How to Write Engaging Worldbuilding

Several years ago, I had a steady gig writing short-short stories for an online literary magazine. I wrote story one a month, and the stories had a maximum word count limit - 2500 words.

This combination of a deadline and a word count limit and proved to be a powerful learning experience.

2500 words is not much to work with. I learned very quickly that if I was going to tell a full story - with a beginning and a middle and an end, with character development, with worldbuilding, with an emotional heart that touched my readers – I had to make every word count. And not just count once. Every word had to do double- and even triple-duty.

The hardest part, for me, was getting all the worldbuilding on the page. I had no space for explanations or descriptions of setting and context. I had to weave all of that into the story present as it unfolded on the page.

I came to think of it as Back Door Worldbuilding.

Back Door Versus Front Door Worldbuilding

Worldbuilding is an umbrella term: under it sits setting and context. Setting is the time and place in which your story takes place. It’s the world your characters inhabit, a world that shapes them and is shaped by them. Context is backstory. It’s the geo-socio-political-economic-historical-cultural-familial-relational context in which the story is unfolding. It provides meaning to the world the characters live in.

Worldbuilding is not something just speculative fiction writers need to think about. All stories need worldbuilding. It’s what grounds the reader in the characters’ world. Without it, it’s hard for readers to fully understand the story and the characters.

Worldbuilding can come into your story in two ways. It can be delivered in explanation and description – I call that Front Door Worldbuilding (other people call that info dumping, but I’ve always hated that term). And it can be woven into the action of the story – I call that Back Door Worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding should come in through the Back Door more often than it comes through the Front Door.

Why?

Back Door Worldbuilding lives in the background, keeping readers focused on the story present. This kind of worldbuidling is in the air, in the groundwater, of the story. Readers passively absorb it as they follow the action of the plot.

Front Door Worldbuilding interrupts the flow of the story with long explanations and descriptions, bringing the story to a halt. It pulls attention away from the characters and the action and the unfolding plot. And by explaining and describing everything, it denies readers the chance make their own discoveries and connections, which is a big part of the joy of reading - and what keeps readers turning pages. It’s like the writer’s saying, okay I know you’re starting to get into the story but hold on a minute, I’ve got some stuff I want you to know. And suddenly, readers are pulled outside of the story. And perhaps wondering whether it’s worth it to try to get back in.

When you’re writing your story, the goal is to bring the majority of the worldbuilding in through the Back Door. It’s more engaging. That said, sometimes Front Door Worldbuilding is unavoidable, especially in the early chapters as you’re trying to get your story world off the ground. Sometimes you just have to say it plain. But these moments should be few and far between, with no more than a few lines or so at at time. And they should only contain what the readers need to know to understand what is happening in the scene.

Want to see what this looks like? Here’s the opening of one of my short-short stories, titled “Blue”:

“Pema tiptoed through the amber morning light as fast as she dared, her feet silent on the titanium ground panels. She clutched her shoes to her chest to contain her clanging heart and kept her head down, as if this would make the passageway stay empty. Her mother’s voice filled her head

We’re starting on Field 4-1 today.

Something about a generator down. Routine Maintenance. Pema didn’t hear the rest. Didn’t ask questions. She couldn’t. Panic had gripped her throat too tight.

She grit her teeth. Tiptoeing wasn’t going to get her all the way to Field 4-1 in the Large Crops Unit, then back to the Hydroponics Lab in the Small Crops Unit where she was supposed to be. Lab Directory Keran did not tolerate tardiness in her apprentices. A note would be sent to her parents. Questions would be asked.

She glanced down the glass-enclosed passageway, an idea tugging at her. Something that would do more than raise questions, if she were caught.

She could run.”

This is almost all Back Door Worldbuilding. As you may have passively deduced as you followed the action, from the amber light and titanium panels and glass-enclosed passageways, Pema lives in a colony on Mars. And she has a problem.

Now, I could’ve written:

“Pema had lived her whole life in Gusev Colony. All she knew was the maze-like passageways of titanium and glass. Every day, the sun glowed amber in the caramel sky, casting the jagged Columbian Range, on the far side of Gusev Crater, in a rusty hue.

Every afternoon, Pema joined her mother in the Large Crops Unit. She loved sitting among the long, green rows of soybeans, loved the smell of the soil. She, too would grow up to work in the Large Crops Unit, just like her parents. It had always felt like a safe place. Until today. With a generator down, harvesting work would shift to Field 4-1. The very field she’d hidden her most precious, and forbidden, possession. If she was going to save it from being shredded by the harvested, she’d have to run.”

This one is almost all Front Door Worldbuilding.

Which passage is more engaging?

If you said the first one, I’m with you. And I think most readers would be, too.

All of the details from the second passage are in my story, but they’re woven in, not in big blocks of explanation and descriptions, like they are here. If you want to read the whole story, you can find it here.

If you have big blocks Front Door Worldbuilding bringing your story to a halt, pull them out and put them into their own document, so you can see it without the story around it. Then ask yourself, how many worldbuilding things - e.g. settting descriptions, a big download of the world’s history, a long explanation of familial connections - am I throwing at the reader here? Three things? Five things? Break those blocks apart into separate ideas, then try to weave each idea, one by one, into the story at just the right moment where the reader needs to know that one thing in order to understand what’s happening in the scene. Voila - Back Door Worldbuilding!

I eventually left that steady gig to get my MFA in writing for children and young adults. “Blue” was the story I used in my application. But the lessons I learned during my time as a regular short-short-story writer will never leave me.

Till next time…

Happy writing!

Erin