Not every author has to tackle the concept of building a world. If you write in the present-day Earth, it becomes a lot easier to avoid talks about geography, the geo-political climate, or culture. However, if you're a fantasy or science fiction author, you might find you want to write a story with a world you built. (Any genre can place the protagonist in a fantasy world, so don't feel like I'm only writing to fantasy enthusiasts)

In fact, there are a lot of people who enjoy world building fantasies. They like to imagine a world built unlike their own. They're willing to forgive quite a bit of exposition and expositional dialogue in the name of filling out a new universe and watching your characters interact with that universe.

However, world building isn't easy. There is a significant difficulty in knowing what to write and how to write it, leaving a lot of people scratching their heads. You might end up with a world that is boring, because three chapters of exposition has kept the story from going anywhere. On the other end of the spectrum, you might end up building a story with an incomplete and hard to understand world, and accomplished nothing as a result.

So the best way to learn how to write a world building novel is to read world-building novels. Example after example of how other people do it will quickly help you learn how to do it too. You can first learn by emulating your favorite authors, then finally, after you know what you're looking for, you can develop your own style.

That aside, what I can offer you is a handful of tips to help you get on your way. Like all of my advice, they aren't set in stone, but some of this stuff will probably help you start world building. At the very least, it might help you translate what you've already experienced into a few key points that I think are important for you to know. Things such as...

There is a reason almost every fantasy story starts with a hobbit. No, I don't mean a literal hobbit, except in the case of LOTR and the Hobbit, but you probably get what I mean. The protagonist is almost always completely unfamiliar with the world. Maybe they are a prince/princess who has spent their entire life under their father's deceptions. Maybe they are a country bumpkin, or a person caught in a secluded village. Usually they are young, and when they are not young, they still manage to be inexperienced.

The reason they all start out this way is because you (the reader) start out that way. You know nothing about this world, and you must experience this world through the eyes of your protagonist. If your protagonist knew everything about this world, then the reader would be confused and have a hard time following along. Thus, in a way, the protagonist of a world-building story must always be innocent, young, or at the very least in a completely unfamiliar area (like being teleported to another world).

In this way, your protagonist is able to relate to you. His confusion is your confusion. The few terms he IS familiar with (unique places, names, skills, and people) will be limited so that you, the reader, can handle them in bit-sized chunks.

However, when I say start small, I don't just mean make the protagonist a naïve child. I also am talking about the setting and the story. Most of these stories don't just start with a country bumpkin, but they have that country bumpkin in the country. They start in one village or city. For the first ten some chapters, all of their story and experiences take place in that town.

Of course, they eventually leave the town, but only after the story has progressed to that point. If you throw the entire world at them in one go, any reader would become confused and lost. Thus you start small, and you grow, little by little. First, it's the city. Then it's the next city over. Then it's the dukeship, then it's the kingdom, then its multiple kingdoms, then it's the world. The story grows, the characters grow, and the world grows, but only as fast as the readers understanding of that world grows. Of course, you can only accomplish that if you...

Now your first thought when I say "create your world" is A) I already have or B) You mean, like, my entire world? Naturally, you can have hundreds of kingdoms/planets/countries with hundreds of cultures/aliens/demi humans. You don't need to decide on the name of the entire noble family, all their cousins, their stance on the other 100 countries, and what King Martin had for breakfast. When I say create your world, I don't mean that you need to literally have a map drawn out (although it couldn't hurt).

No, what I mean when I say create your world is that you need to create the rules that govern your world. What kind of world is your character living in? Does magic exist? Does technology exist? Are there some technological countries, and some magical countries? Which country is your character starting in and how are they going to interact with the opposite? Is your character aware of the technology from the technological country?

Your story is going to need to sit on a framework of rules. Is it a brutal, realistic world, a totalitarian regime? What is your magic system and how does it work? How does learning to fight work? Do people fight like Greek mythology with giant beasts, or is it hardcore realistic with more people dying from disease than sword fights. How can you reconcile a world with healing magic to a world with a lot of disease?

That's naturally just one direction of questioning, but I think it makes the point I want to make. You need to ask yourself how your world is supposed to function. No matter how many countries you invent, nobles you conceive, geological features you concoct, you need them all to follow the general rules of the world you built, or you'll end up writing yourself into a hole. A plot hole, and when your character magically finds their way out of it, you'll merely be accused of Dues Ex Machina and contrivances, and will probably annoy your reader base to boot.

So while I'm not asking you to make every detailed decision on what your world will be, A) make sure you have the scaffolding built for this world, and B) Make sure you have an excel file or something alongside your word file. Every time you write something into your world, jot it down. If your world becomes complex enough, you might very well need a flow chart to follow all of the pieces of this world, so don't get 50 chapters in before you realize you needed one.

So what ends up becoming part of that flowchart? Preferably the things relevant to the plot. I stand by what I said before. You will want every part of your world to be relevant to your story. Now, I'm not saying it necessarily needs to be vital to the main character, but at the very least everything that happens needs to add to the description of the world your character is in.

For example, if you describe a country your character is never going to visit, your building pieces of a world unnecessary for your plot. I'm not saying you can't mention the existence of a distant country, but if that country is distant and elusive, we don't need a complete thorough explanation on it.

Now if that distant country is at war with the country you're in, it might make sense to flesh out the enemy a little more, especially to help understand and justify the experiences of the main character. Maybe the main character is facing high taxes, and the reason he has high taxes is because the nation is at war, and the nation they are at war with is...

See, there needs to be a connection. Everything worth describing needs to add to the story. I mentioned before that one way to keep a story interesting would be to keep that setting doing stuff. The protagonist moving around a nation preparing a war against another mysterious nation is certainly more interesting than a protagonist walking around a place at peace where nothing ever happens.

Now, some of you might be struggling with this concept. To a lot of you, "World Building" is just that... building a world that goes far past the world of the main character. Your characters story is just one story in a vast and dynamic world full of stories.

I won't disagree with you. However, I will say that the more time you spend establishing a world that isn't relevant to your story, usually, the worst that story will be received. Of course, this can be rectified with one simple action. Make the story bigger. Can you build a world on a story that isn't world-wide? Sure... and you do that by...

When we think world building stories, we often think of kings, queens, princes, princesses, heroes, wizards, and world changing events. There is a reason for this. That reason is that in order to build a world, you need a major character who is a part of that world. Farmboy may be a good place to start your story, but until he's the head of the rebellion, there is little reason to describe the politics and locations of sovereign nations. It simple wouldn't be something a farmboy is likely to have to think about all that much.

As a result, the farmboy becomes entangled into the political struggle. Maybe he stumbles on an assassination plot. Maybe he develops a power and becomes the interest of the kings. Maybe he's just in the right place at the right time. For whatever reason, your protagonist needs to become entangled in the world that you're building. There needs to be a distinct parallel between how much you describe, and how much your protagonists are in the thick of it.

And while I've made this all referring to one protagonist, that doesn't have to be the case. You can have two, five, ten protagonists if you want, each going off and seeing different parts of the world. You can go into the PoV of the antagonist too, and thus see the countering opinion and location. There is a reason most world building stories are written in third person limited. This gives the author the ability to show the world across many different locations and many different PoV.

However, I'm not saying your story HAS to be written in third person limited. There are certainly other ways to write a story and have it be world-building. First person or third person omniscient are perfectly acceptable ways to build a story if you're so interested. However, in many cases, if you want to build a story while focusing on only one person, then you're going to be limited to that one person's PoV. This is because you need to...

This might be the hardest concept for me to explain, but your story has its own point of view. Whatever story you write, that story will be seen through rose colored goggles. In Lord of the Rings, you only see the story as told through a human's/hobbit's point of view. That was probably a good idea, as I don't think most of us would relate very well to the point of view of a goblin, but the point is there.

Your protagonist is the source of your world view. When you build your story, that story is going to be built through the eyes of the narration, and probably the protagonist to. Here in the United States, we hear about atrocities going on in Africa or the Middle East, and they don't really touch home with us. We don't really understand the world over there. We can watch the news, and thus we have a biased viewpoint, but we don't really understand the instability, the danger, the lifestyles, or really anything else about the culture over there other than what we are told.

The same goes for your world. Unless you write a story that is completely neutral (which wouldn't be very interesting), then you're going to end up with a story weighted in one direction or another. Your story will probably have an agenda, a point, and a conclusion. All of this will inform what world you are able to build. If you write a story about a girl in a village who never leaves that village, she may hear hints and stories about a bigger world out there, but with no direct exposure to it, your world will never be much bigger than the little village, and will never be much more enlightened than from the point of view of a naïve village girl.

And that's fine. A world-building story doesn't need to cover the entire world. You can have an entire world out there full of unknowns that the reader will never get to experience in this particular story. You can even make references to these wonders, but they ought to sound as whimsical and confusing to your protagonist as they sound to the reader.

That's the trick to world building, I think. You need to be able to think in the point of view of your reader, and you need to equate that point of view to your narration.

You know that know-it-all who is always using big words, has their nose up in the air looking down at you, and generally acts like anything you've done, they've done bigger and better? If you write a story trying to make everything in your world seemingly obvious, you might end up seeming like that to your readers.

Of course, they know it's all fiction, so maybe "snobbish" isn't the right word, but when you act like a story is obvious and demand your readers play catchup, you're merely creating a situation where your reader is feeling detached, and you'll lose readers as a result of this behavior, because for every person that wants to be tossed into a world having no clue what is going on and having to figure it out, there are three readers that don't. Plus, I should add, that even when you do toss someone in the world and expect them to figure it out, if your writing is any good, it'll have tons of contextual clues to help the reader along.

A lot of my advice in this chapter falls on the concept of "clichéd". Now, I've told you before clichés don't equal bad, but an overabundance of clichés have also lead to people being very quick to jump on anything that isn't cliché. I'm merely mentioning what I've seen that worked in the past. This doesn't mean there aren't other ways.

You can make a "neutral" world that is interesting. You can fill it with characters. Perhaps you can tell the PoV from a future protagonist who already knows all the locals, then spoon feed exposition that way. What I'm trying to get at is there is no definitive way to write a world-building story. Don't be scared to create a character that "knows everything". But keep in mind what he reveals to you, the reader.

A world is best fed one spoonful at a time, so don't assume your reader can follow hundreds of names and locations in a few chapters. If you need a flowchart to follow your story, assume your readers would need much much more. If a long expositional scene seems boring, chances are it probably is. Give your audience the benefit of the doubt, and build their story slowly, gradually, and alongside the protagonist. That is, to me, the best way to world build.