Ask the Bard #23: Worldbuilding vs. Story

In this week's worldbuilding advice column, Haly teases apart worldbuilding and story. PLUS! Witness Haly's brain melt, word by word, as she listens to the sound of one hand clapping.

Jan 16, 2025

Q: What is NOT worldbuilding?

Since every action of the characters in the story add to the world, isn't that world building? Isn't the whole story adding to the world?

TL;DR: Worldbuilding is everything that isn't the story. So, everything BEFORE page 1. The story doesn't become worldbuilding until after it's told.

Worldbuilding is an enormous concept, it’s an umbrella term for all of the work that you do before telling the story. It starts when your universe is created with a big bang, and it ends when all of the stars in your universe have burned to nothing. It is the entire history of everyone and everything. It is the invention and manufacturing of everything that your characters interact with, and the societies, viewpoints, and genetics that make up those characters to begin with.

Story happens when we apply the lens of narrative to a particular place and time and set of events and people within that world.

If we look at human history, that’s all worldbuilding. But if we focus in on the wild woods of southern Indiana in the 1820’s, then we can tell the story of a teenage Abraham Lincoln. The worldbuilding of that story is everything that happened before — the entire history of England, the Netherlands, France, Germany, all of the various churches and revolutions, inventions wars and important art movements, the Lincoln family’s move from Kentucky in 1816 — all of that is worldbuilding.

The story stars with a young Lincoln…probably doing something. Walking through the woods or something, and then we can follow him through school and stuff. The school’s construction was worldbuilding, his attendance is story. Incidentally, the worldbuilding of him becoming President is what makes this story interesting.

(The park will be opening in May; when we go down for the preview weekend, I’ll hit up some of the Lincoln historical sites and report back with better information, if anyone’s interested.)

Buy me a coffee on Ko-fi!

Q: Which is more important, the beginning or the end of a story?

TL;DR: Which is more important, your heart or your lungs?

A story is a beginning, a middle, and an end that is different from the beginning because of the middle. That’s what makes a story.

What I love about this community of magnificent Moonbeams is that y’all really make me think. I’m trying to wrap my head around what even would be a story without a beginning. I know of stories with poor beginnings, weak beginnings, irrelevant beginnings.

“The Story with No Beginning” sounds like an excellent MacGuffin for a wildly imaginative fantasy story. It smacks with Neverending Story nostalgia.

The same with a story’s end. Again, that’s what makes it a story. The beginning and the end are what make a story a story, and not just worldbuilding.

(Can y’all tell that

D.W Dixon

asked this question just to see what sorts of interesting things pour out of me when he pokes me with an impossible stick? Fortunately, Schroedinger’s Cat lives rent-free in my fucking head. Buckle-up, nerds, it’s about to get WwWeEeIiIrRrDdD!)

Except that stories don’t actually end we just choose a place to stop relating the events. The events themselves keep going.

If we go back to the Lincoln example from earlier, the story we were telling was about his time as a teen in Indiana. But when that portion of his life ends, the story ends. But his life didn’t end with the story, it just went into a different story.

But at the same time, it also carried on countless other stories…because it would be only the turning of a chapter in the story of his life, or even just his life before becoming President of the United States.

Alright, and there we have a good point to this…remember this with your worldbuilding and your storytelling: There is an entire world happening around the events that your characters are experiencing. It’s possible for your lovers to break up and an earthquake to strike the city your main is in, all while your main’s dad is getting remarried and has become a total groomzilla, and all at New Year’s.

There is always tragedy in the world. There is always celebration in the world. Right now there are people being born, growing up, having sex, slipping into death. Car accidents are happening right now. People are getting married right now.

Every minute. Of every day. Everyone is living their life. And it’s the same in your world. Find ways to show that, and I promise that your stories will be better for it.