Introduction

This week, we’re going to talk about weaving world-building into the story through your character’s eyes. There are multiple ways to go about weaving your world into the story, but one of the best ways is through your character. So let’s talk about how.

dISCOVERIES

The first way you can go about weaving your world into the story is to allow your readers to discovery it alongside your characters. When you have characters who haven’t experienced the world before, it’s a lot more acceptable to show more of the world in a way that’s overt instead of hidden in the lines between the action. Characters’ confusion over things in their world suddenly make sense because they don’t know anything about what’s around them to begin with.

Interactions

What if you don’t have a character who’s new to the world just like the reader is? You can still world-build and weave that building into the story. One great method for this is to develop the reader’s understanding of the world via interactions between your world and your character.

This method strongly goes back to the idea that your world is its own character with its own personality. No one person or world will interact the same way with each other. This method requires you to know a few things. You need to know your character, know your world, and know how your character views the world. These three determine how your character and your world will interact together.

Interactions can happen a lot of ways. It can happen through the character’s meeting with various creatures in the world. Or, maybe your character is a healer and spends much of their time gathering plants and supplies from nature. They might be an adventurer who has to brave the elements and the difficulties of terrain to reach their goal. Really, the possibilities are endless and allow you plenty of room to show the world to your reader. But the key with this method is that you should treat it the same way you treat an interaction between two characters. You won’t info dump on the reader because an interaction between two characters only reveals bits and pieces of both individuals, not everything. Instead, you’ll reveal only what is relevant to the interaction/scene and the story as a whole. Reveal what needs to be revealed then and no more.

The one difference between this method and an interaction between characters is that you may reveal things about the world that aren’t necessarily serving a specific purpose to the plot. At times, you may choose to reveal things about the world in interactions simply to make the world itself feel richer and more alive or even to reveal something about the person interacting with the world.

Happenings

The final main method for weaving world-building in has more to do with sentence-level inclusions and events. These may not be interactions with your main characters specifically, but they typically affect the character in some way or another. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be seeing it as the readers since you can’t show us what your viewpoint characters don’t see unless you’re using omniscient POV.

With this method, your world-building will be less obvious. It might be a common phrase that’s used by the inhabitants of the world or a common creature that is seen all over the place. It might be some sort of distant report of a creature terrorizing villages on the outskirts of a kingdom. Maybe it’s a brief mention of terrain in an area a character is occupying. One way or another, this world-building method usually doesn’t involve intrusive or overt mentions of the world. This is more subtle and is like the spice added to a dish. It makes everything read better, but your reader won’t notice the individual additions: only the whole of the writing’s flavor.

Conclusion

This type of world-building is more complex than what we often think of as world-building, but it’s also vastly more effective than what we usually see in most writing these days. It takes practice and instinct to do this well, but the instincts surrounding what type of weaving to use and how can be developed the more you write using the methods I’ve given here and in the previous post on this topic.