Worldbuilding

Quotes

From World Building by Alex Danco:

“Everyone’s job is world-building, even if they don’t realize it.” It is more or less the same idea, but tailored even more for a world of abundant narrative and complex choices. The more complex or valuable is whatever you’re trying to sell, the more important it is for you to build a world around that idea, where other people can walk in, explore, and hang out – without you having to be there with them the whole time. You need to build a world so rich and captivating that others will want to spend time in it, even if you’re not there.

From World are the new brands by Terry Nguyen

In Steering the Craft, a 1998 nonfiction book on writing, the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin described “world-making” as a collaboration between the writer and reader. “The world of the story must be created and explained within the story,” Le Guin wrote. “It’s a tricky business.”

In this decade, worldbuilding is not just an imaginative exercise with purely artistic aims. The writer-reader relationship has been supplanted by a creator-consumer dynamic. As a thinly veiled commercial endeavor, its purpose is to oil the wheels of major fan-favorite franchises. Worldbuilding provides grist for expansion. The wider the world, the more spin-offs it can contain. See: the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Pokémon, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Super Mario, and many many more.

Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin once grouped worldbuilders into two types: architects and gardeners. These days, there seem to be fewer gardeners (Martin considers himself one), creators who allow a world to organically bloom. Most franchise worlds are architected to market-researched perfection.