The Novelry on Writing Podcast: 5 Fantastical Insights Into World-Building

World-building can be a challenge for writers of all experience levels and genres. In this episode of The Novelry on Writing podcast, writing coaches Piers Torday and Tasha Suri talk about five writing tips that will help you take the world-building in your story to new dimensions. Read on for the episode transcript.

We might have a vision of an incredible fantastical world in our heads. You don’t need to put it all on the page at once. I know it’s tempting. You want to wow the reader with mountains and vistas... But actually, where is your character right now?
—Piers Torday

Introduction

[Tasha Suri] Hello, it’s such a pleasure to be here with you today. I’m Tasha Suri and I am a fantasy author. I’m best known for the Burning Kingdoms trilogy, which began with The Jasmine Throne. But I have written a number of other books, including Empire of Sand, Realm of Ash, and many others we won’t go into right now. And today I’m here with the wonderful Piers Torday.

[Piers Torday] Hi, Tasha. It’s lovely to be here. My name is Piers Torday and I’m an author of several children’s middle-grade books, perhaps best known for the Last Wild series. I write a lot of fantasies, a lot of dystopian stuff, as well as portal fantasies. And I’m also a fiction coach here at The Novelry.

And we’re going to be talking about world-building today. Fantastical worlds.

[TS] We are. And I’m really curious to get your thoughts, actually, because this isn’t something we’ve necessarily talked about one-to-one before.

[PT] No. I think the difference between world-building for children’s fiction and for adult fantasy, because there’s commonalities but also quite specific differences, which we’ll get into. And the first thing we’re going to talk about is, I think, one of the key facets of world-building, which is that, whilst it is very much about creating, any world on the page needs to feel believable, you need to have some sense of the visuals of it. You need to have some sense of the culture and politics that drive it.

Tip No. 1: Start with character

[PT] Essentially, worlds—just like anything in fiction, like plot—come from character. Everything comes from character. And so when I’m thinking about creating any fantasy world, and that might be a portal fantasy where someone has come from a normal situation and stepped into a very extreme different place, or whether it is a dystopian kind of fantasy, so an extreme version of our current world, I always think: how is the main character, particularly for children, who’s their avatar into this world? How are they experiencing it and what are their emotional needs and wants that are making them register and notice particular things?

So, for example, I wrote a story called There May Be a Castle, which is about a little boy on Christmas Eve with his family, he is out for a drive. They have a terrible accident. And the little boy and us, the reader, are thrust into this kind of no-man’s-land. We don’t know what’s going on. Is he alive? Is he dead? Is he still in the world? Where are his family? Gradually we begin to realize that he’s trying to rescue them, but he’s sort of in a limbo land. But it’s in a location he does know from childhood walks where his dad used to tell him stories. And so some of the time he thinks he’s in one of these stories. And through that, we begin to piece together the location and geography of where he is. But it’s all through his disorientated sense of place.

And if you are writing, I think a good way to think about it is, imagine you’ve moved into a new apartment or you’ve gone on holiday somewhere for the first time, and you are going out into that world just to maybe do some tasks or admin. But where are the places you would head to first? What are the things you would notice? What are the conversational things you might overhear and think: oh, that’s interesting? How would you orientate yourself? Because that’s how your character’s going to do that.

But I don’t know, how does it work in adult fantasy, Tasha?

[TS] I think it’s exactly the same. I don’t know that we necessarily call the main character in adult fantasy or the main characters—because you can have multi point-of-view books, of course—the avatars of the reader. But in essence, they are. They are our lens, our window, our gateway into the world.

A common issue I find in people putting together their first fantasy novel is they think the world is the most important thing they think they have to work out. The geography, the politics, the—you know, the economics. And all of those things are very important, don’t get me wrong. But the most important thing is your character, because they are your lens into that world.

It’s funny, actually, that you talked about portal fantasy, and I think it’s a lovely little subgenre. It’s one where you have a character from the normal world going into another world. It’s more common, I think, in children’s fiction, though it is present in adult fantasy. Some really interesting ones to look at are things like The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow, or Georgia Summers’s recent book, The City of Stardust. Georgia also works for The Novelry, funnily enough. And those can be great because having a character who is unfamiliar with a world entering a fantastical world allows you to introduce all those new elements in a way that explains everything to the reader, but also allows us to watch the character grapple with those new elements.

But as I said, that’s less common in adult fantasy. And often characters are already embedded into this fantastical world. So, how do you handle introducing the world through their lens? And I think the key tool is to really think about the priorities, the interests and the desires of your character. Their goals, the thing that’s driving them.

One tool I used when I wrote The Jasmine Throne, which is a South Asian-inspired fantasy with multiple different city states and different religions and different cultures, was to have characters move through their world with purpose. So it can be very simple. I had a character go through a market—and I love a market scene so much, because it allows you to reveal so much about the world through how your character interacts with it. Where is the market? What is the weather like? What are they selling? What is your character looking for in the market? All of these things actually reveal a huge amount very simply in a way that feels, I hope, subtle and elegant.

[PT] That’s such a great tip. And moving through a world with purpose, allowing you to dictate the terms of how it’s revealed. What’s our next tip?

Tip No. 2: Bring in the fun

[TS] It’s somewhat of a silly tip, but I really love it. It’s— I’m a D&D player, so I play Dungeons & Dragons. You might be able to tell this by looking at me. And Dungeons & Dragons—much like the world-building of fantasy novels—has rules, right? There are things that can happen and there are things that can’t happen, and there are actions with consequences. And everything is led by a dungeon master, which you generally won’t find when you’re writing a novel, I hope.

But the one thing that always comes up is the Rule of Cool. The idea that if you do something really cool and interesting, you can break the rules of the world. Now, the way that I apply this to fantasy is I say: it is worthwhile writing things that you find fun and interesting. Often I think we end up in this kind of dirge-like place where we think we have to make the world logical and consistent and the world has to feel real. But what we miss is that it’s fantasy, right? There are dragons, there are mermaids, there are pirates. I realize pirates exist in the real world, but they’re more fun in fantasy and we should be having fun.

So a really good thing to do is to begin with what you find interesting and fascinating and exciting and bring that to the page before you worry about, you know, the fiscal deficit in your world, for example.

[PT] So true. I think, honestly, that’s one of—I think—the best tips about fantasy writing, is like you know, if you love fantasy like we do, why you write, why you read fantasy, is you don’t want the real world.

[TS] Right?

Have characters move through their world with purpose.
—Tasha Suri

[PT] You want a world where rules are bent and shifted and those little funny thoughts you have walking down the road, you think: oh, wouldn’t it be cool if that could happen?  In your world, it can. And always lean into that.

I’ve just written a fantasy for older children called Midnight Treasure, which is set in a parallel version of Transylvania. And it’s my take on lots of familiar tropes in fantasy like vampires and werewolves and so on. And I was doing a lot of research into vampires and the history of it because it’s so much more complex than I think a lot of the slightly sort of mainstream versions that have come down to us through popular culture. And I discovered that in Transylvanian culture and history, that although we think of a vampire always as like this monster of the undead, that sometimes it could just... A vampire could be the rain.

[TS] The rain?

[PT] Or a window. Like there could be these spirits, you know, watching you and feeding on you from a household, a household object.

[TS] Oh wow.

[PT] And I thought: that’s so cool. And suddenly that introduced a whole element of shape-shifting into my vampire world that I hadn’t really considered before. I’d thought about sort of, you know, physical bodies transforming. And so I created these whole kind of particular class of vampires who are the secret police in my world, who can transform themselves into anything, like a cup or a lamp. So you never know when you’re being watched by these vampires, and they could suddenly turn into a vampire from this household object. And I just, it’s completely mad, but I had real kind of fun with it. And now it’s a core part of the world.

And I would always say, as a writer, trust your instincts. If something really tickles you and makes you excited or makes you laugh or freaks you out, jump on it and go with it and it’ll become a major part of your fantasy world.

[TS] I love that so much. It’s so creepy, the idea that you’ll never know if you’re being watched.

[PT] Yeah.

[TS] I love it. And you can just, I can just see how excited you are about putting that in. And really, you should be writing worlds that excite you. You should be writing worlds that make you happy, even if what makes you happy is quite dark or eerie in some way.

[PT, laughing] It is.

[TS] I always talk about the things that I really loved to bring into my books, and my books are quite dark, largely. Lots of horrible things happen to characters, but it’s so much fun as a writer to bring the horrible things in, right?

[PT] Yeah.

[TS] It’s so enjoyable.

[PT] It’s the best, it’s the best bit about writing fantasies. You can do the craziest things.

As a writer, trust your instincts. If something really tickles you and makes you excited or makes you laugh or freaks you out, jump on it and go with it and it’ll become a major part of your fantasy world.
—Piers Torday

Tip No. 3: Use breadcrumbs

[PT] Let’s move on to our third tip, which is a sort of key— This is more sort of a technique thing. And this is the idea that you create fantasy worlds through breadcrumbs. And what we mean by that is... I guess a good example, I was always fascinated when I had the privilege of visiting some studio backlots. And at the time they were filming a lot of popular quite old TV shows—that’s how old I am, TV shows now. But like The West Wing and ER and Friends were all filmed. So one set in Washington, DC, one set in Chicago and one set in New York, all filmed within the same literally 10 feet of each other on a backlot in California.

And so you could see the front of the White House next to the back of the hospital in the Chicago Hope Hospital, and then opposite the White House and Chicago Hope Hospital was an apartment with the sofa from Friends. But when you watch those programs, you are very much not near any of those places. But what those programs do when they’re made is, you don’t need to see the whole White House in The West Wing at once. You just need to see the front of the White House. And then another scene will show you the Oval Office or a corridor in the White House, just as in Chicago you might see the back of the hospital and gradually the program will introduce you to the rest of the hospital.

And when you’re writing, it’s the same. We might have a vision of an incredible fantastical world in our heads. You don’t need to put it all on the page at once. I know it’s tempting. You want to wow the reader with mountains and vistas... But actually, where is your character right now? Are they standing at the back of the hospital and just seeing the back doors of the hospital? Great. Then we’ll start there and we’ll start with that little crumb, that little sort of clue to the world we’re in. And gradually, as they—to use Tasha’s phrase—move through purpose in their world, you’ll introduce different elements. 

I think where this is done quite well, a sort of classic example, is a sort of school fantasy for children like the Harry Potter books, where a new child arrives at a school and an existing older child guides them through the school and, bit by bit, it feels realistic because that’s what happens on inset days.

And, you know, you learn bits, bit by bit, the elements of this fantasy world, the rules they’re going to have to follow, who’s who. But don’t try and do it all at once because we’ll get caught in, it’s like a sort of information dump, which is death to fiction.

But I don’t know, what are your breadcrumbing techniques?

[TS] Oh, the info dump, the dreaded info dump. It is almost impossible to avoid when you’re writing, but you have to avoid it. I always say it’s fine to do in a first draft—info dump, explain how everything works, explain your world, but remember that your reader’s not interested in that.

My tip for breadcrumbing is that you want your breadcrumbs to be exciting. You want them to be the best bits of the bread, for lack of a better way of putting it. Because you want the reader to want to know more about your world. The trick is you are selling your world, right? So if you introduce something interesting, your reader is going to want to know more and understand it.

So in The Jasmine Throne, quite early on I introduce a disease called The Rot. Brace yourself! It’s a disease in which human beings take on the—have elements of plants on them. They start to grow wood through their skin or flowers through their eyeballs, fun stuff like that. And plants have the reverse. And I don’t explain why this is happening because I don’t want to. I want readers to keep reading to understand what impact that has on the world, what is going on in this culture, you know, how does magic interact with people? And if I just explain that, it’d be terribly dull, but by putting in a little bit of an interesting breadcrumb, it makes them want to keep moving forward.

[PT] I think that’s brilliant advice. And how really breadcrumbing is one of the key ways to make a fantasy page-turning, because we’re trying to— We want to know more. You are leaving a trail of clues about something and you’re like: but why? But why, but why?

You want your breadcrumbs to be exciting. You want them to be the best bits of the bread, for lack of a better way of putting it. Because you want the reader to want to know more about your world. The trick is you are selling your world, right? So if you introduce something interesting, your reader is going to want to know more.
—Tasha Suri

Tip No. 4: Draw from history

[TS] I love history, so this will not be a surprising tip, but I think it is really useful to draw your inspiration from real history and real events. This might seem counterintuitive to fantasy, because fantasy is often its own world doing its own thing. But if you look at something like, let’s say, Game of Thrones, you can see the strong inspiration from the War of the Roses, from British history, and the way that has shaped how the fantasy world and the fantasy plot works.

And the reason that I really recommend doing this is because history’s fun: one. And two: because it allows you to ground your world meaningfully in real things. And anything that allows you to ground your world is useful. 

So when I wrote— Let’s cover The Jasmine Throne again, why not, for fun? I drew on a lot of different bits of Indian history to give the world heft and weight. But one particular part that I drew on in The Jasmine Throne and also in my earlier books, funnily enough, was the Mughal history of India. So a period from about the medieval to early modern in North India when the Mughal Empire ruled, and their particular interesting approach to who would get to rule and take the throne, which was: why don’t we all just fight each other? Let’s all fight our siblings. Not a very effective method, but really interesting to use for a novel, right?

I am curious, though, how you have utilized history or events or the real, to ground your fantastical world-building.

[PT] Yeah, it’s really interesting and I’ve just... I suppose my latest series, the Midnight Treasure one I referenced earlier, is perhaps my most historical set of novels. I mean, it’s a parallel version, it’s fantasy, but like, I’ve used history. And in a way, the central conceit comes from this idea that obviously the most famous vampire—Dracula, created by Bram Stoker—in literary version was based on Vlad. Well, someone known as Vlad the Impaler, who was, in effect, only really known as that because he was seeing off Ottoman invaders who were trying to colonize their country and impose really tough tax regimes on them. They resisted, and he was pretty ruthless and did impale a lot of people to sort of deter other invasions. And he wasn’t—spoiler!—he wasn’t actually a vampire and he did actually die, like all humans do.

[TS] That’s terribly disappointing.

[PT] Terribly disappointing! But then I thought: listen. But what if he was a vampire and was a successful military commander? Then what if the vampires then reigned over this bit of Europe since then? How would that change history? And it’s sort of taking a real thing of history, like a really successful, you know, bit of a battle or military campaign, but then adding that fantasy element to it as in, you know, what if they were vampires? And then what? Imagine how that would play out as I do in my book, 500 years later. How would that have changed things?

So it becomes part fantasy, part counterfactual, which I found really fun. So you are taking a real world, but going: what if this fantasy element had disrupted the historical timeline?  What would the consequences be half a millennia on? How would people be living? And so I’ve got this story where there’s a kind of ruling class of vampires who’ve actually become very complacent, very corrupt—not like they were nice to begin with— but they’ve become super, you know, ruling over these mortals who obviously really, really hate them and are trying to find a way to get rid of them, which is the kind of driving thrust of the narrative of the story.

But it began with exploring real history. And then it’s a bit like the Dungeons & Dragons rule, in a way. I think it’s like: take what you find fun or playful and mix it. Mix it with the facts and see where it takes you.

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[TS] I also think that history is itself full of fantastical elements. Right? I found it really interesting looking at things like the idea that kings or monarchs were chosen by God, right? The idea that their blood could have magical properties. This was a concept that people believed in at various points in history.

When I was studying the Mughal era of India, I found all of these resources about how different emperors or princes would put prayers, sew prayers into flags, and those would allow their particular battalion to win. And that is fantastical, right?

And I can see exactly what you’ve done there, where you’ve taken that little hint of the magic and you’ve dragged it out and really explored it. And I think that’s one of the great joys of fantasy to be able to do that. 

[PT] Yeah. I love it. And it is that—you’re so right, that fantasy actually is only ever our imagined version of stuff that often has happened in real context.

What’s our final tip for readers?

Tip No. 5: The ripple effect

[TS] We’re going to talk about the ripple effect. We’ve talked about a lot of different things you can explore in writing fantasy, but I think that many writers become overwhelmed by all the possibilities available to them. And so the best thing you can do, and I think something we’ve kind of raised throughout this chat, is to bring in one fantastical element and watch how it changes everything, exactly like you did in your novels. 

The idea of, let’s say, what if we had the Napoleonic Wars, but then we had dragons? How would that change the Napoleonic Wars? That’s a series of books by Naomi Novik called Temeraire. Really good. You should check them out. 

Everything would change, obviously. The whole world would, in its fabric, in its nature, become different. And that’s what happens if you bring one fantastical element in. And that is a really great place to begin.

[PT] Yeah. And the pleasure of following through conceits. I think, as writers, really have faith. Once you’ve had that conceit, really lean into it and invest in it. Don’t feel you need to always add loads of other stuff on top or need to unnecessarily complicate it. But to actually just play it out, let it ripple through the story.

In my first series, the Last Wild, although it’s kind of dystopian, which is a slightly different kind of fantasy to the kind we’ve been mainly discussing today, but it is fantasy because it’s a version of a world that doesn’t exist, although it might. The central conceit was: a virus has killed most of the world’s animals. And so there’s a food shortage and that sets up the initial concept. But actually, if you follow that through, all the time the story’s being driven by: well, where does this food come from? Or what’s the world like without that animal? What do people do? How does that affect the landscape? How does that affect ecology? How does that affect health and disease?

There’s always a different way you can attack that idea or explore or tease, tease something out of it. And I think the ripple effect can be quite a good way to actually help drive your story. Because you might think: what element have I not looked at yet? Of that decision that I’ve made, that conceit, that fantastical element I’ve introduced? Have I not explored, oh, the social side? Let’s look at that.

Many writers become overwhelmed by all the possibilities available to them. And so the best thing you can do, and I think something we’ve kind of raised throughout this chat, is to bring in one fantastical element and watch how it changes everything... The whole world would, in its fabric, in its nature, become different. And that’s what happens if you bring one fantastical element in. And that is a really great place to begin.
—Tasha Suri

[TS] It’s wonderful, isn’t it? Because it’s that tension between that conceit and your character. So if you put a character in a world where suddenly all these animals are not there and this food does not exist, how does your character interact with that world? How do they cope with hunger? How do they cope with attempting to ensure their own survival or the survival of people they love?

And I think that, to me, is one of the key things that I recommend, which is thinking about how your character is in tension with the world. The conflict that the character has to deal with because of the way the world is, is something that is so important to fantasy.

[PT] Yeah. And I think that’s a great note to finish on. And which brings us back to where we started, which is—ultimately, the world comes from your character and the way they’re obliged, forced by us—us mean puppet-masters!—to interact with it, to create fantastical worlds that we all love. Thanks so much for listening.

Closing words

[Louise Dean] Thank you for joining us today. We are so pleased to have you along for the writing journey and we hope to see you on another episode of The Novelry on Writing.

If you’d like to learn more, visit us at thenovelry.com. From first draft to finished manuscript, at The Novelry you’ll enjoy one-to-one coaching from bestselling authors, live writing classes with award-winning authors and literary agents, and you’ll work with a publishing editor all the way for submission to literary agents toward a publishing deal.

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