I have a confession: I never read the Wheel of Time series. Rather, I started reading it a long time ago and lost interest almost immediately. More recently, I tried the TV series and couldn’t even finish the first episode. Why? I think it’s the world building.

What I Didn’t Like

I won’t belabor the obvious; Wheel of Time is a long-running, much-beloved fantasy series with incredibly rich and detailed lore. I’m not saying it’s bad. If nothing else, it’s clearly very successful as a franchise, which would be difficult to pull off without a lot of people liking it. It must be doing something right.

All I’m saying is it’s not my cup of tea. The world and its history are presented through confusing, long-winded exposition right out of the gate. I feel like I’m reading a text book and, if I don’t make note of all those people, places, and dates, I may fail the quiz at the end. The characters, meanwhile, seem to take a back seat. There’s something to be said for telling the story of a world through the lens of its characters (see the Gold Standard below), but the characters of Wheel of Time felt like an afterthought to me. Maybe this is corrected later on, but it set a tone that made me put the series down twice.

How I Try to Do It

I’m still a novice at this, but I tend to think the world should be built around the characters. The world of True Calling isn’t something I painstakingly crafted through pages of notes; it’s a backdrop for the story of the characters who live there. I add new details as I need them and try to let the world set the stage without getting in the way, leaving loose threads to pick up and weave together later. For example, the war alluded to in Original Enchantment is fleshed out in more detail in Relic Tamer. It was as detailed as it needed to be in the first book, then I added more detail for the second. This allows the world to grow organically to suit the needs of the story.

The Gold Standard

I’ll be the first to admit mine isn’t an ideal approach. There’s a subtle art to good world building that requires a great deal more preparation and diligence.

Take George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, for example (the books, not the TV series on HBO). Martin tells the story of his world through the eyes of his characters, offering different perspectives on the same events as he weaves together a dozen different stories. Sometimes you get interesting new places and cultures. Other times you get different sides of the same conflict, or different social strata in the same city. In every case, the individual character’s story is still at the forefront, but all of those stories taken together tell the larger tale of the world as a whole.

Or take my personal favorite, Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles. Due to the story-within-a-story perspective, Kvoth’s ascendance into a legend is counterpointed by the constant reminder of his eventual fall from grace. Woven throughout this are small details: Idiomatic expressions, rumors, songs, coinage conversions, you name it. Rothfuss tells the story of his world by not telling it, by simply allowing those details to exist as his character lives there. He rarely offers much explanation for these details until later in the story when they already feel familiar, allowing you to learn about his world through context the same way you often learn about the real world.

What’s the common trend between the two? I think the keys are subtlety and perspective. Good world building isn’t a Wikipedia article offering every detail about your world. It’s not a list of facts beaten over your reader’s head like a cudgel. Good world building is a process of discovery, an organic experience told through the eyes of your character and fed to the reader gradually.

Maybe one day I’ll reach Martin and Rothfuss’s skill in world building. Then again, maybe there’s a correlation between too much world building and never finishing your series. 😉