When people hear “worldbuilding,” they often think of sprawling maps, thousand-year histories, and detailed appendices explaining magical systems. They think of a massive budget, a grand, top-down design that explains every nut and bolt of a fictional universe before the story even begins.
I’m here to tell you that’s a myth. The most immersive worlds aren’t built on encyclopedias; they’re built on a budget. Not a financial budget, but a budget of attention. Your reader’s attention is the most precious resource you have, and the best worldbuilding doesn’t spend it on info-dumps. It spends it on small, consistent details that imply a much larger world.
Great worldbuilding isn’t about explaining the world; it’s about making the reader feel it. Here’s how.
1. The Flavor of the Food
You don’t need to explain a futuristic city’s entire supply chain. You just need to describe the taste of the street food. In a cyberpunk world, does the noodle soup have a faint, synthetic aftertaste because all protein is lab-grown? Is the most prized possession a real, dirt-grown onion? These small sensory details tell the reader more about the economy, the environment, and the class divides of your world than three pages of exposition ever could. The details of daily life—what people eat, what they wear, the slang they use—are the threads you use to weave the tapestry of your world.
2. The Rules Are for Breaking
Every world has rules, whether it’s the laws of physics or the laws of magic. A great story isn’t about listing those rules; it’s about showing what happens when they’re bent or broken. In a world of magical realism, maybe everyone accepts that the ghosts of their ancestors occasionally show up for dinner. The story isn’t about explaining why this happens. The story is about the one ghost who refuses to leave, or the one family who suddenly can’t see them anymore. The magic is in the exception, not the rule. By focusing on the deviation, you make the underlying rule feel ancient and real without ever having to explain it.
3. The Scars of History
Worlds, like people, are shaped by their past. You don’t need to write a full history textbook. You just need to show the scars. Is there a beautiful park in the middle of your city that everyone avoids after dark because of a forgotten tragedy? Is there a piece of advanced technology that people treat with superstitious fear because of a past disaster? These are the fingerprints of history. By showing the effect of a past event on the present-day culture, you create a sense of depth and consequence. The world feels lived-in, haunted by a history the reader can feel but doesn’t need to have memorized.
Conclusion: A World You Can Touch
Whether it’s the neon glow of a cyberpunk city or the quiet strangeness of a magical town, the goal of worldbuilding is the same: to create a reality that feels so tangible, so consistent, that the reader forgets it’s fictional.
This isn’t achieved through grand architectural plans, but through the patient accumulation of small, authentic details. It’s about showing the world through the character’s eyes, letting the rules emerge from their struggles, and trusting the reader to connect the dots.
My characters are always navigating worlds that press in on them, forcing them to define their own space within a reality that was not built for them. It’s in their fight to carve out an identity, to find a truth that feels real, that the world itself comes into focus.
It is this philosophy—that the most epic struggles are often the most personal—that lies at the heart of my latest novel, Letters to the Body I Never Had. It’s a story about building a world for one, inside a world that refuses to see you.