Worldbuilding for Masochists

Sometimes, people will say of a book that "the setting is another character". But what does that really mean, and how can a writer craft it? Ai Jiang joins us to discuss creating worlds and settings that have their own personalities! From the physical geography to the architecture, from the scale of the location to its dynamism, writers can make a lot of choices to make their setting feel unlike any other.

The setting can do a lot ...

In amazing fantasy and science fiction worlds -- Who's doing the work? Where does the food come from? The clothes? Who does the caregiving? Guest august clarke joins us to discuss the hands and bodies that create a society.

Labor is something that’s often sort of invisible in stories if it’s not explicitly the driving focus of a book – So, why is that? How can authors better incorporate labor into their worlds? Labor intersects wit...

Worldbuilding means getting to “play god” – so how does that take a different shape when you’re part of a pantheon rather than the One True Ruler of your world? Xen, Matt Roen, and Sara Wile, the creative trio behind Midst, a surreal sci-fi fantasy audio drama now produced by Critical Role Productions, join us to discuss co-creating a world and the stories that happen within it!

When working as a team, how do you divide the labor? ...

What happens when the world your characters -- or your readers -- first find themselves in turns out to be not quite what it appears? Marina Lostetter joins us to explore the different ways that a writer can play with an unreliable world. Maybe it means a story of scientific discovery that reshapes how their characters perceive their place in the universe; maybe it means a story where information has been deliberately suppressed an...

In honor of Valentine's Day, the season of Carnivale, and our own amusement, we bring to you this extra-long episode, where we heat things up and get a little down and dirty with our worldbuilding. What role does sex play in the world you're building -- and how do you depict that?

This comes up a lot, obviously, in romantasy and other related subgenres, but even if that's not what you're writing, sexuality and gender dynamics are s...

Mythological retellings have been having A Moment in fiction for a few years now. So, why do we do that? Kritika H. Rao joins us to explore the power and agency inherent in recontextualizing mythology for a modern readership! What is it that we reclaim or rediscover in retelling these stories for ourselves? And, on the other end of the scale, how can the retelling of ancient stories sometimes be weaponized and politicized for a spe...

The world a character exists in shapes their identity on many axes of power and privilege. So how do those various scales affect the emotional stakes of the story they find themselves in? Guest Sophie Burnham joins us to discuss building a world that suits the characters you have in your head!

As a writer who starts with character first, Burnham answers questions about their world after they know who their characters are and what d...

And obviously the answer is yes! But in this episode, we answer your questions! We talk about the "rules" and common advice of worldbuilding -- and the ways in which we merrily ignore, redefine, or defy them. We pull apart some techniques related to the craft of communicating worldbuilding to a reader and how to achieve balance within a story. We do some shop talk about the publishing world. And we give you our very important opini...

How do the people in your world learn things? Lessons learned might come from formalized institutions, but knowledge might also get passed down through families, through guilds and trade organizations, or through the wisdom whispered in a character's ear by the trees. A world's literacy rate will define a lot about how information gets transmitted, preserved, or altered over time. So who controls the access to information, and how ...

In this episode, we discuss purely fictional, 100% not-at-all real, nothing to do with contemporary life ideas about rebellions and revolutions. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, or persons is coincidental. Completely.

Continuing our "back to basics" series, and jumping off of a lot of the things we've discussed in the recent episodes on governments and politics, we think about what happens when those things break down. ...

So once you've got a government, what can that government do? What does it regulate, and how is it, itself, regulated? Laws can be created for a lot of reasons, some good and some bad. Sometimes they protect a citizen's opportunity to do certain things, sometimes they present a block to those opportunities, and very often, they aren't applied equally and equitably across all of society. So when you're building a world: How does the...

Government is a set of rules agreed upon, and politics is how a society determines those rules. So how do you create the systems by which civilizations negotiate those levers of power in your fantasy or sci-fi world? On the sliding scale of representation to authoritarianism, where do the civilizations in your world fall -- and why? What pressures have shaped society to behave in the ways that it does? How centralized or de-central...

As with the last two “back to basics” episodes, we thought we’d spend some time looking the thing that (usually, though there are exceptions) makes fantasy fantastical – the magic! How do we build magical systems, and what questions do we ask ourselves while doing so? Guest and former WFM co-host Rowenna Miller joins us to discuss how, exactly, we make magic!

With magic being a foundational element of a world, when it exists in one...

We’re spending a couple of episodes going back to the basics of worldbuilding, talking about the questions that it’s often fruitful to ask oneself when you’re doing this wild thing. Last time we did the physical world, so now it’s time for the world of people!

What are the building blocks of a human life? (Or an alien one, or draconic, or elven, or whatever you've got?) From the most intimate relationships out to the way societies ...

Every once in a while, it's good to go back to the basics. And for us, that means the basics of worldbuilding!

When you're getting started out with a new project, building a world from the ground up, there are a lot of things you can take into consideration! This episode is not so much about finding the answers as figuring out how to ask the questions and what kinds of questions you want to ask. How much do you need to know before ...

A villain may not have excuses for their behavior -- but they probably have reasons. How can worldbuilding feed those reasons? Antagonists are often those characters who are both the most willing and the most able to seize control of power structures and take advantage of their privileges. So what pressures in your world have created those structures, and how does your Big Bad maniuplate them? Guest Chloe Gong joins us to explore h...

We were all in the same room! And that room was in Scotland! In this episode, your WFM co-hosts were able to record a special episode at WorldCon. We chat about ourselves, our works, the Traveling Light anthology, and our favorite components of a world to build.

And then, we take some audience questions! (We apologize that some of them are a little hard to hear; they had a mic, but it seems it was not always picking up super-well) ...

What can translation and transmission of ideas and stories over time teach us about a society -- and about storytelling? Guest Ken Liu joins us to talk about the intertwining of philosophy, imagination, and translation. As writers, we can never fully translate the story that plays out in our heads onto the page, because every reader will imagine something a little different. How do we embrace that and celebrate it as a lovely part ...

Where does mythology come from? How does it tie us together? What does one world's mythology tell us about its people, how they view themselves, and their interactions with the divine? We speak to Nalo Hopkinson about myths, mythologies, folklore, and the stories that we tell each other as well as the stories we invent.

[Transcript TK]

Our Guest: Nalo Hopkinson is the award-winning author of numerous novels and short stories for ad...