What to expect:
First things first:
- Everything that deviates from reality needs to be explained.
- The world of a novel can be an entirely new universe, but it can also be much smaller—for example a fictional city, a school, or even just a single room.
- Worldbuilding involves more than the main characters and their surroundings. It also includes language, religion, culture, political conditions, and much more.
What is worldbuilding?
Worldbuilding consists of many different elements that interact with each other. It does not necessarily mean inventing an entirely new universe or a complete fantasy world. The city, a room, or a specific building can also form the “world” of your story.
In closed-room mysteries, for example, the confined space in which the crime took place forms most of the world of the story.
Worldbuilding can be divided into the following areas:
Geography / Environment
In what kind of environment does your story take place?
If you are creating a completely new fantasy world, you need to think about different countries, their geographical relationships with each other, and the design of their habitats. Are there oceans or deserts? Where are forests, rivers, and mountains located? Is there even land, or does your story take place on a planet made entirely of water?
In more realistic stories, the broader context usually needs less detailed explanation. However, you still need to consider things like the layout of a city, the structure of rooms in a building, or the design of the private spaces of your main characters.
Cultural Characteristics
Another important aspect is the cultural characteristics of the locations where your story takes place, which also influence your characters.
What language or languages do the characters speak? Do these differ between locations or between characters? What religion shapes the characters’ moral beliefs and actions—or is there any religion at all?
Clothing styles, food choices, and certain behavioral patterns can also play an important role in worldbuilding.
Political Situation
Closely connected to cultural structures is the political situation of your world. Depending on the story and genre, this may play a more or less prominent role in worldbuilding. However, you should at least consider whether your characters live in a largely functioning democracy, a dictatorship, or a monarchy.
Is there peace? Are there national or international political tensions? Or does your story even take place against the backdrop of a war?
Characters
How are your characters socialized?
Are they well integrated into society, or are they outsiders—for example because they come from another country or even another planet? Which social class do they belong to? Have they experienced social decline or advancement? How do they communicate? What is their clothing style?
All of these questions and many other aspects should be considered when designing each character—especially the main characters—in order to logically justify their actions and make their personal circumstances within the world of your story understandable to readers.
Logic
Another fundamental aspect connecting all previous points is logic in both the external circumstances and the internal motivations of your characters.
Everything works according to certain rules. You don’t need to be an expert in geography or physics to explain why mountain peaks are colder than valleys.
Does magic exist in your world? Explain the rules that govern how it works. New technologies can also be explained logically without going into scientific detail. What matters is that you explain them in some form so readers understand how your world functions.
Tips for Worldbuilding
How you design the world of your story depends entirely on your personal writing style and the requirements of your plot. However, the following tips can help in many situations during the writing process.
Create a Dedicated Place for Your Worldbuilding
Whether you create a digital or handwritten journal, collect loose notes in a folder, or build an Excel spreadsheet—create a place where you store everything related to the worldbuilding of your story.
This allows you to quickly look things up and add new ideas whenever necessary. Always write down new ideas immediately so you don’t forget them. Unnecessary or illogical ideas can always be discarded later—adding forgotten ideas afterward is much harder.
Before integrating new ideas into the existing text, you should compare them with the rules of your world to avoid logical inconsistencies.
“As much as necessary, as little as possible”
Try to avoid overly long descriptions of landscapes, distant continents, or other details that do not affect the story.
Your readers should gain a basic understanding of the world your characters live in, but focus on what is necessary. If an element of the setting does not influence the plot or directly affect your characters, detailed descriptions often become distracting.
For example: There is a mysterious desert tribe on the other side of the ocean? That’s fine—but as long as your characters never go there or interact with them, it is irrelevant how many people live there, where the oases are located, or whether they travel with sheep, goats, cattle, or camels.
Introduce details only when they become relevant for understanding the story or the events within it.
Respect the Rules of Reality
If your story takes place in a real setting or in a historical period, you must respect the constraints imposed by reality.
If your protagonist is a Hanseatic merchant in the 15th century, they cannot contact their business partners by phone or email. Communication would involve long delays, with messages delivered by messengers traveling by land or sea.
If your story takes place in modern-day Hamburg, the city cannot suddenly be located next to the Alps or somewhere in Norway.
The advantage of realistic worldbuilding is that you need to explain less, because readers already have a general understanding of many aspects of the setting.
Consistency in Description
One of the most important aspects of worldbuilding is consistency—in the description of characters, environments, traditions, and more.
If your protagonist is described as very tall, they cannot suddenly become shorter than average without a logical explanation (unless an event within the story causes this—such as a shrinking potion in a magical world).
Similarly, if your story takes place in modern reality and is meant to be realistic without fantasy elements, a group of griffins, elves, or fae cannot suddenly appear out of nowhere.
Use Your World for Multiple Stories
If you have written a book and created an entirely new world for it, it would be a shame not to reuse the time and effort you invested in building it for further stories.
The framework of your world is already established—so use it to tell new stories with different characters from other parts of the same world.
Readers who love your world will be happy to return to it.
Not sure if you’ve thought of everything in your worldbuilding? That’s exactly what our checklist is for: Just download it and check to see if everything in your world makes sense. Have fun!
Frequently Asked Questions
You have done enough worldbuilding when you understand the rules of your world that are relevant to the story.
Best Practice:
Develop the areas that directly interact with the plot and characters first.
Ask yourself:
What does the reader need to understand for this scene to work?
A common rule among authors is:
90% of the worldbuilding remains in the background — only 10% appears in the text.
Entwickle zunächst nur die Bereiche, die direkt mit Plot und Figuren interagieren.
The most effective strategy:
Worldbuilding should be conveyed through action and observation, not long explanations.
Three proven techniques:
1. Context instead of explanation
Not:
“Magic is forbidden.”
Instead:
A character hurriedly hides their spellbook from the city guards.
2. Use character perspective
The world is revealed through perception and emotion.
3. Information in small portions
Readers learn about the world gradually through multiple scenes.
Rule of thumb:
If information is not necessary for the current scene, it does not belong there.
Believability does not come from complexity, but from logical connections.
The most important principles:
1. Cause → Effect
If magic exists, how does it influence economics or the military?
2. Environment shapes culture
Climate, resources, and geography influence societies.
3. Consistent rules
Once a rule is established, it should not suddenly be broken.
Example:
If teleportation exists, trade routes or borders would likely function differently.
There are many approaches, but one particularly efficient order is:
Story-first Worldbuilding
- Protagonist
- Central conflict
- Setting of the story
- Rules of the world that influence the conflict
Afterward, the world can gradually expand as the story develops.
Many successful authors build their worlds iteratively while writing.
Originality rarely comes from completely new ideas—it usually arises from unusual combinations.
Effective strategies include:
1. Change the perspective
Tell familiar tropes from a different cultural perspective.
2. Radically change one element
Example: Magic exists—but only in dreams.
3. Draw inspiration from the real world
History, anthropology, and mythology offer many unique ideas.
4. Think through the consequences
What happens in the long term if your world contains a specific element?
