Worldbuilding for Masochists

It's one of the first choices you'll make when writing a story, consciously or not: what point of view are you writing from? First person singular? Third person limited? Omniscient? Something else? The POV can affect a reader's experience of the narrative and the worldbuilding, either subtly or dramatically -- so how do you decide what's right for this story? Kate Elliott [https://imakeupworlds.com/] joins us to explore the possibilities! In this episode, we look at how the point of view can shape both what you communciate about a world and how you communicate it. The POV shows the rhythms of life and can be a good way to feed worldbuilding to the reader -- but it can also expose a character's gaps in knowledge or their biases and prejudices! After all, a commoner and a noble living in same location will interact with different pieces of the world and in very different ways. That, in turn, can affect how the author thinks of the world: what we spotlight, where we might have gaps, and prompting a need to check our own biases. And on top of all of that, POV is also something with its own trends within genres and over time! So we dig into those influences as well. Transcript for Episode 156 [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jiOzF1xGLMthddYsuSlb_iNvDWCN7jjWZFqLlEiRw4M/edit?usp=sharing] Our Guest: Kate Elliott has been publishing science fiction and fantasy for over thirty years with a particular focus in immersive world building and epic stories of adventure & transformative cultural change. She’s written epic fantasy, space opera, science fiction, Young Adult fantasy, and the Afro-Celtic post-Roman alternate-history fantasy with lawyer dinosaurs, Cold Magic, as well as two novellas set in the Magic: The Gathering multiverse. Her work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Norton, and Locus Awards. Her novel Black Wolves won the RT Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Epic Fantasy 2015. She lives in Hawaii, where she paddles outrigger canoes and spoils her schnauzer.

We often think about "making things make sense" in worldbuilding and building internal consistency, scientific realism, and other logic-based considerations into our fiction -- But what happens when your worldbuilding principle is “What would be awesome?" Jim C. Hines [https://www.jimchines.com/], who embraced this principle for a forthcoming book, joins us to explore the possibilities! The Rule of Cool, credit to, is defined thusly: "The limit of the Willing Suspension of Disbelief for a given element is directly proportional to its awesomeness." In other words, if it's cool enough, you can get away with it. This often applies to sci-fi tech and fantasy magic. Let's be real, things like faster-than-light travel, lightsabers, and starfighters will always be "rule of cool", in one way or another (so far as we currently understand physics), and magic doesn't have to be something you break down and quantify and explain perfectly. So what can we play with? And where do those decisions intersect with narrative tone, genre standards, and reader expectations? [Transcript TK] Our Guest: Jim C. Hines is the author of the Magic ex Libris series, the Princess series of fairy tale retellings, the humorous Goblin Quest trilogy, and the Fable Legends tie-in Blood of Heroes. He also won the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer. His latest novel is Terminal Peace, book three in the humorous science fiction Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse trilogy. He lives in mid-Michigan with his family.

We often think of worldbuilding happening on a grand scale, with huge maps and the sweeping narratives of nations and world-changing events. But that's not really the stuff that makes a world feel lived-in. The granular choices are what show day-to-day life, and day-to-day life illustrates so much about how a world has developed, how a culture has grown, and how people negotiate the circumstances of their lives. These are the things that, out of genre, creators might not think of as “worldbuilding” but as "just" character work or setting details. All of it helps to tell the story of your world and how people live in it. So in this episode, we start at the mid-sized level of worldbuilding and then narrow our way down, from cities to neighborhoods to individual buildings to distinct rooms. How can the smallest choices have a significant impact, giving your stories more life and verisimilitude? What defines public and private space, and how do people perceive the differences? What are the uses of buildings and the rooms within them, and what does that tell you about who occupies the space? And how can you craft all of this in a way that feels genuine and goes beyond the surface level? [Transcript for Episode 154 [https://docs.google.com/document/d/14KJLZy9CjNcTiD9Nru-IapfF5LrFa0fCusiqGuzTQWE/edit?tab=t.0] -- Thank you, scribes!]

How can language help shape your worldbuilding? We're not necessarily talking about conlang here -- that can certainly be part of worldbuilding, but it doesn't have to be, and many works of speculative fiction manage perfectly fine without invented languages. But the words you choose in description and dialogue will also communicate something to your reader. There are so many ways that words can create the vibes for your world: the aural quality of different languages, choosing character and place names, the cadence and flow of sentences, and the conscious emulation of other genres or eras. We also explore what the conceptual availability of certain ideas, technologies, or worldviews may mean for the vocabulary, idioms, and metaphors of a culture. Being very intentional about word choice can help a writer communicate a location's aesthetic, let a reader know what to expect from a book's tone, help reveal character through dialogue, and even drop information about all your other worldbuilding in quick and subtle ways. And since we are huge word nerds, we delight in examining all of it! The episode begins, however, with a 15-minute diversion into how much we love Shakespeare, so -- enjoy that! And happy birthday, Bill! We are also delighted to announce that we are, for the fifth year in a row, a Finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Fancast [https://seattlein2025.org/wsfs/hugo-awards/2025-hugo-award-finalists/]! Anyone who has a WSFS membership [https://seattlein2025.org/memberships/memberships/] for this year can vote, and we would love your consideration. Membership costs $50 and gets you access to the voters' packet, digital versions of almost everything you'll find on the Finalists lists -- novels, novellas, novelettes, short stories, poetry, and even audio and video. [Transcript for Episode 153 [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qS56iOqItG2OnJDoA5rR2AucISa86fdacZG7UHo9Tco/edit?usp=sharing] -- Thank you, Scribes!]

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 [https://aijiangauthor.wordpress.com/] 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 to set the mood and tone of a story. Is it bright and peppy, or dark and gloomy? What's the vibe? The overlap between setting and aesthetic can be quite high, communicating a lot to your reader about what they might expect from the story and characters. We also often talk about how characters are the products of their circumstances -- and that means they're also products of their surroundings! What about the physical space that they exist in, or have existed in during their life, has shaped them? [Transcript for Episode 152 [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oUlNTgwhgo6XkHFCxi_PQybMHun9lECnQSeD4ULOsMY/edit?usp=sharing]] Our Guest: Ai Jiang is a Chinese-Canadian writer, Ignyte, Bram Stoker, and Nebula Award winner, and Hugo, Astounding, Locus, Aurora, and BFSA Award finalist from Changle, Fujian currently residing in Toronto, Ontario. Her work can be found in F&SF, The Dark, The Masters Review, among others. She is the recipient of Odyssey Workshop’s 2022 Fresh Voices Scholarship and the author of A Palace Near the Wind, Linghun and I AM AI. Find her on X (@AiJiang_), Insta (@ai.jian.g), and online (http://aijiang.ca [http://aijiang.ca/]).