My 7 Pillars of World Building

How much lore does a story really need?

When I was in the early stages of preproduction on Tales from the Triverse I ran into a problem. The serial is structured as crime fiction, with each storyline focusing on an investigation by the detectives. Sensible crime fiction writers set their novels in the real world, so that they can borrow from reality for their world building.

A realist crime novel set in 2025 gets to inherit all of the audience’s assumptions. Physics, weather, laws, common cultural references, politics. The reader automatically knows how everything works, and the writer can build upon that solid foundation. They can push their story further from reality, of course, nudging into noir or pulp territory — there’s a ton of creative latitude even when your story is set in the ‘real world’. It’s still fiction, after all.

As I started to figure out Tales from the Triverse, I realised that I’d blundered into a much more complicated scenario. The serial mixes in science fiction and fantasy, being set across three distinct realities: the far future, a high fantasy world, and an alternate 1970s London where the bulk of the procedural cop drama takes place. There is magic. There are spaceships and robots. The interplay and cultural collision between the three universes drives much of the narrative.

Whodunnit?

I enjoy world building, but in previous projects it had been part of the writing process. I would build out the world as I went, other than a handful of fundamentals. The stories did not require every detail to be worked out in advance, because they were not operating within the crime fiction genre.

Making it up as I went wasn’t an option with Triverse, I realised. I couldn’t have detectives investigating crimes if the parameters of the universes hadn’t been established. That would be unfair to the readers, and would result in far too much hand-wavey, make-it-up-as-I-go plot developments.

When we read an Agatha Christie novel, part of the fun is trying to solve the crime before Poirot. It’s a puzzle as much as it is a story, and a puzzle is only solvable if you know the rules and have all (or most) of the pieces. If the creator of the puzzle can, on a whim, fundamentally change how the pieces go together, it stops being fun and instead feels frustrating. Like the writer is cheating.

I needed to define the three universes in the triverse, so that the rules were set and the puzzle pieces were clear. That would enable the detectives to investigate crimes and take the reader along for the ride.

The problem is that world building can be infinite, and I wanted to get on with actually writing the book. That required figuring out how much world building was required to set the rules, but without dragging me down rabbit holes that could take months from which to escape.

The 7 Pillars

I ended up with a minimum viable product approach to the thing: how much world building was needed for this thing to work?

Look into my Scrivener project and there are folders for each of the triverse settings:

Inside of each folder are seven documents:

• Technology

• Economy

• Religion

• Geography

• Culture & society

• Politics

• Language

My reasoning was that if I had a grounding in each of these seven topics, I would know enough about the world to write stories.

A lot of these are gross simplifications, of course, borrowing somewhat from Star Trek and Star Wars: realistically, you can’t summarise an entire planet’s culture. Every country, every city, every district, every street has its own idiosyncrasies — but that’s one of the necessary shortcuts I needed to take if I was ever going to actually write this thing; and, besides, I knew with Palinor (the fantasy setting) that I was only going to be visiting a relatively small geographic area.

To dig into each of those pillars in more detail:

Technology details the impact of invention on society. Is it a pre-industrial world? A primarily agrarian society, perhaps, with a population dispersed across a large land mass? Or is there advanced tech, such as factories and computers and vehicles? The level of tech has a drastic impact on how a civilisation functions at all levels. How do people communicate over distance?

In the case of my fantasy setting, ‘technology’ means ‘magic’. So while it’s a mostly pre-industrial civilisation, by Earth standards, it makes up for it with advanced magical capabilities. This is where I defined how the magic system worked, for Palinor, and how space travel works for the far-future setting.

Economy concerns itself with how society handles wealth, and business, and trade. Are we talking about villages trading with each other on a local scale? Primarily inherited wealth moving through the genes of aristocracies? Massive solar system-wide post-capitalism? This sort of thing determines how people get food on the table and a roof over their heads. Are we talking about scarcity or plenty?

Religion explores the beliefs of the people. On my fantasy world, it’s a made-up set of deities, with the quirk that the gods are real and exist physically in the world. In my alternate 1970s Britain it’s only a step removed from the real 20th century. Whereas the far future is largely secular in terms of governance and the driving factors behind society, even while legacy traditions continue quite happily in people’s lives.

Geography is about the land. My far future world is post-ecological collapse, with the Earth having been rewilded through a process called the Greening. The fantasy world is a place of extremes: barren wastelands and deserts and towering rainforests. 1970s Britain is…as you would expect. Geography isn’t just set dressing: it interacts with other elements such as technology, to determine how easy it is for people to travel and get around, and factors into the available resources.

Culture is harder to define and I found myself having to draw with broad strokes. For Triverse specifically it was about contrasts: the future Earth being highly progressive and permissive, 1970s Britain being nationalist and with a protectionist bent, and Palinor being a bohemian society disguising a foundation of slavery and exploitation. It all requires further exploration, which takes place in the stories, but the benefits here are in how the cultures inform the characters, and their responses to each other and events.

Politics does what it say on the tin. Are we talking about a 20th century-style western democracy? A communist state? Isolated feudal city states? A corporate-led technocracy? What kind of freedoms and restrictions do people have when living in these places? Even if Triverse wasn’t an overtly political tale, I’d still need to know about this stuff because it directly affects the behaviour of characters.

Language is a practical consideration, determining whether the peoples of the different settings can even understand one another. Are there multiple languages to consider, or has a dominant language emerged? Introducing language and communication barriers can open up all sorts of interesting story possibilities, but can also be a significant complication to the storytelling. There’s a reason in science fiction and fantasy that language is often skirted around; having everyone speak a single language lets you get into the meat of the story, rather than having to always figure out communications as the first move. Star Trek’s universal translator exists so that the writers didn’t have to think about this aspect.

Greater than the sum of its parts

My theory was that these seven categories would provide me with everything I needed to start writing the actual book. I could add details over time, but the foundation would be in place from the beginning. It would keep me honest during the police investigations, to the point that readers didn’t feel cheated out of the solution.

It helps maintain an internal consistency and keeps me from falling into plot holes. Restraints imposed by the world building lead to interesting creative solutions and ideas.

What I found is that while each of the world building pillars are fairly light on detail, they combine to create greater complexity. The nuance of a society comes alive in how these seven elements mix. It’s in that collision that a sense of verisimilitude arises.

It’s an approach I’ll likely take forward into future projects, and hopefully will prove useful for other writers. World building is always a balance between detail and practicality: too little and your world feels flimsy, too much and you’ll never get to the actual manuscript.

All that said, this is just my way of doing it. I’d love to hear how you approach world building, and how much you do prior to embarking on the story itself.

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Thank for reading.

The fifth and final season of Tales from the Triverse kicked off last week in dramatic fashion. I’m so excited to bring this three year serial story to a close:

Obsolescence

This week I’m down in London for a couple of days working in the office, plus I’m attending a Substack gathering Tuesday evening. Will report back on that one.

On Friday 9 May at 6pm (that’s this Friday!) I’m having a live chat with none other than

Neill Cameron

, creator of MEGA ROBO BROS and Donut Squad among many other comics. These are formative works for my 12 year old. We’ll be nattering about working on long-running serials, finishing major projects and whatever else comes to mind. 1980s Transformers comics may get a mention.

Also, I was rather chuffed with that sketch I did for today’s post:

In an ideal world, I’d do my own sketches for every single newsletter, rather than having to fall back on stock images. It’s trickier for Tales from the Triverse, because the cartoony style that I’ve been playing with this year doesn’t really suit the story.

These one-off sketches, and the development of Beardy Man (the one on the left, above) are also stepping stones towards doing my own actual comic. Once I wrap up Triverse, I’ll most likely dabble in making some of my own comics. Short, 4-5 panel skits. That would be a fun thing.

The three characters above were an exciting development for me. I’m very much a beginner at illustration and comics, and the encouraging thing here is that they feel like three distinct characters, while retaining a unified visual style. I’ve never really managed t hat before. Through costume and posture, there are mini stories emerging.

I want to be able to draw like Jamie McKelvie, but that’s not going to happen. For a long time I’ve been held back by not being able to draw realistic human figures. The bobble-headed style above is me taking a step back and trying something different, where I can have fun and be expressive, without constantly disappointing myself.

Anyway, that’s all bubbling away in the background. First I need to finish Triverse. I’ll see you back here on Friday.

Hope you all have a lovely week.