Fantasy and Sci-Fi Worldbuilding Fundamentals

The first world I ever built involved mementos. When a person died, their brain would condense into a colorful, shining orb — a memento — which someone else could absorb into their bodies to gain superhuman abilities like reading minds, having a photographic memory, or implanting false memories in others. The hand-wavium scientific explanation was that it activated certain regions of the brain, expanding the mind’s possibilities.

I never wrote this story because I spent too much time worldbuilding and not enough time writing — a familiar dilemma for many writers.

Here, I want to guide you through three core principles of fantasy and sci-fi worldbuilding you can use as the foundation of your story so you can start writing sooner rather than later. While there’s a lot of value in planning and researching your world in advance, it’s easy to wander so far into the depths of worldbuilding waters that you lose sight of the story’s shore.

These three fundamentals — the setting, the distinctive element, and the character conflict — are meant to help you focus your efforts so you don’t drown in your quest to see where the ocean ends.

As author Maria Dahvana Headley once put it:

“So much of the hard part of worldbuilding isn’t the building at all, but the pruning of the…