World building is a complex element to fiction writing and if you’re new to it just remember the key word right there in the title – building.

We build. We start small and we build something big. Something enormous sometimes – in tone, in breadth, in detail, in realism, in wonder and magic.

But how does a writer actually world-build and balance plot, character and action?

Here’s one way to do it:

Stick Your World Building Detail to a Character (or Plot)

By that we don’t mean reduce your character to a walking encyclopaedia but to align world building detail, detail that expands your world for the reader, to your Point of View character.

As an example, you may have a deadly plant species (let’s call it ‘moonshade’) that the reader needs to understand for maximum tension in a particular scene. If your POV character is a simple solider, he or she may not focus on the plant beyond knowing that ‘moonshade’ is dangerous because the petals are poison to touch.

Upon seeing it, your soldier may not consider the root words for ‘moonshade’ nor the plant’s regular living conditions nor the speed with which it kills or the exact properties of a cure. And if you as the writer unload all that information onto the reader at that point, your world-building is going to feel ham-fisted.

However – let’s change your simple soldier to a botanist. Or even a botanist-soldier.

Now maybe your POV character would notice such details. The world building detail sticks to the character. The botanist-soldier would naturally be aware of and consider the properties of the moonshade plant and know exactly why it would be unusual to see one blooming in the middle of the day, and understand that something is amiss. They’d know the antidote and they’d take a mental inventory, just in case another character in the story was poisoned.

(And of course, at that point, you have to poison the botanist instead, so they can’t share the antidote right away – and now you’re also sticking the detail to Plot and raising tension too.)

More on world building in a future post!