When planning a story, it’s easy to come up with lots of cool details for your world, but how do you actually put them in the text?
Let’s go over examples, discuss, then write our own story together!
During the last stream, a subscriber requested that we go over how to make your worldbuilding more relevant in a story.
You can watch the video here to or scroll down for notes/highlights.
How to Make Your Worldbuilding Feel Relevant
- When you’re planning/outlining a story, especially fantasy or sci-fi, you’ll probably come up with a lot of cool ideas for the world it takes place in
- Maybe your story’s world has dragon-airplanes, or cheese tunnels, or living gemstones
- That’s all cool, but the question is, how do you make those worldbuilding ideas feel relevant to the story, and not random or unnecessary?
The best way to do that is to connect your worldbuilding to the plot, characters, or themes of your story
★ Ex. of worldbuilding connected to plot: Harry Potter
– Worldbuilding: The wizard bank is run by goblins…
– Plot: …and Harry goes there to get money, and for Hagrid to pick up a mystery package.
★ Ex. of worldbuilding connected to character: Hunger Games
– Worldbuilding: Hunting is illegal in District 12…
– Character: …but Katniss does it anyway with the bow her father made for her.
★ Ex. of worldbuilding connected to theme: Game of Thrones
– Worldbuilding: Ned Stark prays to the old gods in the godswood at Winterfell…
– Theme: …which makes him feel out of place in King’s Landing where they worship new gods.
- Almost all of the worldbuilding in your story should connect to at least one of these three
- Take a look at how many other worldbuilding details in Harry Potter connect to the plot:
- Wizards fly on broomsticks (connected to Quidditch)
- Portraits in Hogwarts being alive (connected to the Fat lady and Neville locked out of Gryffindor’s common room)
- Wizards using wands (connected to Harry/Voldemort’s twin wands)
- The Hogwarts Express (connected to being the place the main characters all meet for the first time)
- The Forbidden Forest (where they have detention and see the dead unicorn)
But how do you connect your worldbuilding idea to the plot, character, or theme of the story in the first place? By brainstorming the ripple effects of your worldbuilding idea
★ Ex: in Harry Potter, the wizard bank is controlled by goblins
…and goblins mine underground, so the vaults are a huge maze underground
…and since it’s a huge underground maze, it’s a good place to hide things
…and since it’s a good place to hide things, the most powerful item was put there
…and since it’s the most powerful item, a dark wizard tried to steal it
– We went from a worldbuilding idea to a plot point, just by brainstorming the ripple effects
★ Another example: There’s a town where people who are half-human half-crabs live
…and crabs are scavengers, so the half-human-crabs eat their own dead
…and since they eat their own dead, murders are easy to cover up
…and since murders are easy to cover up, a rich crab-family hires a human detective to investigate the death of their son
…and they hire him because he was born half-crab but his parents had his spindly legs amputated at birth
– We went from a worldbuilding idea to a plot point and a character, just by brainstorming the ripple effects, and…
More Worldbuilding Details
- From there you might come up with other worldbuilding ideas, like what crab keyboards look like for their claws, how crabs fit on airplane seats, and an entire crab language
- But just because you come up with an idea, that doesn’t mean it needs to go into your story. A lot the outlining worldbuilding is just for YOU the author to understand your world and characters better
- Crab keyboards should likely make it into the story, crabs on airplanes probably won’t unless it somehow comes up naturally, and the entire crab language is probably too unwieldy to use
- If a piece of worldbuilding you came up with before you started writing the story is causing you issues, then CUT IT
- For example: if you originally planned for the half-crabs to have originated from an experiment gone wrong, but then as you’re writing you realize that a natural mutation would be better, then CHANGE IT
Worldbuilding as You Write
- The best worldbuilding is created AS you’re writing, since the worldbuilding you create in the moment is whatever the story needs and will fit perfectly
- Not having your world 100% planned out before starting to write might be scary, but it’s one of the most exciting parts of writing, and you will smooth out inconsistencies later in editing
- For example: you’re writing a scene with a crab-human walking on asphalt, and realize they need shoes for their crab-legs to protect themselves/keep clean, and then you go back later and give the other crab-humans in the story shoes too
REMEMBER!
- Worldbuilding serves the story, not the other way around. If you come up with an entire world before you start writing, you’ll either: (1) Not be able to use everything in the story, or (2) be so overwhelmed by everything you want to include that you end up writing nothing
- Even Tolkien, the king of worldbuilding, kept a ton of details about Middle Earth out of The Lord of the Rings story and saved them for supplementary materials
- You are a tour guide for the reader, showing them only ONE track through your world, if you point out every little thing they’ll be overwhelmed, so just show them enough to entice and excite them
After that, chat voted that we brainstorm the ripple effects of a worldbuilding idea and then write the beginning. They voted on this one: Symbiotic bugs that give different powers depending on what body part they burrow into. The more bugs, the more powerful you are.
Here’s what we came up with:
Ivar and Breen were on the verge of a revolutionary discovery. The two of them were hidden away in the abandoned Scapter mines, where they’d spent the greater part of two years performing their research. Lit only by shroomlights on the stone ceiling, the dank tunnel reeked of decay and blood.
Mostly because of the dead bodies propped up against the walls.
All of them were copies of Breen’s body, the faces in varying states of horror. Some of them had rips down the chest and stomach, some of them were missing limbs. All of them were pale and translucent, the skin bloodless and thin like paraffin paper.
With the colony of cicadas that lived in Breen’s body, he was able to create a shell-like duplicate of himself whenever he pleased. The cicadas also made him have a tendency to walk around with his hands bent forward curved like claws at all times, and emit an annoying, shrill screech sound in the summer. But Ivar was willing to put up with that for all the bodies that he supplied. They’d needed every last one for their experiment. Until now.
“Are you sure about this?” Breen asked, his bent hands twitching with anxiety.
Ivar had never been more sure of anything in his life. The last copy had been a success, and now it was time to perform the next step: testing his theory on himself.
He picked up a glass jar of beetles from the rocky ground. They clicked and clacked against the sides, climbing over each other in a vain attempt at escape. He would let them loose soon enough.
Already, Ivar felt the hunger. He’d always felt it ever since he’d come of age and the mosquitoes had chosen him. Most people were chosen by high breeds like ants or crickets or ladybugs, but Ivar had been chosen by the mosquitoes, the most hated of pests. Whereas ants gave their hosts super strength for construction, and crickets gave their hosts powerful jumps, mosquitoes merely gave their hosts a voracious hunger for blood and a sharp tongue to drink it with.
Even among other pests, like locusts and spiders, Ivar had been an outcast. They were all worried that he’d drink their blood, depriving them of the nourishment they gave to their own body-colonies. They whispered to each other about how all it would take was a little suction from his needle-tongue to make the insects inside of them starve to death, sending them dripping dead from their body onto the ground.
Ivar had never done such a thing. He survived on bloodworms harvested by worm-farmers, spending his nights hidden away wherever he could eat in peace. Every time he stabbed a writhing, juicy worm with his tongue and tasted its dirty viscera and innards, hatred pumped through him along with the fresh blood. He couldn’t get rid of the mosquitoes inside of him, but their insatiable hunger fueled his ambitions.
The emptied carcasses of five giant bloodworms lay at his feet, not a drop of liquid left in any of them. Ivar had never felt so satisfied, even the mosquitoes inside of him, usually buzzing and screaming for more, were sated and silent. Perfect for what was coming.
“Give me the knife,” he said to Breen, beckoning with his hand. Breen placed the blade in his palm, and Ivar quickly pierced a small opening in his arm.
He unscrewed the jar of beetles, and the effect was immediate. The black bugs swarmed out of confinement with the little wings and landed right onto the bloody opening in his flesh. With their tickling teeth, they burrowed into the wound, bumping up against his skin as they tunneled their way through his bones and blood. It wasn’t painful, but it did feel unsettling, like an aggressive massage inside the body rather than outside.
When all the beetles had bored their way in, Ivar waited for the mosquitoes to rebel. Humans were only able to store one colony of insects inside of them, they only had so much blood to spare, but with all the extra nourishment that Ivar had imbibed, so far so good.
“How do you feel?” Breen asked. He stared at Ivar with terrified eyes. As far as they knew, no one had ever attempted what they were doing now.
“I feel fine,” Ivar said. “Let’s see how long it takes for the effect to take.”
The result was nearly instantaneous. Ivar groaned and grumbled in discomfort as he felt his back protruding and crunching, like bones digging their way out from beneath the skin of his back. He ripped the cloth shirt off, revealing the black beetle armor now protruding from his shoulders down. With a few more uncomfortable pops, it formed fully, a shining metal beetle carapace, just like all of the beetle-hosts he’d seen.
“Whoa,” Breen said, admiring Ivar’s new exoskeleton. “It actually worked!”
Ivar tried to contain his excitement. They’d seen what had happened with some of Breen’s clones before. The first few seconds were okay, but when the infused blood ran out, the rival insect colonies started fighting and eating each other.
After a minute of no inner-rebellion, Ivar allowed himself a smile. He could feel the mosquitoes still sedated from their engorging meal, and the beetles were moseying around in their new home. So far, he was not a human battleground.
It was time to push further.
Too excited to contain himself, Ivar bent to the ground and opened up all the remaining jars immediately. Praying mantises, centipedes, wasps and scorpions. All of them peeked out from their containers, smelling the bloody opening still on his arm.
“Are you sure we should be doing all of those at once?” Breen asked. He gave off a small hint of a cicada shriek. Hearing that set Ivar off.
“Just give me the knife!”
He snatched the blade from Breen’s hand and carved another opening in his other arm, laying both bloodied limbs on the stone ground to attract the insects.
Even Ivar wasn’t prepared for how hungry they were. All of them swarmed into his body, making his arms heavy like lead. Once the initial rush had writhed their way inside him, he tried to pull away his arms, but he couldn’t. They were too heavy, too weak from the blood loss, and more and more bugs were crawling inside of him.
Far from an unpleasant tickle, this was torture. Ivar felt every pointed leg, every stinger, every claw and tooth brushing up and scraping against his inside-skin all over. He screamed, not caring who heard anymore, not caring if they found him, just wanting the thousands of sharpened razor blades out of him!
“I’m going to get help!” Breen yelled. As soon as he dashed past Ivar, his hand moved on its own accord. He couldn’t have budged the heavy weight of his limbs if he wanted to, but now something else was controlling him.
Breen watched in terror as the transformation took place. The centipedes made extra arms sprout from Ivar’s sides, twisted in extra joints. The wasps made his eyes bulge into bleeding globes, reflecting a hundred fractured images of terrified Breen. The praying mantises contorted his hands into scythes, and a dozen scorpion tails burst from behind him, each dripping with venom and stabbing wildly at the air.
The mosquitoes inside Ivar were awake again. They had never been so hungry.
“You are ours now,” Ivar spoke to Breen in a voice that wasn’t his. His lips didn’t even move, the words emanated forth from him as a hellish imitation of a human from a thousand thousand insects.
Incisors popped out from Ivar’s mouth, a choir of mandibles shaking and howling as they latched around his head. With the smallest effort, it was yanked free of his body. The sharp tendrils slurped up every bit of the man — flesh, blood, bone and bug — and yet it still hungered for more.
Be sure to check out the video to see how we came up with this opening just from brainstorming the ripple effects of the worldbuilding idea!
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you join us on Twitch.
And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Featured image: Pakutaso