World Building I: Pitfalls
Wherein I discuss the common mistakes I see beginner writers make when designing their world.
World building is a topic I’ve gone into at length on the discord, and I’ve found that a trap many amateur writers fall into is overestimating how important world building is, as well as how much of it there should be. This is particularly a problem in fantasy writing, in part due to a lot of popular contemporary fantasy media receiving heavy praise for the world building they do, but more speculative fiction often has the same issues.
In short, world building can be used as a way to add texture to the setting of a piece of media, creating interesting and evocative ideas in the audience’s minds of what a life in this world would be like. It can also, more relevant to our purposes, serve as a way to form connective tissue between the plot, the characters, and the higher level concepts at play in the script. An example I like to use is how Dragon Age’s setting utilizes the Chantry, the world’s dominant religion, and the Veil, the central apparatus through which magic is done and which renders mages uniquely susceptible to demonic possession, to create several complex and (mostly) nuanced stories that wouldn’t be possible in a more mundane setting like, say, D&D’s Forgotten Realms world. In that franchise, you’re often introduced to complex world building that is looped back into the plot, with the early game asking the player to draw their own conclusions about the various unique elements of this world, and then in the late game providing an opportunity to act on those conclusions in impactful, meaningful ways.
The pitfall I often see is that several stories spend a lot of time on this world building stage, but without a clear goal. Elements are added to the world because they’re neat or thought provoking, but never acted upon in the script because, well, this is just a story about a blue haired dude that kills an evil emperor. This is assuming the script ever gets written, as I know writers who have lore documents hundreds of pages long, filled with character backstories, history, gods, detailed magic systems, dozens of races each painstakingly designed to not be analogous to a typical fantasy race, but not a single word put to page for the actual story they’re writing it all for.
Especially with how uneconomical script is in FEGBA (every sentence more or less comes with a pause for an A press, greatly slowing down reading speed and making dialogue scenes much longer than they could be), you honestly don’t have the time to loredump the player every few chapters every time you have a cute idea to impart. If you don’t want players to start skipping your dialogue, you need to be smart about what you choose to say and when, especially when it could be a loooooong time between each chunk of dialogue. Making sure important info sticks and is easily applied is important.
The best way to do this is to provide an anchor. In short, the player will have a much easier time consuming a piece of world building if they can tie it to something tangible in the script. It could be a character closely tied to this aspect of the world with strong opinions on it – now you not only have a face to tie this information to, but it’s been given context and emotion. It could be something the player witnesses firsthand, turning the world building from a thought provoking curiosity to a more directly engaging reality. On a simpler scale, it can just be making sure to bring things up as they become relevant, as this way the player is immediately shown the world building having a cause and effect on the real world, and can more easily conceptualize other ways that this same facet of the world building could manifest itself.
An example of bad world building is something like the ever popular FE intro narration, where you’re introduced to several nations, names, faces, concepts, and ideas before one can even find something to ground oneself in the world and make sense of the information given to them. Without context, information is meaningless, and the only knowledge that will stick for a player will be that which is made immediately relevant to them. Beyond that, the faceless, impersonal, and strictly informative nature of the info dump makes it boring to read. There’s no texture, no emotion, and so it fails both as story telling and as a way to efficiently impart information, as the vast majority of the info given is either entirely superfluous or restated later and better by an actual character within the script, now with the benefit of context.
My advice to writers first starting out, or romhackers who find the writing process intimidating, is to let world building come to you. As you find yourself adding new characters, new places, new complications to the script, feel what’s most interesting to you. You can always rewrite if you have an idea that conflicts with previous info but is too good to pass up, and my experience is that typically as you flesh out the world this way, the jigsaw slowly falls into place around you, as suddenly plot threads and character arcs become obvious and your ideas begin to criss cross. Don’t worry about figuring out the entire world before you start writing, just feel your way through the script and see what context comes naturally to you. Your plot, characters, and setting will begin to define each other symbiotically, and once you’re fully comfortable you can begin planning your setting further ahead, alongside things like character arcs and the twists and turns of the plot.