World First Writing

Some may call it worldbuilding disease, but fleshing out your world before you ever start on your writing project may be a very helpful tool for building stories with greater internal consistency and a more natural feeling plot progression.

This isn't to say that you cannot achieve that by other means. Tens of thousands of books out there would easily prove me wrong if I were to assert that. However, for some, using this strategy may yield better results, despite what others may assure.

Finally, before I get into this properly, I want to clarify that I'm not claiming to have come up with any of this. There are plenty of people who build stories in this way, at least to some degree. There are even some monumental examples which will be discussed later.

Many of you will have likely intuited from the introduction what I mean by “World First”. However, I would like to expound on the concept in greater detail, as well as give an explanation for those who haven't put it together yet.

World First is an approach to writing where you use a story to explore an already developed world, rather than contructing a world around a plot. A lot of writing advice out there suggests that you should only worldbuild as much as is necessary to serve the narrative. However, if every facet of the world simply exists to prop up the plot points in your story, not only can the world feel rather narrow, but it can also result in a world in which anything that isn't a direct focus of the plot becomes flimsy at best, and one dimensional at worst.

Before I continue on, and discuss some of the benefits of this aproach, I do first want to acknowlege that everything I am about to talk about it certainly achievable without this approach, however it is my belief that the World First approach makes these things much easier to achieve as the World First approach makes it less of a consious chore to pay attention to them.

When writing a story in world with already defined rules, norms and cultures, the roadblocks that a protagonist might face will be much more likely to feel natural and expected, rather than artifical or arbitrary. If your development of the plot is isolated from or precedes the world it is set within, it can be very easy to fall into the trap of making a decision that serves the plot perfectly, but fails to pass the verisimilitude test.

In many cases, that verisimilitude test comes down to the issue of internal consistenty, and sometimes the thing that might serve the plot best, in theory, is inconsistent with how the world has been established thus far. This is mitigated, however, when at all points throughout the story, you are referencing back to the same, established, pre-defined details to make decisions on how to progress the plot. That may make it seem as though the world must be fully set in stone before you begin writing the actual story, and it may feel contradictory for me to say that it's not, but nothing is stopping you from going back and making changes. At all times things may be subject to change, but things shouldn't be changing all the time. Having a strong foundation doesn't prevent you from making alterations, should they become necessary, but it does remove the need to make such alterations quite as often.

Another facet of internal consistency that really benefits from this approach, is repeated factual assertions about the world. Instead of hoping that going north for a bit, then east, then south-west then east again makes sense with the last time you describe how to get to city A from city B when you're now travelling from city C. If you are referencing the same map every time, that's no longer a worry. Instead of estimating how powerful an army is each time you encounter it, if you've already established its size, where its forts are and what units it employs, then you'll already know that there's a fort three towns over filled with swordsmen and wizards.

A defined world can additionally serve as inspiration for the story. Once you have a world built, it's not too hard to look at it and ask, “What kinds of problems might people face in this world?” Or, “How would the people of the world try to fix this issue?” These kinds of questions can lead to very interesting stories that take full advantage of the world they take place in. And because you formed them out of the setting, rather than the setting being formed around whatever best suited the plot, there is less of a likelihood that the plot will feel forced, as it naturally fits within the setting.

Developing your plot out of a well-rounded setting also makes it much easier to have more well-rounded characters, especially antagonists. This is because rather than being an antagonist first, then having a backstory built for them, separate from that of the protagonist, they are simply a resident of the same world which your protagonists are from. This allows them to have more understandable motives and goals. Maybe they are fed up with the inequality in the world and seek to solve it via radical means. Maybe they see the political power structures fracturing, and see it as their opportunity to seize control. Or maybe they were seduced by the ancient dark gods who have slumbered for eons. And the protagonist could be fueled by the exact same issues of the world, but chooses to take a more noble approach. All that starts, however, with knowing that there is drastic inequality, that the politics of the kindom are in turmoil or that those ancient slumbering gods are even there in the first place.

As mentioned in the introduction, I am far from the first person to take this approach to their writing. However, trying to do some research, I wasn't able to find much talking about this approach. While I could spend hours writing about all of the different examples which I suspect of using this approach, the most notorious instance of this approach would be the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Tolkien began building his unique mythology, including myths, poems, and especially languages beginning in 1914.

It wasn't until the 1930s that he began working on The Hobbit, which was originally a separate work that was later incorporated when he began working on The Lord of The Rings. He referred to this corpus of worldbuilding as the Legendarium. It began in 1914, and he continued to work on it up until his death in 1973.

While much of the Legendarium would posthumously be published by his son Christopher Tolkien as a summary in The Silmarillion and more fully in The History of Middle-earth, the content of the Legendarium was originally intended as a work unto itself, which simply happened to serve as a basis for some of the most iconic High Fantasy works in history.

Just about all the writing projects I have worked on have utilized the “World First” philosophy. At present, I have three currently active projects, which have all used it to varying degrees.

Many people would critique this approach by calling it worldbuilding disease. And it definitely can be. However, I would oppose this by saying that it would only be a disease if it is negatively impacting your process. As such, if you're using additional worldbuilding as an excuse to not write your actual story, then that's worldbuilding disease. If you are obsessing over the details of an irrelevant little hamlet with zero impact on the greater world, that's worldbuilding disease.

A tool I would recommend to determine whether or not you are using this approach, or simply succumbing to worldbuilding disease is to ask yourself whether or not you have goals that you're working towards where reaching them you would consider the world to be complete enough to get started looking for a story. If not, then maybe consider developing some goals.

Some examples might be: “I want to define the political and economic relations of all the countries on this continent, then develop 2-3 cultural points of interest that result from those relations”, “I want a strong magic system, with all the personal relationships, resentments and gossip of the small town I want to work within defined” or, more grand, “I want to develop a mythology surrounding the history and origin of this world, which can then be used to divide the world into its respective nations, informing the politics, economics and cultures of these nations.”

These goals can be more or less specific depending on your particular situation. Personally, I don't have specific goals for any of my worlds to be considered complete. This is because I intend to have multiple stories take place in most of my worlds, meaning that starting on one story doesn't mean that I am going to be slowing down with the worldbuilding, however depending on your use-case, setting concrete goals like those above will likely be a good tool that you can use to keep yourself from going too far with it. This is especially true if you aren't used to working this way, or you simply know you're the kind of person who can get carried away.

After all of that, you may be wondering where to get started with it all. Well, as unhelpful as it may sound, you can really start anywhere. Some people may prefer to define all the different cultures they want to work with, then figure out where they go later. Others may prefer to start with the mythological origin of the world, defining the gods and the magic. Yet other may wish to start in detail in on particular location, then keep expanding outward until they've covered the whole world.

Personally, I like to begin with a few key elements. First, I want to know what kind of setting this is. You can think of it like a genre. Is it more high fantasy, with overt magic, maybe a less technologically advanced populous and grand adventures taking place all over. Or maybe its a very down-to-earth setting in a small fictional town in rural Pennsylvania. (another note here, is that your world doesn't always have to be an entire world, sometimes it's just a small town, or maybe even less than that; discussed further below) Then I like to go straight for the map. For me, the map give all of the context for how different groups of people might interact. Two kingdoms on opposite sides of the world probably aren't gonna wind up hating each other because they never interact. If you come up with all the relationships between nations first, you could wind up struggling to justify them.

Once I have a map and a theme, I draw up borders. Depending on that theme, I may want to have a few large kingdoms, big empires surrounded by many smaller states or maybe the setting is a bit more modern, and there are some interesting borders which have resulted from diplomatic negotiations and diverges from following natural dividing lines like bodies of water or canyons. You can also try leaving some parts of the world unclaimed and seeing what kinds of events that could result in. Once I have the nations, that's when the real work starts. I go one by one and try to give each nation something to set it apart, maybe a little bit of history, a resource it produces or a significant aspect of its culture.

Usually by the time I've gotten here, larger patterns start to emerge and the world itself starts to lead me in one direct or another, as to what needs to be filled in more or expanded upon.

However, while this is the series of tasks that I find most helpful, I do strongly encourage you to try out a few different approaches, as even I don't always stick to it. If you've got an idea now, follow it. Don't put off the part you want to work on because, “I'm not supposed to do it that way,” or, "that part's supposed to come later." That's a surefire way to lose interest in a project.

While much of this article has discussed worldbuilding in terms of an epic world or a drastic alteration of our own, not every story needs such a grand setting. Worldbuilding can also be developing the summer camp and all it's staff for a children's novel, or building out some companies for a corporate espionage narrative.

It is important to keep in mind, while doing your worldbuilding, what kind of story you want this world to produce. The worldbuilding can do a lot to effect the tone and atmosphere of the final product. This leads as well into keeping in mind whether your are building for a single story or series, or if you want something that can host a whole collection of stories either loosely or even unrelated entirely. These all inform the scale at which you may want to worldbuild.

While it is definitely not the right approach for everyone, taking this alternative approach when working on your writing may just take your writing in a new direction.

Always remember to work however works best for you. If your inspiration always comes in the form of a story idea, then don't force yourself to worldbuild first and let the background setting follow the story. However, if you shy away from doing a lot of worldbuilding up front because you are afraid you will succumb to worldbuilding disease, then maybe face your fears and give it a shot, it may work better for you than you realize.

Have you ever written a story like this? Were you too afraid to give it a try because of everyone talking about worldbuilding disease? Has this article inspired you to give it a go? Let me know in the comments below.