How to Write a Book, Part 1: World Building

This is the first piece in what is hopefully a series of articles, in which over the course of the year I am going to try and teach you how to take your creative writing to the next level. This article will go over the foundation of your story, the world, and the people in it. 

World building is the stone that builds the bridge. If done properly you can take your story to critical acclaim solely on your world and how it engrosses people into your vision. If done improperly you could doom yourself to a boring mundane story.

As Diane Callahan puts it, most people “drown in their quest to see where the ocean ends;” people struggle not with worldbuilding but simply putting it down. Once you, yourself, become the architect of a universe why would you want to stop? Most people don't really cope with this that well, if you can I would tell you to pursue a career in storytelling. 

There are two ways to build your world: the top down and the bottom up. Let's start with top down, as that is the easiest one to get yourself stuck in. Top-down is best suited for grand epics, D&D, and large multi-entry series. This is because to do any of those, you need to have your character built around the world. When doing top-down, you start with the atlas, the map. You can either make your own map, steal the earths, or do both at the same time. One of my favorites is finding a map of a time in Earth's history when its geography was completely different. One of my favorites is the Western Interior Seaway, a time in Earth's history when North America was split in two by a relatively shallow ocean going through Mexico, the Midwest, and central Canada around 100 million years ago. If you're making your own map, you could hand-draw it, but this is time-consuming, and you will probably have arthritis afterward. You could do the rice method, which is where you take a handful of rice, throw it on a sheet of paper, and trace the outline for your world. You still might have arthritis after this one, but it won't take as long. After this, you populate, first with geography, then kingdoms and countries, followed by large cultural centers that ruin the capital of a country or schools, then you deep dive into individual towns, the buildings in them, and whatever else you want to put in them. This leaves you with a map and not much else, so in order to fix that, I'm going to ask you some questions. Who rules your world? Do they rule all of it? What do their subjects think of them? If they don't like them, will they revolt? Are they at war? 

What's their culture like? Why is there a culture like that? What is their history? Do they have secrets? And should they? What is their system of government? Why is their system? The way I see it is if someone asks you a question about your world and you can’t answer it or easily improvise it, you have failed to flesh that area out enough. Each answer should have an answer and something explaining that answer. Take, for example, “Why don't the vampires live in the sewer?” “Because there are giant alligators in the sewer.” “Why are there giant alligators?” “because there was an illegal farming operation”. Each question has an answer to the giant alligators and an explanation of the illegal farming operation. This allows you to confidently have an answer to most questions. There will always be something you can not answer. Your goal is not to eliminate that but to simply make the question so obscure that it becomes irrelevant from your story. 

The next method is bottom up. This is where you start with the immediate surroundings of your characters and then build up. Here you could start with a map just at a much smaller scale, or you could start with a description describing what your character sees right then and there. After that you move up to the place that is followed by the region of the world, you just keep going and going until you're content. This leaves a few holes in places your characters haven't been as you had no reason to build them. Generally you should have a basic concept of what that place is like in order to be prepared for it. As the architect of your story, if you don't have an area fleshed out you don't have to go there, don't subject yourself to cramming out the worldbuilding for a location if you don't have to. In this form of worldbuilding you still have to answer all the questions for the previous style just in a much less grand style as instead of everywhere in your world it's just a few select locations. This allows you to really build your few locations as instead of building it all at once it allows you to stage and increment on your already built world.

I would recommend using a mix of the two, as relying solely on one or the other leads to potential avoidable plot holes. What I would recommend is to start with top down until you get to the point where you know when and where your characters will be, and then transition into bottom up in order to start building the basis of your story. 

Eventually, you have to stop worldbuilding. If you start to feel as if your world doesn't have enough space for your ideas, it probably means that your world is full and overpopulated; there needs to be room for empty fields, long roads, and stretches of just nothing. By allowing your world to feel sparse yet not empty, you add believability space to expand your old stuff. If you over-populate, you run the risk of readers burning out, burning yourself out, and diluting the power of your world. There can only be so “evil king Grutz” and there “edge of annihilation" if there is one of those around every corner, it loses its value and cool factor. It's a simple supply and demand; the supply for legendary things you can tell a story about should be 1, and demand is and always will be a flat 1. No matter what you think or what someone tells you, never have 2 main stories you think you can manage or that they could have a cool interaction. No they won't. You just make it worse for everyone. It leads to a muddying of everything; it makes you confused, your reader confused, your message muddled and contaminated, dominated by one or the other. If you're set on it, you can try a few alternatives: making the two stories look different yet be the same in the end, writing an entirely new story in the same universe, maybe or maybe not with the same characters, to tell your new idea. In general, if you have a new idea, expand your series or whatever you're writing into something bigger.

Finally the meat of worldbuilding: the world, see its in the name so it must be important! 

When worldbuilding, visual art is some of if not the best stimulant you can put yourself on for the process. If your idea is widely liked–take for example floating islands there will be so much art out there there's sci-fi, fantasy, apocalyptic, whatever you could think of–its most likely out there. Take your idea and visualize it from the angles you will use most likely inside, outside, from a distance, and different angles of all of these. Locations or the backbone of your world hold your plot, your characters, one of the biggest wow factors in the whole of writing, and the ability to tell so much with so little. 

Worldbuilding is what you use to kill time and kill doubt. It allows you to put your ideas somewhere and create something truly unique. You will, if you let yourself, get lost in it eventually. By building your own world you allow your creativity to truly express itself. The world is the ground beneath your feet and foundation for everything and the basis of your story. Hopefully I gave you enough to start upon your journey. 

Sources: 

King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. 2000. New York, Scribner, 2020.

McKee, Robert. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. London, Methuen, 1997.

Truby, John. The Anatomy of Story. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 14 Oct. 2007.

Martin, George R R. A wwwwGame of Thrones. New York, Bantam Books, 1 Aug. 1996.

Martin, George R R. A Clash of Kings. London, Harpervoyager, 1998.

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Martin, George R R. Storm of Swords. 2005.

Martin, George R R. A Feast for Crows. London, Harper Voyager, 2017.

‌Martin, George R R. A Dance with Dragons. New York, Bantam Books, 2011.

Corey, James S. A. The Expanse. Orbit, 2019.

Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. New York, Scholastic Inc, 2008.

Taylor, Dennis E. We Are Legion (We Are Bob). 2017.

James. Tiamat’s Wrath. Orbit, 26 Mar. 2019.

Westworld. Directed by Michael Crichton, HBO, 2 Oct. 2016.

‌“Guide to Nonlinear Narrative: 3 Tips for Writing a Nonchronological Story - 2025 - MasterClass.” MasterClass, 2020,

Maria Dahvana Headley. Magonia. HarperCollins, 28 Apr. 2015.

Callahan, Diane. “Fantasy and Sci-Fi Worldbuilding Fundamentals.” Medium, 20 Feb. 2025, quotidianwriter.medium.com/fantasy-and-sci-fi-worldbuilding-fundamentals-5ec797b0c5c2. Accessed 1 Oct. 2025.

Swan, Jordan Riley, and Hero Bowen. Into a Wicked World. 3 May 2024.