You Don't Need to Know EVERYTHING: Worldbuilding's Biggest Myth SHATTERED

Haly's taking on the biggest misconception about worldbuilding and dishing out tips to help you overcome your fear of not knowing everything about your world so you can start worldbuilding today!

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Now that I’m getting back into my usual writing habit, I am making space on Wednesdays to focus on worldbuilding education.

“Wait, Haly!! Is this…is this a return to Worldbuilding Wednesday?!” Yes, D.W. I hear you fluttering with anticipation. Let us say, for now, that it is me working to ensure that I don’t get so wrapped up in other projects that I forget what got me here in the first place:

My contagious fever for worldbuilding, imagination, and community.

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Worldbuilding’s Biggest Lie: You MUST Know EVERYTHING

In last week’s post discussing whether worldbuilding really matters, I touched on how it can become a crutch for procrastination. The thing is, so can everything else in the world. From laundry to community engagement to compulsively checking pages read and subscriber count.

The good news is, I’ve got a lot of experience combating Worldbuilder’s Disease, and there’s one sure-fire cure to keep YOU from getting lost in the fascinating and unique place known as Your Creative Imagination!

Photo by Ákom Károly Áron on Unsplash

Ignorance Isn’t Just Bliss, it’s Best!

The root of the word ‘ignorance’ is ‘ignore,’ and we’re going to be leaning into that with our whole weight for the rest of this article.

You have to learn to ignore the siren-song of knowing everything, even about your world. Especially about your own world! While it’s true that you need to know everything about your story—its characters, setting, pacing, tone, etc.—that pressure should not transfer into your worldbuilding.

You only need to know what you need to know.

As my friend and cohort

Thaddeus Thomas

likes to say:

“What do people in your world do with their expelled feces?” I know exactly what they do. They throw it at questions like that.

Literary Salon #5

It’s a joke that never gets old for a number of reasons, but mostly because there’s a lot of truth in the sentiment. The amount of shit you do not need to know about your world—however big or small it may be—vastly and overwhelmingly outweighs what you do need to know by immeasurable orders of magnitude.

You don’t even know everything about the world you live in, how you gonna know everything about a made-up place?!

Let go of the Unimportant, Keep the Mundane

Worldbuilding is about creating the details that support your story. It includes character and setting, sure, but it’s also what provides conflict, tension, drama, and stakes. Because—like it or not—everything is connected. Good worldbuilding is focusing on the strongest nodes, not every individual thread.

• Let go of geography: if your character lives in a landlocked location, then they probably don’t need to know when the next high tide is, which means you don’t need to worry about it either. Consider what’s closest to your characters and spotlight a few things that make the geography unique like a natural formation on the horizon and a landmark in the town.

• Let go of culture: these details are often the most fun, most fascinating, and most time-consuming in all your worldbuilding. (The only thing that comes close is magic/tech, which is a direct product of culture.) Focus on what’s important: how someone goes about their day, and the cultural moments in their life.¹

• Let go of magic/tech: another huge time sink, and the source of many arguments over hard vs. soft science/magic. (Almost as many as come up over plotting vs. pantsing, and as wholly irrelevant: sit the fuck down and write. 👙) Most of us don’t know how electricity actually works², so even the magic-users in your world probably don’t understand the actual nuts-and-bolts of magic.

• Let go of history: there is simply no need to know every detail of everything that happened from the big bang inside your brain that sparked the universe in which your world resides, to the final disintegration of that universe in the consumption of all things at the end of time. Again, you don’t know that about the real world, why would you know it about a fake one?! Pick three big events from history: one local, one recent, and one distant.³

Keep What’s Vital

There’s no secret to perfect worldbuilding except to say…it’s about what serves the story plus a little cherry on top for flavor. Some of the examples I made might be critical to your piece. After all, Thaddeus did need to know how feces was evacuated for a story he wrote—thanks for sharing! 🤣😁

The point here is that avoiding Worldbuildier’s Disease—being drawn into an endless pit of worldbuilding from which there seems no escape—comes down to focusing only on what’s necessary to make your story uniquely yours!

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I have openings in my August schedule for worldbuilding consultations. DM me (Substack & Discord).

1. What do I mean? As an example, for decades in the United States it was the cultural norm to begin kindergarten at about age 5 or 6, graduate at about 17 or 18, possibly go to college or trade school, get a job, get married, retire after 30 years with a watch, and take up a hobby you can teach to your grandkids.

For the daily… We get up, have breakfast, go to work or school, come home, have dinner, clean ourselves, and go to bed. Certainly it doesn’t describe every one on every day in every circumstance, but it’s enough for a general idea of how most people behave on most days.

2. I do, but only because I’m the daughter of an electrician and had fancies of being an electrical engineer when I was younger. I wanted to be a LOT of things. It’s why I’m the tits, now.

3. Example from Star Wars: deceased father (local can be personal), we recently stole plans for the Empire’s new weapon, and a long time ago there were Clone Wars.