I have a tendency to go to extremes in my writing. Either I sit down with no plan, no character profiles, no timeline, and no worldbuilding in my head and just write a story however I feel like, or I write a hundred pages of preparation and worldbuilding ahead of time.

The problem comes when I try to condense that worldbuilding down into something that the reader will actually find interesting and sound natural in the context of a novel. This is something I’m still learning to do, but these are the three pieces of advice that helped me the most.

1. Avoid info dumping

The days of readers enjoying books that spent pages and pages describing the inner workings of a city government are long past. Most readers now prefer to be introduced to the elements and features of a fantasy world gradually, through natural dialogue and events. Your first chapter, for example, doesn’t need to describe in-depth the names of the countries involved in your story or how they govern themselves. I will sometimes do half a page of pure worldbuilding information for the reader, but I rarely go beyond that, because I think it gets boring fast.

The other part of avoiding info-dumping, beyond just making worldbuilding sections too long, is sharing information that will never be relevant. For example, you don’t need to tell the reader about the seven people groups in your fantasy world if only three of those show up in the story.

2. Show, don’t tell

For myself, I really struggled to understand what was meant by this advice. To be honest, I’m still figuring it out and I often get frustrated trying to distill worldbuilding into dialogue or the natural story rather than direct exposition. Also, sharing worldbuilding in dialogue can be a pitfall that makes your characters sound unnatural and share something that your characters already should be aware of.

The best I can do is offer an example: Instead of describing a city’s strict laws, show a character being apprehended for breaking a minor rule, highlighting the authoritarian nature of the regime.

Instead of an in-depth description of your magic system in the first chapter, wait until a chapter that features an academy where magic is being taught, or integrate teaching about your magic into the plot and story itself by introducing a master-apprentice relationship.

3. Make the most of small details

Small details are something I tend to miss as I’m building a massive world from scratch. Something to remember is that in our world, foods have special names. There are local customs that add flavor to each area, and different groups might use different slang.

You might for example describe a market scene with vendors selling exotic fruits unique to your world or characters using colloquial phrases specific to their region. Not all of the small details need to be plot-centric, but they can help ground your reader in your world.

It’s even better if you can use those seemingly unimportant elements to foreshadow future events. As a somewhat silly example, in the beginning of your story, you might mention that one of your characters has an allergic reaction to that particular exotic fruit. Halfway through the book, you have that character fail to show up for an important event, which brings a high cost to the heroes, and it turns out the reason is because of an allergic reaction. Someone who knew about the allergy must have betrayed the character.

At that point your readers experience a kind of satisfaction from seeing the payoff of a seemingly unimportant detail that also helped them feel at home in your fantasy world.

Final Thoughts

Fantasy worldbuilding is an extremely complex topic, and I’m hardly the most experienced person in that regard. Two of my favorite fantasy authors, John Flannagan who wrote Ranger’s Apprentice and Brandon Sanderson who wrote the Mistborn trilogy and others, do an excellent job of worldbuilding very quickly and effectively, and I highly recommend reading their books as an example. You might also follow Jed Herne on YouTube for some additional tips.

In the meantime, please like this post if you found it helpful and share any tips you may have or any challenges you’ve faced regarding fantasy worldbuilding in the past. Also, please subscribe to learn how to create a hard magic system and how to write a blurb for your book, among other things.

Finally, feel free to take a look at the first chapters of my own serial fantasy novel, Loyalty Fallen.