Recently, I shared a post on systems-level thinking for worldbuilding, which is invaluable for generally making your world feel like an actual coherent thing rather than a constellation of barely-related factoids.
The issue is that, unfortunately, some writers may use this as carte-blanche to infodump or summarize all the connections they have made. This, too, is annoying – almost more annoying than thin worldbuilding. I can forgive some glitchy or barely-there worldbuilding far more than I can someone giving me a torrent of backstory.
So, as usual, we need some balance. Enough connective tissue between the systems to feel coherent, but enough boots-on-the-ground prose that we feel like we’re there. How do we do this? I give you my thoughts.
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Don’t forget that the characters live here.
This seems like a strange reminder, but many newer writers have characters who seem to be dropped onto the planet at the same time at the reader, wholly ignorant of simple things. Even though we’ve been told that the characters have lived here their whole lives.
Writers do this because they can’t get out of their own mindset, where they are discovering the world along with the readers. They feel the need to point things out for the reader’s benefit, but do it through the character’s POV in a way that doesn’t make any sense.
For example, I discussed feminism in the Eirenic Verses and basically told you that … I don’t think about feminism in the Eirenic Verses at all. Why? Because Breme as a society is feminist. They have a female goddess that writes the world and have an all-female order of High Poets that hold sway over most aspects of everyday life.
When feminism is the default state of a society, no one discusses it much. They don’t need to. They don’t think about it. That’s just what they know.
So, remember that your characters are living their lives in this society. The architecture is invisible to them until they come up against difficulties. They’re not thinking about the implications of worshipping a giant cat whose scrapey tongue created the karst formations they live in. They just go “oh yeah, Fuzzball the World-Licker really dug into this area, hah.”
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Focus on sensations, not facts.
An issue with infodumping, as I shared in the above-linked article, is that it gives readers the details without actually letting them feel anything. They’re not experiencing the world; they’re narrating it for the benefit of the invisible audience that they shouldn’t even realize is there.
Rich, sensory detail will make the world come alive far more than any amount of infodumping ever could. Readers get an image in their heads that brings them into the room, and then they’re more willing to listen to your recitations of whatever the hell is going on.
Here’s an example from my fourth book, What Is Cannot Be Unwritten:
He sauntered to the barkeep, a bored woman washing a mug, and spoke in a low voice. “Do you have any Pearl Diver Cider?”
The woman narrowed her eyes in outrage. “What are you talking about? We would never sell such a thing.”
Maybe using a blatant slur for same-sex love wasn’t the best idea, as the barmaid looked about to chuck a glass at his head.
Regardless, he’d committed to it, so Mordrek gave a wide smile, which she didn’t reciprocate. He wasn’t surprised at her coldness, but it still stung.
“I think you would. Isn’t it delicious? I certainly love the female taste more than life itself.”
When she still didn’t move, he leaned in, almost putting his lips to her ear. Thankfully for his ego, she didn’t pull away.
“Never mind all that. I’m here to speak to Tayata. I’m an … associate, of a kind. Rest assured, I know what they drink down there, and I don’t care.”
The woman scanned him over again, and he did his best to look non-threatening. Several seconds passed while she eyed him until she finally gave a long sigh.
“Let me check in the storeroom.” She set the glass down, ignoring a man calling for another ale, and opened a small door. The sound of her footsteps clonking down a flight of stairs was only faintly audible over the chattering drinkers and a badly-played penny whistle.
As he expected, she didn’t return immediately. While he waited, Mordrek scoped down the bar for an interesting-looking woman, but most of the clientele were hearty fishermen there to wash down the day’s work.
Except for downstairs, as revealed when the bartender reappeared and ushered him to a twisting stair spiral. Despite being quite short for a man, Mordrek almost whacked his head on a low ceiling beam, then paused to scrutinize the map there.
Riynan Island. The threat that hung—quite literally, in this instance—over every pearl diver’s head. Every surreptitious kiss, every hand-touch that lasted a bit too long, risked both women being dragged to a desert island and set upon by dogs.
“Very brave to put that there,” he said amiably to the bartender, who snorted and shook her head.
“Tayata’s idea. This whole thing was.”
Quite a good idea, in Mordrek’s opinion. Here lounged dozens of women, splayed across secondhand divans and tattered couches. Black candle smoke, smudged into stars and hearts, bedecked the stone ceiling; from the heavy crossbeams hung folded paper decorations that twinkled with each string-twist. Tawdry chapbooks were thrown on the mismatched tables, with lurid hand-drawn covers of women in carnal embraces.
Much as he’d like to say he’d stumbled into a perfect nest of desire, these ladies were off-limits. If the bored bartender were not standing beside him, it’d probably be off with his head.
So here we’ve got, as my brother called it, the lesbian speakeasy. It’s hidden from everyday view, and Mordrek has to ask for it by a code name – Pearl Divers (a slur for lesbians). There’s a map of a place called Riynan Island hanging above the door, which Mordrek calls “brave.”
Readers can piece together that being a lesbian is a dangerous thing in this society, and that lesbians might be carted off to some evil island where they get eaten by dogs if they are caught doing anything lady-lovey. We don’t need to get told that, because the priority is building a scene of what this room looks like. Because readers can see a depiction of the world itself, they absorb the worldbuilding details more easily; they have an image to stick it with.
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Choose emblematic objects.
Humans love symbols. We’re programmed to make meaning from objects in our environment, and we will remember these more readily than biographic or expository details. You can hack this little quirk of human memory by embedding emblematic objects into your narrative.
One way to do this, as I showed in my aerodynamic writing post, is to pick a few details of a given scene and let them stand in for the rest. For example, say there’s a guttering lantern on the wall, but it’s surrounded by crisp white tile. That’s a little weird, isn’t it? Readers can speculate then. Is this some post-apocalyptic wasteland that ran out of fuel so they had to go back to lanterns? An old-timey medieval dungeon that happens to have some very anachronistic details?
You can also do this the other way: associate key objects with a given character, and use them as stand-ins for that character.
I do this explicitly in Absent All Light by having Uileac find Myunsa, Orrinir’s toy horse, in his saddlebag after Orrinir was taken captive. Myunsa was debuted in Funeral of Hopes and mentioned several times.
Most humans have their totemic objects that are associated with them: things we always have with us or that we value dearly, even if they are not valuable on their own. It could be our favorite mug, our car, our beloved hoodie, a stuffed animal. Giving your characters a totemic character not only makes them feel relatable, but it provides the reader with clues about what the character values and how they fit into the world.
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Let the characters interact with the world.
Again, this feels like a given, but you would genuinely be surprised at how many books out there have the characters seemingly untouched by the world around them. This is common in the much-abhorred summarization style, where every character simply executes actions like they are moving through an outline because the writer forgot to write the actual book.
Let characters touch things. Have them pick stuff up, fiddle with it, put it down. Look out the window. Cough when a dust storm rolls in. Complain about mud on the hem of their cloak. Hear birds singing. Have their throat get dry after a long day on the road and then sigh in relief when they finally get to the canteen.
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Use place names to hint at history.
Place names are not just random things thrown in; they can be emblematic of what a culture values, where it came from, who was there and when they left, and so on.
The United States, for all its faults and flaws, is an absolutely fascinating example of this at work. Some place names, like Cuyahoga County, come from Native American heritage; others, like New York, come from colonization. One can even trace precisely where the colonizers came from and what cultures they encountered in the area just from place names.
While I would not suggest you lay out the etymology of every place name in your world, hinting at them can be an invaluable way to suggest a richer history. For example, most of the place names in Breme come from High Poets, while most of the place names in Sina come from previous queens. We don’t need to go into every place name; just one or two will help people get the jist.
By explaining this, we get a sense of what that culture values, what is considered important enough to immortalize, even when the area was settled. Again, you don’t need to go into every single one. Explaining one can serve as shorthand for all of them.
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Don’t make your main character too special.
No matter how important your main character is to the world, not everyone is going to know or like them. If you’re in the real world and your character is a celebrity, people still won’t always recognize them on sight – especially in today’s society, where there are millions of micro-influencers.
To demonstrate what I mean, I had to explain who Hozier was to my mother because she’d never heard a single one of his songs. There have also been times when she namedrops someone who was famous in the 80s, and I give her a blank stare.
It’s just not realistic for everyone to immediately fawn over your main character, no matter how famous they are. Some may notice them and rush over to talk, while others simply don’t care.
And, of course, everyone has some haters, no matter how nice they are.
This maxim is especially important in medievalesque fantasy, where there is no mass communication. If you stripped a princess of her fancy garb, her royal carriage, and her retinue of guards, very few people out in the hinterlands would recognize her.
Not that this forms of plot of the sixth book in the Eirenic Verses, Poesy, or anything.
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Let characters discuss current events or societal differences.
The key here is not to be too expository. You must make it clear that the characters are talking to one another – not to the reader.
As an example, here’s a part from my fifth book, Absent All Light (coming June 23, 2026), where Orrinir is talking to the Sinans who have captured him. Sina is more technologically advanced, so they have things that Orrinir has never heard of because their countries have been separated for centuries.
Sagremor’s eyes narrowed, but he nodded agreeably at Private Maru. “It’s all we’ve ever known, so how could we compare it to whatever your country has?”
“You can’t,” Private Rinto answered with that triumphant sneer. “I doubt you could even imagine. Doctors. Running water. Some places have electric lights.”
He couldn’t help himself; Orrinir protested without conscious thought. “Of course we have running water. We have rivers too, you know. What else would we drink—puddles?”
Both Sinans stared at him; his confident expression faltered, but he went on. “You can’t imagine the Great Gold River. The Gold Cascade. The—”
To his amazement, the men began to laugh, Private Maru slapping his thighs.
“And they’re all idiots, too. You don’t understand the concept of running water? Pipes, faucets? It never occurred to all you hicks that you could divert a river and push water into your homes?”
So we learn a few things here. Breme doesn’t have running water, and Sina does; Orrinir has never heard the term “running water” ascribed to anything but a natural river.
We note that he focuses on the term he can sort of figure out – running water – rather than “electric lights.” He’s in a defensive mood, insisting he’s not ignorant, so of course he’s going to highlight the things that he thinks he can argue, not what he has no clue about.
It would be strange if a kidnapped soldier, held hostage by a group of people he instinctively hates, suddenly started asking questions of his captors about their new-fangled technology. So not only do we get good insights, but we feel the tension in their conversation. This isn’t an open exchange – it’s a hostile one.
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Introduce contradictions.
One place where writers slip up is making any one culture wholly coherent and sensible. Real cultures aren’t like that. People disagree; rules aren’t apply equally across the entire area; what works in one town is completely irrelevant in another. There are always anachronistic pockets, or uneven legislation, or enclaves and holdouts.
Allow your characters to have conflicting opinions about cultural values or different experiences of the same place. Not only does this introduce minor conflicts, but it makes the world feel like a living, breathing place that is inhabited by contradictory human beings, not a hive mind.
In my first book, 9 Years Yearning, Uileac encounters some gay nomads trading stuff in the capital. He mentions offhandedly that it’s not an uncommon sight, though not everyone supports “dovetails,” as Breme calls them. We see that the nomads dress differently than the agrarian settled people, and that others around them look askance at them a bit – likely more because they are nomads than because they are gay.
Does Uileac agree with that? He’s too focused on the fact that these gay nomads stir up something weird in his chest. And that’s fine. Your characters don’t have to have opinions on everything, just like you don’t. In fact, it’s preferable if they don’t, because then your book becomes a fantasy opinions column instead of a book.
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In many cases, it is the little things that create verisimilitude in a fantasy novel. I always think back to Redwall, my favorite fantasy series as a child, and the fact that what I remember most are the delicious cheeses and feasts. That is the primary thing I have imprinted upon, and there are likely similar details in your favorite fantasy series.
Disney movies are the same; you likely remember Belle’s rose or Cinderella’s magic slippers with greater detail than anything else. Objects, sensory experiences, and unusual contradictions make something memorable, not long lists of worldbuilding details or political screeds.
Lastly, remember that you don’t need to define everything in exhaustive detail, as I’ve said in my framework for worldbuilding. It’s okay for things to just be things because you said they were things. Let readers wonder and come to their own conclusions. By cocreating with your readers, you build far more investment than even the most comprehensive world encyclopedia could ever provide.
