I’m a planner when it comes to writing, through and through. I can’t just start a story without first having a concrete idea of where it’s set, who the characters are and what their goals are. I know not all people are that into planning! However, I’d like to have a little talk about why some degree of worldbuilding is important for writing a good story.
Now, I go nuts with planning. I draw maps, come up with complicated geopolitical relationships and histories for the regions and such and then go into depth thinking about how the characters will interact with these elements over the course of the story. However, I wouldn’t expect everyone to do this or even anywhere close to it! I’d just like to go over a baseline!
Having a very basic map of the area your story takes place is immediately incredibly helpful! You get a very solid sense of where characters are and how they can physically interact with the world around them. However, even more, important is coming up with an incredibly basic overview of where your story is set. The history, or even just the kind of people who inhabit that area. It makes your story feel more alive!
So what do you think? Is there an element of worldbuilding you aren’t sure of? Let’s discuss!
I like the idea of creating maps for the area where our story takes place. I haven’t done anything like this yet, but I might start soon… do you use a particular website for this, or do you actually draw the maps?
World building is extremely important! I honestly could do a lot better with world building when I write a story, but for my RPs, I try my best to plan a lot with the world building.
For any roleplay, the world building the creator does is probably almost as important as the plot itself, and even more important than the characters themselves. If there isn’t enough world building, then the whole rp will seem flat, dull, and like it wasn’t planned well. Even a passable level of world building is nothing compared to fully thinking things through and planning what the world is like within the rp.
Maps definitely come in hand for having the RPers know what they are working with location-wise, although I’ve only ever personally made a map for one RP and the map wasn’t great. Any history that can be decided for the background of an RP is incredibly helpful and makes the rp even better.
I won the S.L.A.M. competition in my school last year, so I got to go to this question panel with a bunch of awesome authors. One of the questions I asked was about worldbuilding, and they said one of the most important parts was to make it feel real and to mirror aspects from real life. Like, if you’re setting your story in the future/past/other dimension, what would certain places look like? Would McDonalds be an old-timey tavern, or an intergalactic pit-stop with spacey food?
I personally like to map everything out, but not to this extent. If I plan too much, I get very bored and sick of the idea, and end up with an unfinished story… but props to you for going through all that work!
World building is something I wish I could see more of in general, I love having a whole world to explore as opposed to just like a small corner that contains a story. Building a world also gives opportunities for more stories.
I kind of just try to build the world while I write (very bad at it) but being a pantser I don’t like planning things out. So I’ll just have to see how it goes with that lol.
If I plan too much, I get very bored and sick of the idea, and end up with an unfinished story… 
but props to you for going through all that work!