Worldbuilding
Narratology & storytellingBuilding a coherent fictional world — geography, history, cultures, rules — and the art of revealing it without explaining it.
Example
Miéville's New Crobuzon: an entire city reassembled from dockside grime and "remade" bodies.
Worldbuilding names the design of an imaginary world in all its dimensions: geography, history, languages, religions, economy, natural or magical laws. It's the flagship discipline of fantasy and science fiction, but every novel builds a world — a Normandy village too.
The genre's law is the iceberg's: the author must know ten times more than they show, and the submerged mass is what gives the visible part its density. Successful worldbuilding reveals itself through use — an unfair tax says more than a chapter of political economy — and keeps its promise of coherence: readers forgive dragons, never broken rules.
Profiles and relationship map
Keep your world in profiles linked to one another
Create profiles for your places, peoples, objects or magic system, with your own categories and fields. Link them to one another and read the network on a map; in a series, the same profiles serve every volume.
Free to write and to export. No credit card asked.
Put this term to work
The writing studio novelists were missing
Outline, characters, places and objects, the links between them, mind map, scene board, export: everything lives in one place. Plus an AI that knows your story, whenever you want one.
Free to write and to export. No credit card asked.