Worldbuilding for Masochists

What makes a story -- and a world -- "cozy"? What are the conflicts, challenges, and obstacles like when, instead of taking the Ring to Mordor, you heroes are trying to keep a coffee shop afloat or open a pet shop?  Sarah Beth Durst joins us to discuss not just what cozy fantasy is, but how its radical joy can be a powerful act of subversion when the real world tells us to be cynical or defeatist....

What is the measure of a true hero? What a society consideres heroic can say a lot about their values, needs, and ethos -- but it's also something that can shift a lot over time and from location to location. Is heroism about physical strength? Strength of faith? Strength of heart? Or is it about cunning and cleverness? Guest John Wiswell  joins us to discuss the worldbuilding implications of hero...

In one way or another, economy touches almost everything in a world. Even without currency or capitalism in the sense that we currently know it, the idea of obligations and repayment exert pressure on society. So how can we make interesting worldbuilding choices when it comes to money, debt, gain, and other aspects of economy? Guest Elizabeth Bear joins us to explore the options! Where does money...

It's the start of SEASON SEVEN! And original co-host Rowenna Miller is back to join us in a reflection of how multiple years of doing this podcast has affected how each of us thinks about worldbuilding. What have we learned from our many amazing guests, and how have they inspired us to think about worldbuilding in new ways? Have our worldbuilding interests and focuses shifted? And since the real w...

It's one of the first choices you'll make when writing a story, consciously or not: what point of view are you writing from? First person singular? Third person limited? Omniscient? Something else? The POV can affect a reader's experience of the narrative and the worldbuilding, either subtly or dramatically -- so how do you decide what's right for this story?  Kate Elliott joins us to explore the...

We often think about "making things make sense" in worldbuilding and building internal consistency, scientific realism, and other logic-based considerations into our fiction -- But what happens when your worldbuilding principle is “What would be awesome?"  Jim C. Hines , who embraced this principle for a forthcoming book, joins us to explore the possibilities! The Rule of Cool, credit to, is defin...

We often think of worldbuilding happening on a grand scale, with huge maps and the sweeping narratives of nations and world-changing events. But that's not really the stuff that makes a world feel lived-in. The granular choices are what show day-to-day life, and day-to-day life illustrates so much about how a world has developed, how a culture has grown, and how people negotiate the circumstances...

How can language help shape your worldbuilding? We're not necessarily talking about conlang here -- that can certainly be part of worldbuilding, but it doesn't have to be, and many works of speculative fiction manage perfectly fine without invented languages. But the words you choose in description and dialogue will also communicate something to your reader. There are so many ways that words can c...

Sometimes, people will say of a book that "the setting is another character". But what does that really mean, and how can a writer craft it?  Ai Jiang joins us to discuss creating worlds and settings that have their own personalities! From the physical geography to the architecture, from the scale of the location to its dynamism, writers can make a lot of choices to make their setting feel unlike...

In amazing fantasy and science fiction worlds -- Who's doing the work? Where does the food come from? The clothes? Who does the caregiving? Guest  august clarke joins us to discuss the hands and bodies that create a society. Labor is something that’s often sort of invisible in stories if it’s not explicitly the driving focus of a book – So, why is that? How can authors better incorporate labor int...

Worldbuilding means getting to “play god” – so how does that take a different shape when you’re part of a pantheon rather than the One True Ruler of your world? Xen, Matt Roen, and Sara Wile, the creative trio behind Midst , a surreal sci-fi fantasy audio drama now produced by Critical Role Productions, join us to discuss co-creating a world and the stories that happen within it! When working as a...

What happens when the world your characters -- or your readers -- first find themselves in turns out to be not quite what it appears? Marina Lostetter joins us to explore the different ways that a writer can play with an unreliable world. Maybe it means a story of scientific discovery that reshapes how their characters perceive their place in the universe; maybe it means a story where information...

In honor of Valentine's Day, the season of Carnivale, and our own amusement, we bring to you this extra-long episode, where we heat things up and get a little down and dirty with our worldbuilding. What role does sex play in the world you're building -- and how do you depict that? This comes up a lot, obviously, in romantasy and other related subgenres, but even if that's not what you're writing,...

Mythological retellings have been having A Moment in fiction for a few years now. So, why do we do that? Kritika H. Rao joins us to explore the power and agency inherent in recontextualizing mythology for a modern readership! What is it that we reclaim or rediscover in retelling these stories for ourselves? And, on the other end of the scale, how can the retelling of ancient stories sometimes be w...

The world a character exists in shapes their identity on many axes of power and privilege. So how do those various scales affect the emotional stakes of the story they find themselves in? Guest Sophie Burnham joins us to discuss building a world that suits the characters you have in your head! As a writer who starts with character first, Burnham answers questions about their world after they know...

And obviously the answer is yes! But in this episode, we answer your questions! We talk about the "rules" and common advice of worldbuilding -- and the ways in which we merrily ignore, redefine, or defy them. We pull apart some techniques related to the craft of communicating worldbuilding to a reader and how to achieve balance within a story. We do some shop talk about the publishing world. And w...

How do the people in your world learn things? Lessons learned might come from formalized institutions, but knowledge might also get passed down through families, through guilds and trade organizations, or through the wisdom whispered in a character's ear by the trees. A world's literacy rate will define a lot about how information gets transmitted, preserved, or altered over time. So who controls...

In this episode, we discuss purely fictional, 100% not-at-all real, nothing to do with contemporary life ideas about rebellions and revolutions. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, or persons is coincidental. Completely. Continuing our "back to basics" series, and jumping off of a lot of the things we've discussed in the recent episodes on governments and politics, we think about what hap...

So once you've got a government, what can that government do? What does it regulate, and how is it, itself, regulated? Laws can be created for a lot of reasons, some good and some bad. Sometimes they protect a citizen's opportunity to do certain things, sometimes they present a block to those opportunities, and very often, they aren't applied equally and equitably across all of society. So when yo...

Government is a set of rules agreed upon, and politics is how a society determines those rules. So how do you create the systems by which civilizations negotiate those levers of power in your fantasy or sci-fi world? On the sliding scale of representation to authoritarianism, where do the civilizations in your world fall -- and why? What pressures have shaped society to behave in the ways that it...

As with the last two “back to basics” episodes, we thought we’d spend some time looking the thing that (usually, though there are exceptions) makes fantasy fantastical – the magic! How do we build magical systems, and what questions do we ask ourselves while doing so? Guest and former WFM co-host  Rowenna Miller joins us to discuss how, exactly, we make magic! With magic being a foundational eleme...

We’re spending a couple of episodes going back to the basics of worldbuilding, talking about the questions that it’s often fruitful to ask oneself when you’re doing this wild thing. Last time we did the physical world, so now it’s time for the world of people! What are the building blocks of a human life? (Or an alien one, or draconic, or elven, or whatever you've got?) From the most intimate rela...

Every once in a while, it's good to go back to the basics. And for us, that means the basics of worldbuilding! When you're getting started out with a new project, building a world from the ground up, there are a lot of things you can take into consideration! This episode is not so much about finding the answers as figuring out how to ask the questions and what kinds of questions you want to ask. H...

A villain may not have excuses for their behavior -- but they probably have reasons. How can worldbuilding feed those reasons? Antagonists are often those characters who are both the most willing and the most able to seize control of power structures and take advantage of their privileges. So what pressures in your world have created those structures, and how does your Big Bad maniuplate them? Gue...

We were all in the same room! And that room was in Scotland! In this episode, your WFM co-hosts were able to record a special episode at WorldCon . We chat about ourselves, our works, the Traveling Light anthology, and our favorite components of a world to build. And then, we take some audience questions! (We apologize that some of them are a little hard to hear; they had a mic, but it seems it wa...