How Worldbuilding Can Help You Brainstorm

Hey there, fellow nerds! Today's post is on how worldbuilding seriously helped me with my writing--and how it can help you, as well.

For those of you who don't know, worldbuilding is, well, the art of building a world. . . usually in the form of words, not literally with bricks, stone, wood, etc. :D As writers, we typically have to experiment with it a bit, whether we realize it or not. Every good story has a good world to go along with it, in my opinion, but it doesn't really have to be stressful to deal with.

Some people just don't like worldbuilding (can't relate), while others love it and spend many hours obsessing over the tiniest details about their story's world (that's me). No matter what approach you take, worldbuilding is completely necessary. . .

But I'll let you in on a secret:

You can actually worldbuild before you even have a story to go along with your world.

In fact, that's exactly what I did with my most recent work in progress, a novel called Euphoria. After realizing that I was outgrowing the series I had been working on, I wanted to come up with some grand new idea, to really just write something I could be proud of. But no ideas would come to me, even though I would just sit and brainstorm. A lot of my confidence as a writer began to dwindle away, and it was incredibly frustrating to be so passionate about writing but not to have any ideas I could work with. I just needed to write something.

I guess after awhile I just stopped searching and took a bit of a break. I can't be away from writing for long, so I started building a world, although I didn't know how or if I would ever use it in a story. The first part of that world I designed was a rainy city called Trellavinia, flourishing on a great cliff overlooking the sea. People considered the rain a blessing and walked the rainy streets with their faces turned to the sky, thanking the rain goddess. It was a dark and stormy place (rarely did the sun shine, but here this was appreciated), so neon city lights lined the streets and lit the way.

I kind of fell in love with that little city and kept going. After that I designed the civilians, the laws, the traditions, the culture. . .

And it didn't stop with just one city. The ideas kept on coming for more cities, deities, and even history! While I didn't have a plan for any of this yet, I spent a lot of time designing that world and kind of expanding on the details.

I ended up deciding that the deities would be false, and that there would be strict laws centered around them. And then the history just started to flow, connecting each city. I don't remember how long it took, but eventually the idea for a good, strong story began to take shape, and although it had to undergo a lot of changes, it was a keeper! I've become very proud of it and I'm about 25,000 words or so in.

So yes, I'm confident that worldbuilding can help with your writing. It has certainly helped with mine; having the majority of the general laws, beliefs, and ideas at hand helped me to really focus on the writing process.

Now, I'm not saying that building an elaborate little world is the solution to a lack of ideas, but I think that worldbuilding flexes those muscles we use for writing and can help us to improve, even when we're not working on an idea! It's definitely worth a try if your source of ideas is running dry, if you don't know what to write, or if you just want to work on your worldbuilding skills. (And hey, if you ever want an example of excellent worldbuilding, you can always give the legendary J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy a read.)

Good luck to you all in your worldbuilding endeavors, and I hope that this post has been helpful in some way. Thank you very much for stopping by. :)