
You can also use setting to underscore emotion. Many writers and filmmakers use rain and storms to emphasize aspects of emotion. A character stands at a graveside mourning in a rainstorm rather than on a sunny day surrounded by happy birdsong, unless the writer has a different emotional point to make.
Use setting to generate plot
A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin uses setting to influence plot and character in dramatic ways. The various family Houses come from different parts of the world and their cultures, landscapes, and even climates impact the characters and the plot.
The Wall separates the wild far north from the rest of the kingdom. It keeps the Wildlings and the White Walkers out — but what if it is breached? This story question is evoked by the setting and is played out across the series in a dramatic way, impacting the lives of major and minor characters alike.
My story ideas often come from setting and a sense of place. Risen Gods was inspired by the earthquake that struck the city of Christchurch, New Zealand in February 2011. The city was devastated, and friends of mine were caught up in the disaster. In the novel, Ben and Lucy are separated and as the Maori gods rise, they must travel the length of New Zealand to find each other and save the country from destruction.
As they make their separate ways north, their adventures and challenges are driven by setting. For example, Ben encounters a demon in an ice cave at Franz Josef Glacier, and Lucy witnesses the great ocean monster Te Wheke at the crossing of the Strait.
What if you want to include visuals of your world-building in your book?
Some authors like to include maps or diagrams that evoke the world in their novels. Tolkien’s hand-drawn maps of Middle-earth are a great example and why many fantasy authors love to use maps.
You can use a site like Inkarnate.com to help create your own map, or work through a resource like Fantasy Mapping: Drawing Worlds by Wesley Jones.
You can also commission professionals to produce one. For Risen Gods, we commissioned a fantasy map of Aotearoa New Zealand with the geography of the country and the Maori mythological creatures and gods that Ben and Lucy face along the way.
You can see the map at www.TheCreativePenn.com/risengodsmap
You can use author-focused freelance hub Reedsy to find an illustrator, or sites like 99Designs, Fiverr, or Upwork.
What is a world bible?
A world bible contains all the supporting information about your world, from maps and culture details, to historical research, character lists and bios, key plot elements, and anything else you want to include. You can use it to keep track of characters and plot as well as refer to it as you write to check for consistency and mine it for future story ideas.
Some authors create hugely detailed world bibles that they populate to keep track of everything. Others keep a few pages of key aspects.
For my ARKANE thrillers, I copy and paste every finished book into one Vellum project (which I use for formatting) and use the Search function if I need to check something. You could also use Scrivener or any method of grouping the finished novels so you can search across them all.
Have you evoked setting in each scene?
Every writer has their strengths and weaknesses.
If you love character and dialogue, you might find that you have pages of writing in which amazing conversations happen, but there is no indication of where they take place, and no richness to the setting or the world.
You can save this step for the edit, but make sure the reader can tell where each scene happens as well as what happens to whom along the way, and the character’s emotional reaction to the setting. Don’t just have talking heads in an empty white room.
Questions:
• What do you know so far about the settings or world of your novel? What do you still need to find out?
• Are you excited about world-building before you write? Or is it something you want to discover in the writing process?
• Which of the various aspects of the world will be important for the plot, character development, and/or theme of your novel?
• Have you written specific and sensory detail about each setting to bring it to life? Or do you have talking heads in an empty white room?
• How have you used character emotion to underscore elements of your setting?
• Do you need (or want) to create a world bible? How might it help you?
• How will you balance world-building with writing the novel? How will you stop yourself from drowning in world-building if you find the process enjoyable?
Resources:
• 30 Days of Worldbuilding: An Author’s Step-by-Step Guide to Building Fictional Worlds — A. Trevena
• Fantasy Mapping: Drawing Worlds — Wesley Jones
• Holly Lisle’s Create a World Clinic — Holly Lisle
• Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction — Jeff VanderMeer
• Interview on world-building with Angeline Trevena — www.TheCreativePenn.com/angeline
• Map creation site — www.inkarnate.com
• Find illustrators and other freelancers who specialize in working with authors — www.TheCreativePenn.com/reedsy
• Other freelance sites — Upwork.com, 99Designs.com, Fiverr.com
