6 Worldbuilding Mistakes Every New Writer Makes

In this video I’m going to be talking about six fantasy world building mistakes that almost every new writer makes and I know that because I’ve seen tons of new writers submit samples from their novels to me for my story coaching program and I’ve also worked with a lot

Of those writers in my story coaching program as well so these mistakes I’m about to cover in this video come from just seeing repeated patterns and repeated errors in a lot of these new Riders manuscripts and they also come from lessons that I’ve learned along my own writing journey of publishing three

Fantasy books and a video game mistake number one is detaching your world building from your plot characters and theme so it’s very tempting when you’re starting out as a fantasy writer to just try to create the coolest fantasy world you possibly can you throw in an amazing magic system maybe you include some

Really interesting plants and animals maybe you throw in this interesting political system as well and you change some things about the geography maybe you have some things floating in the sky maybe you have oceans that are made from lava or something like that and it’s really easy to get carried away by

Adding all these cool elements while forgetting that they probably aren’t achieving a good story ultimately World building is a tool for crafting good stories and you should look at it that way does World building Aid my story or is it detracting from my story instead and more specifically is that World

Building integral and unified and coherent with my plot and my characters and my themes the way to conceptualize this is that you want to create such a sense of coherence between the world that your characters inhabit the characters themselves and the actual plot the kind of structure and movement

Of your story you want to create such a sense of coherence between those three elements that it would almost feel impossible to remove one of those elements and put it in a different story so ideally you want to create a world that is so integral to your plot to the

Struggles that your characters face to the character’s arcs that you couldn’t easily remove those characters from that world and put them in a different setting I think a story that does this to a incredible 10 out of 10 level for me is the gutter Prayer by Gareth Ryder

Hanrahan the this story is set in Garden this very dark Grim alchemical city that is almost like this sort of Victorian era glasgow-esque industrial city but set in this sort of 19th century fantasy world and it’s a city where you have simultaneously like Gods and Monsters that are roaming around you have ghouls

Beneath the city who are trying to control things you have an alchemical Guild that is trying to cook up these taloman which are these creatures made from molten wax who are basically like the Terminator and Terminator 2 just these like molten wax creatures trying to hunt down people and you have all of

These different kind of Twisted monsters and people who want to control their City clashing into each other in a city that feels kind of almost like a fantasy version of Gotham and that setting is so integral to the story that the author literally begins with the first chapter

Being narrated from the perspective of a building and without getting into any specific spoilers for this story the kind of spirit of the city is so integral to the plot as we follow along with these thieves who get caught up in these various political machinations throughout the story to the point where

That story is just such a great unified synthesis of character and plot and theme and World building so the question to ask yourself here for this point is how does this world building express my theme of my story I’ve talked about the theme a lot in previous videos on this

Channel but essentially the way I kind of think about theme is that it is a moral question that is being asked through your story so if you have a story which is all about spies and all about characters kind of portraying each other trying to find the truth trying to

Uncover lies how can you craft a world that explores that theme to the fullest extent you probably don’t want to create a world that is really like kind of bright and Breezy and happy and you know it’s everyone is getting along great and that sort of thing you probably want to

Create a world that is dark and twisted where you never really know for sure what is happening and there are always creatures lurking in the shadows and there are all these political games going on behind the scenes maybe you even want to go as far is making some of

The weather unpredictable so that you don’t know who to trust you don’t know which people to trust in this world you don’t know how to trust the weather in this world you don’t know how to trust the geography of this landscape even it’s really fun to kind of take your

Story’s theme and to figure out interesting ways to sort of build like the symbolic web that you are exploring through the physical setting and Landscape of your story likewise it’s really important to look at the interconnectedness between character and world as well ideally you want to create

The kind of world that is the most uniquely challenging to your main characters you want your main characters to struggle as much as possible so you should try to create a world that facilitates that struggle that forces the character to question their beliefs to undergrow painful growth and to

Experience some sort of character Arc where they change over the course of their story and through the course of pursuing their desires in this regard The Dark Knight by Christopher Nolan is a fantastic example of the synthesis between character and World building in the Dark Knight Bruce Wayne Wayne slash

Batman is extremely obsessed with trying to save the soul of Gotham from The Joker however the World building of Gotham and the kind of incentives that are operating in that world the personalities of the people existing in this city and the psychology of its inhabitants make it extremely difficult

For Batman to actually save these people in the first place so really when it comes to this point you should think about character plot and World building as three points on a triangle and you should be always considering how the stuff you’re doing here whether it’s in

The world building whether it’s in the character whether it’s in the plot how does that stuff actually relate to the other two points of that triangle mistake number two with fantasy world building is starting too big particularly when you’re beginning as an author and you are tasked with this

Challenge of trying to develop a fantasy world for your story it can be overwhelming and you can start to think my gosh I need to know everything about this world I need to know the 20 rulers that have controlled this country and you know when this country was founded I

Need to know how this universe was created what gods were involved in that and need to know the magic that is involved in every corner of the world I need to know the city names in every corner of this world and as you can see it can get really overwhelming and

Really intimidating pretty quickly however I just recommend that you should try to step back from that and instead of forcing yourself to take on such a big challenge try to just look at your world building through a smaller lens in our own lives we understand very small

Aspects of the world around us like there are so many things about the world that I have absolutely no clue about but it really doesn’t affect my life in a meaningful way and because your world and your fantasy story is always going to be seen Through The Eyes of your

Characters you can kind of take the same approach to that as well you don’t need to answer all the questions you don’t need to have every single aspect of Your World building sorted out in advance you know we’re not trying to be talking here we don’t have to spend 20 years

Developing unique language systems and writing thousands and thousands of pages of History to develop your fantasy world you absolutely can if you want to but that can also lead to World Builders disease which is when you just spend so much time developing your world that you never actually get on with the really

Important task of writing the actual story so don’t feel the pressure to start too big and then also on a more kind of tactical actionable level when it comes to actually writing your story within the novel itself I would advise almost keeping yourself confined to a small lens on the world when you’re

Starting out it’s very overwhelming for readers if you just throw them straight into this world and you are trying to bring them up to speed with literally everything in it and this is what often leads to info dumping which is where you know you get into a new fantasy book and

You’re like okay what’s this about and then within the first 20 Pages it’s just this massive expositional prologue where the author is trying to throw every single thing at you the author is like I’ve done so much homework I’ve done so much preparation on this world you need

To understand every single aspect of it and that’s quite overwhelming for readers to encounter instead there is absolutely nothing wrong with confining yourself to a smaller more manageable sense of World building again World building is a tool for telling better stories you don’t get points for having

The best world building you get points for writing the best story and that brings me to my next World building mistake which is going shallow instead of deep so this is kind of similar to the previous point I was just talking about about the mistake of starting too

Big but essentially what I’m saying here is that if you want to think about fantasy world building in terms of let’s say like 15 or 20 different categories whether they are things like currencies or languages or geography or magic there’s tons of other ways you can kind of categorize and think about World

Building as well when you’re thinking about all these different categories of World building it’s very tempting to be like okay I’ve got to answer stuff for every single one of these but quite often if you try to cover all of these different aspects in your book it will

Lead to shallow World building instead of deep World building so you know you’re gonna have a few sentences on each of these things but because you’re actually not going in depth into any of them the reader’s credibility and believability in the realism of this world is never quite going to be there

Instead if you pick one or two of these aspects so let’s say I pick my magic system and I also pick the geography of my world and I just go really deep into to exploring those in a fascinating interesting and hopefully original way that also serves my characters my plot

And my theme that is going to be far more interesting to readers because they’re like oh great I love stories with well worked out magic and interesting takes on geography this is exactly what I’m up for plus as a side benefit to that if you go really deep

Into one or two aspects of Your World building and you fully convince readers that you have really thought out all the nuances and all the possibilities and implications of that specific subject then when you offhandedly mention something about currency or languages but you never actually go deep into it

The reader will just think hang on a second this author put a ton of effort into the magic and the geography it felt really worked out it felt very realistic to me okay he’s only mentioning this thing briefly but I’m just going to assume that he’s done the same amount of

Work for this thing I’m going to assume that because he proved his credibility to me with this other aspect I have just transferred that credibility over to this other aspect as well and really that’s already is one readers want the illusion that you have created this

Fully fledged world for them in the same way when you go to a theme park and you kind of know when you’re at a theme park that everything is just a facade but you want to be immersed you want to be fooled you want to believe the lie that

This is a completely different world that you’re stepping into with all of the rules and all of the implications thought out by a master designer before I get into the fourth mistake I want to quickly tell you about my free fantasy writing advice ebook five storytelling lessons that transformed my writing you

Can download it for free by going to the link in the description down below and it has exactly what it says on the Tim some of the best lessons that I have learned from my 10 years of writing my various books and the video game that

Came out last year as well and there have already been hundreds of writers that have downloaded and enjoyed the book so go ahead and join them click the link in the description down below to get that now like I said it’s totally free fantasy world building mistake number four is ignoring the consequences

Often in our quest to develop really cool fantasy worlds we can be a little bit flimsy about the concept sequences of what our world building would actually do to use an example from one of my early books which is currently unpublished the book is called masks of

Steel and it’s basically set in this world where civilization lives on these sort of Rocky spiers that Rise Up from this sea of mist that is filled with monsters and in this world there are fighter pilots who fly planes around between these small rocky spiers get into dogfights with the Pirates Who are

Always trying to destroy this civilization and basically it’s kind of Top Gun in this fantasy setting now that was a really cool here when I was writing it and I was like oh yeah this is really interesting to explore but in hindsight there’s a lot of consequences

That I failed to adequately explore in that story and you know if I eventually decide to go back to that novel pick it up and publish it these are all things I would have to fix the most glaring one is okay if you have these really densely

Cities that are just sitting on top of these spiers first of all where are they getting all these building materials from especially for things like the planes and then second of all where are they growing all their food because you’re constantly describing these buyers as being like 90 occupied by

Buildings like this very densely occupied city is on top of these Rocky spiers where’s all like the farms and the food and that sort of thing so not considering something like that is something that will probably strain the believability of the reader and it’s going to ruin their suspension of

Disbelief so just off the top of my head if I was thinking about a problem like that the way I would maybe Solve It Is by saying okay well maybe somehow the food grows on the side of the spiers maybe they have some more efficient farming mechanism maybe people in this

World like are actually magically adapted to not need as much food maybe there’s different spiers that are just for farming so you can actually figure out a way to work around these but the important thing is you should always be looking to the consequences of your well building because whenever you’re

Changing something that’s different from our world there are first order second order third order fourth order and so on effects of how that can actually create these Domino impacts on the ecology and the Society of your world for example if you have a story setting where everyone

In this world is like a Viking Warrior or whatever and they all go off to raid who’s staying behind to like mine the farms and mind the animals and actually you know mine the buildings and that sort of thing so whenever you make a big change from our world in your own

Fantasy World building or setting make sure you’re always questioning what could be the potential impacts of this and I think this is a step where it’s really good to actually run your world building past you know a couple of friends and basically just ask them to

Say I want you to grill me on this I want you to just try to poke out all the flaws and all the holes in this thing of course your world building doesn’t have to to be a strictly logical exercise there’s times where it’s totally fine to

Just follow the rule of cool and to have something in your world that doesn’t really make sense but you have it there anyway for example in across the broken Stars which is set on these discs that float in space that are sort of surrounded by force fields I’ve wanted

These characters who were called Angels who could basically fly between the discs with wings and of course you know if you’re in space there’s not really any air but I was like ah space fantasy I want them to be able to fly with wings I’m just going to kind of hand wave my

Way out of this problem and that’s fine as well if you’re being honest with your intentions and you are kind of creating that tone and that promise to readers Fantasy World building mistake number five is anachronistic dialogue so anachronistic simply means out of place or feeling like it is not correctly of

This era this is a very very common thing that I have seen with the books that I’ve edited through my story coaching program there are a lot of instances where you know my clients are writing books that are set in sort of medieval-esque fantasy worlds or

Sometimes a era that is maybe a little bit later but they used dialogue that is sometimes far too modern sometimes I use things like I gotta go and just modern American slang that feels really at odds within this sort of fantasy world it’s very important to make sure that your

Dialogue feels congruent with your setting now this doesn’t mean that you have to come along and you know do some really weird mock Shakespearean dialogue like saying oh I doth me thinks that this Griffin be attacking us or I don’t know however people spoke in Shakespeare

Um you don’t have to go to that extreme but you do have to consider is the way that this person is talking appropriate to this setting and to the voice and tone of this world that I’m trying to create really really what you just need to do here is avoid knocking readers out

Of their suspension of disbelief with this as well you also want to think about words and phrases that are kind of unique to our world that you might be taking for granted that wouldn’t make sense in this fantasy setting a very common instance of this is talking about

Things like minutes or hours if you actually go back even a couple of hundred years those were not really Concepts that were super talked about our whole language around time and minutes and hours and this sort of thing only really came about once we started industrializing at least in sort of the

Western world only came about when we started industrializing and all of a sudden okay we need to make sure that people are at the factory at the same chronological instance so what do we need to do we need to create time but if you are just some farmer in 1500s

England there’s no real need for you to understand minutes and hours because your day just consists of getting up when the sun gets up working at your family’s fields and then going to sleep and then lastly mistake number six is a lack of originality and new

So this is a bit more of an ephemeral Point than the other things I’ve made here but I truly believe that you should be striving to create a one-of-a-kind book every time you write something you never just want to be a copy of a copy

Of a copy because there are a lot of things out there that are exactly like that I think it’s always so important when you’re approaching your fantasy world building and your story in general to always strive to be putting something new into the genre to be advancing the

Fantasy genre forward in some way shape or form and the way that you do that in my opinion is you kind of look at the things that you are uniquely interested and influenced by and you figure out a way to take them into your story and hopefully your unique interests and

Hobbies and passions and the things that you were just curious about are going to be exactly that they’re going to be unique to you so for example maybe you’re really into like fungi and mushrooms and that sort of thing and you’re just like okay how do I bring

This into my fantasy world in a way that uses all of my specific knowledge and interests and curiosity from this weird sort of passionate hobby thing I have in a way that no other writer has done before because no no other writer shares my passion in this thing for me

Personally like some of the stuff I’m really passionate about outside of fantasy stories include architecture I used to work in the field of architecture and climbing I’m a massive bouldering addict so these are two things that you know when I’m writing fantasy stories I’m like okay how do I

Kind of develop really interesting architectural settings such as in Kingdom and Dragons the book I’m writing right now most of that story is set at this floating Mountain City in the sky where there are all these Warrens of tunnels that kind of carve through this floating Mountain there are these

Crystal doorways that open up when you touch these sort of combination locks made from Jewels next to them and there is all this other sort of magic infused into that setting as well and I could really just run wild with the interior design of a lot of these rooms too I’m

Not saying I’m the only writer who is interested in architecture here or anything but because it’s something that I’m very passionate about hopefully I’m able to present a slightly unique or original take on it when I’m writing about it in my books and I think that’s

What you should be striving for as well every time you are developing a world writing a story you should be asking yourself how do I Infuse some of my soul into this how do I make something that really can’t be compared with anything else that is out there because it is

Such a unique expression of what I am interested in it’s definitely easier said than done but it is an ambition that I think we should all strive towards when we are writing fantasy stories and for those of you who are with me on the path of pursuing original

World building that also manages to express your characters and your plots and your themes in a cohesive and resonant way to you I say keep writing keep striving I’ll see you in the next video Thank you