If you’re creating a new story or piece of narrative fiction, it’s important to consider the whole picture before you dive into your writing. This post will provide you with a helpful worldbuilding checklist that can get you started with this. It’s useful to consider the world that your characters will inhabit as this will help them become more fleshed-out members of your story.
Worldbuilding is one of my favourite parts of writing. It’s a chance to create a whole new world from scratch, but often it can become overwhelming to know where to start. Hopefully, the prompts I’ve included in this simple infographic will give you a starting point!
Worldbuilding Checklist
Developing an entire world from scratch can seem daunting at first. However, it’s a core component of establishing an environment for your story and its characters. Dedicating some time to high-quality worldbuilding will equip you with a better sense of place, time and context in which to place the events of your narrative.
Knowing where to begin can be hard though. So, you could use some of the prompts in this infographic to give you some ideas about conceiving a world that’s as engaging as those who live in it.
These are just a few simple starter prompts. Used correctly though, you can implement them into a worldbuilding document you’ll be able to refer back to when crafting your story.
Why does worldbuilding matter?
It might seem enough just to have a thoroughly developed set of characters, but without a fully realised world for them to operate in, they’ll quickly begin to feel stale. Worldbuilding will allow them to fully commit to and engage with their surroundings in a meaningful way. Plus, it’s actually kind of fun!
There are lots of other things to consider when building your story’s world. Treat it like a guideline that you can refer back to at different parts of your writing process. By taking the time to cover and develop as many different aspects of your world as you can, you’ll find that your writing is enriched with greater depth and realism as a result.
Don’t be afraid to think big either. Explore the geography of the world you know and adapt its features into your own worldbuilding. Learn from fantasy artwork, historical references, and the buildings of the areas you know well. All these things can provide ideas for your own fictional settings. Creating your own unique world can be the start of entire threads of narrative adventures. One well-crafted world could provide you with a wealth of new and exciting material to write about beyond the one story you have in mind.
Further resources
Hopefully, this checklist will give you a bit of a starting point! Feel free to use these additional worldbuilding ideas too, and let me know how you get on with your writing. If you’ve found this post helpful, please do share it or give it a pin on Pinterest. Let me know in the comments if you’ve got any further tips or resources for worldbuilding.
