Hey friends! Let’s talk about a common creative writing struggle that some of you might be familliar with: worldbuilder’s disease. We’ll take a look at it and how I’ve come up with a method to keep it at bay as much as I need. Strap in, it’ll be a lengthy one!

How Am I Doing?

I’m great, but it’s been hard coping with the heat! It’s been really hot over the last week, and it makes me want to laze about in bed with a fan on all day. I understand why siesta exists and with peak temperatures every year, we should implement it up north as well in my opinion.

Other than that, I went to visit my parents in their new (very old) home in the countryside. My brother and I popped by for a bit to help out with cleaning one of the houses that hasn’t been used for over 5 years. I chased out spider colonies older than my nephews.

What Am I Doing?

On the Bibidi side of things, I’ve been implementing feedback from the last playtest as well as general UX improvements. It’s been slow going, but both Jonas and I are back from vacation now, so hopefully frequent meetings will redirect my attention fully onto this project once again.

Apart from development, I have worldbuilding on my mind. You see, the game is relatively straightforward, and doesn’t have a lot of room for exposition in the narrative. Despite that, we still want the game to feel saturated with a dark, mysterious vibe that insinuates there is a fully fleshed-out world outside of the player’s vision.

I love writing up lore, but that’s a bit of a problem with that. I’m afflicted by worldbuilder’s disease. That’s novelist jargon for people who can’t stop adding more ideas and details to their world, despite the fact it doesn’t neccesarily improve the story.

It’s easy to get lost in fleshing out parts of your world’s geography, cultures, magic systems, et cetera. There’s always more to work on. So much so that any other part of your narrative grinds to a halt. If you’re already actively working on a story, but still write lore around it, chances are you want to rearrange plot beats and arcs to fit that cool new idea you had. It’s a sisyphean task.

By now, I must’ve made a hundred worlds for videogames, D&D campaigns and fantasy novel settings, but so many of them never get to “completion”. But what is completion? A world can never be perfected. There will always be nooks and crannies can’t fully flesh out. Something I’ve only realized in the past few years is that a world is completed when the story within it is completed, even if not every culture is explored, physics drawn out and landmass detailed.

Iceberg Theory

So how does one build worlds for a story you want to eventually complete? Instead of setting a story in a world you’ve made up, make up a world around your story! You start with what you want your characters to go through, plot out their arcs, characters you need and scenes for impactful locations. From their you can start building the world directly around it: locations you need, people that inhabit those locations, systems you need to propel your plot forward like magic.

Essentially, you’re already done, but if you want to world to feel lived in or larger-than-life, you can keep chipping away at it. Why do those people inhabit those locations? Why is your magic system the way it is? What history led up to those facts? But be careful, you might run into worldbuilder’s disease again, unless you know when to stop.

So, how do you know when to stop? Hemingway’s iceberg theory states that a story can be strengthened by the parts you omit. In essence, your story is a massive iceberg, of which the readers’ only see the tip that peaks out of the water. Brandon Sanderson, a proflific fantasy novelist and worldbuilder, likens worldbuilding to the iceberg, but suggest to leave the iceberg hollow. What he means by that is that you want to flesh out your world just enough so readers’ get the impression that there’s a massive foundation to the setting, even though most of it is simply left blank.

Skeleton to Skin

The way I go about that is what I call the Skeleton to Skin method. I write down every component I know I’m going to need for my story first. The characters and their arcs, the main conflicts, some scene settings if I know them and mechanics and gameplay elements specifically for videogames. I connect them with lines if they’re related. A character arc, for example, can usually be connected through linear plot beats. A gameplay loop can be connected to itself. This forms the skeleton.

Then, you try to determine what lore you need to fimly set that skeleton in place. History, locations, peoples, cultures, physics, systems, anything that supports or justifies the skeleton. This is the flesh. This is where you want to spend most of your time worldbuilding. This needs to be detailed, atmospheric and make the readers’ ask questions about the world.

Then, there’s the skin. This is what I liken to the surface of the hollow iceberg. These are snippets of information that hint at a larger world, but that you don’t actually spend time on fleshing out. These are lcoations and cultures outside of the reach of the story, but the still carry echoes through the worldbuilding. For example, if your setting solely takes place inside a large metropolis, these can describe isolated cultures far away on the other side of the world that sometimes carry traders into the city walls, but largely stay away. Similarly, these can be the ruins of a civilization long lost, whose influence is felt but not understood.

Why Am I Doing? (this)

It’s been a while since I’ve written something about creative writing, especially about methods. The skeleton to skin thing has helped me over the years to scope down writing projects, especially with deadline-heavy ones such as the D&D campaigns I run. What’s great about this specific method is that you can fix your player’s characters as the skeleton and really start to flesh out the world around their backstories. This makes their input feel like part of the fabric of the world.

Next week, I’m back in the Netherlands for a bit and I might not write a newsletter because of it. So, don’t be concerned if nothing reaches your inbox!