1. A Guide for Successful World-Building in Fiction — Sarah Frances Hicks (Writing Cooperative)
A practical, encouraging guide framing world-building as something every novel does, not just fantasy/sci-fi — even a story set in “Kansas City, Nebraska” needs a distinct world. Argues writers should feel free to spend as much space as the story needs (citing Tolstoy’s lengthy economic digressions in Anna Karenina).
- Worth digging into: her claim that world-building means “your world is distinct from the world you live in” even in realistic settings — a useful reframe for non-fantasy writers.
- The Wole Soyinka and Richard Powers (The Overstory) examples, if you want to see world-as-allegory done well.
2. Building a Fictional World: A Novelist’s Guide — Michelle Barker (Darling Axe)
Strong, well-argued piece. Central thesis: “the world is merely the backdrop… it will want to be the story… but you can’t let it.” Covers world-building questionnaires (with links to detailed sub-guides on geography, government, economy, etc.), warns against the “rabbit hole” of over-planning turning into procrastination, and gives a great craft example of how GRRM introduces direwolves in A Game of Thrones by anchoring them to things Bran already knows (ponies, dogs) rather than infodumping.
- Worth investigating: the linked questionnaire series (Geography, Government, Economy, Religion, History, Language, Technology/Magic) if you want structured worldbuilding prompts for D&D or fiction.
- The “circus mirror” framing — fantasy as a distorted mirror of real human vices — paired with the Ursula K. Le Guin quote about fantasy as “the language of the night.”
3. Balancing Story and Worldbuilding at Any Writing Stage — E.S. Foster (Ryan Lanz blog)
Lighter, more personal/anecdotal piece about a writer who over-focused on plot revisions and neglected world consistency (confused beta readers as a result). Offers a simple diagnostic: “assess which area you’re neglecting” and shift accordingly, then just write things down as you go.
- Less analytically rich than others — worth skimming rather than deep investigation, but the beta-reader confusion anecdote is a good practical warning sign to watch for in your own drafts.
4. Worldbuilding: A Guide for Creating an Immersive World — Jerry B. Jenkins
The most exhaustive, structured guide of the bunch — a full step-by-step system (Plan → Describe → Populate → History → Culture → Power/Magic) with dozens of prompting questions under each. Distinguishes “Real-World Fantasy” (history altered, e.g. The Man in the High Castle) from “Second-World Fantasy” (fully invented, e.g. Middle-earth) and combinations (Harry Potter, Narnia).
- Worth investigating: the “Keep Your World Grounded” section on consistency and “willing suspension of disbelief” — practical rules-consistency advice.
- The real-life-inspiration examples (Tolkien and Beowulf, GRRM and the Wars of the Roses) are good research leads if you want inspiration sources for your own fantasy world.
5. Five Common World-Building Mistakes and How to Correct Them — Naomi Jackson (Kingdom Pen)
Five specific, well-illustrated pitfalls: (1) cultures that never interact (“everyone in their place”), (2) “Tolkien Syndrome” — overusing invented languages, (3) morally flawless races/characters, (4) unrealistic static time frames for long-lived civilizations, (5) magic without consistent rules.
- Worth investigating: her magic-system rule-of-thumb (institute even 5 firm rules and never break them) and the “average empire lasts 250 years” data point — useful for calibrating D&D campaign history timelines.
6. Worldbuilding as a Creative Writing Pitfall — Laura Kelly (Readable)
Centers on Brandon Sanderson’s term “Worldbuilder’s Disease” — creative paralysis from excessive planning that never becomes a written story. Introduces the “Iceberg Technique” (most world detail stays implicit; only story-relevant elements surface) and suggests character-first, needs-driven world detail (“a character’s profession dictates the tool/location, which then requires worldbuilding”) as an antidote.
- Worth investigating: the direct Sanderson quote on strategic vs. exhaustive worldbuilding — good source-of-truth citation if you want to reference this concept precisely (link to Sanderson’s own lecture is embedded in the article).
7. In Defense of Worldbuilding — Emily Temple (Literary Hub, 2017)
A rebuttal essay responding to Lincoln Michel’s Electric Literature piece calling worldbuilding “the most overrated and overused concept in fiction.” Temple argues for a wide definition of worldbuilding — internal logic, mood, and context, not just “goblin baby wipes” levels of exhaustive detail — and pushes back on Michel’s proposed replacement term “worldconjuring.”
- Worth investigating: this is the most theoretically substantive piece here — a genuine critical debate about what “worldbuilding” even means as a term. If you want the other side, tracking down Lincoln Michel’s original Electric Literature essay would complete the argument.
- The Stephen King quote about not insulting “your reader’s interior vision” is a sharp companion idea to the Sanderson material above.
8. Is Worldbuilding Pointless? — Martin-TT (Gnome Stew, 2007)
Short original post (quoting novelist M. John Harrison’s harsh claim that “worldbuilding is dull… the great clomping foot of nerdism”) plus an unusually long, lively comment thread (20 replies) from tabletop GMs debating the value of deep setting prep vs. player-facing usefulness.
- Worth investigating for your D&D work specifically: the comments are genuinely more useful than the post itself — look at Alan De Smet’s comment (world-build more than players will ever see, but don’t force-feed it to them) and the “sandbox vs. model railroad” framing from Sarlax, both directly relevant to campaign prep philosophy.
Overall pattern across all eight: almost every piece converges on the same core tension — build enough of a world to sustain internal consistency and authorial confidence, but don’t let it become procrastination (Sanderson’s “Worldbuilder’s Disease”) or crowd out plot and character.
Round 1: Michel’s opening argument (“Against Worldbuilding,” Electric Literature, April 2017)
Michel’s core complaint isn’t with fantasy or sci-fi themselves, but with “worldbuilding” as a critical standard applied to all fiction. He traces the term’s spread from a niche fantasy concept into university literature classes and video game reviews alike, and argues that in its common usage — citing Chuck Wendig’s definition covering money, customs, imports, exports, and so on — a perfectly executed work of worldbuilding would leave no gaps for the reader to fill in, with everything worked out at least in the author’s mind. electricliteratureelectricliterature
His proposed alternative is “worldconjuring” — evoking a world through resonant detail and letting the reader fill gaps, rather than exhaustively justifying it. His clearest formulation: worldbuilding imposes, while worldconjuring collaborates with the reader. He illustrates with Kafka: worldbuilding would be a thirty-page account of alien beetle customs, worldconjuring is Gregor Samsa simply becoming a beetle in the first sentence. electricliteratureelectricliterature
Two other threads run through the essay:
- “Bad worldbuilding” is often just bad writing wearing a costume. He argues flat cultures or shallow motivation aren’t really worldbuilding failures — a contemporary realist novel with the same flaws would just be called badly written.
- A political/formal critique: he notes it’s not a coincidence that the writers celebrated as skilled “worldbuilders” tend to be white and Western, while comparable imaginative work from other cultures gets filed under “magical realism” instead — suggesting the term smuggles in a narrow idea of what “realism” is allowed to look like. electricliterature
He closes by arguing that fans who chase “plot holes” (why didn’t the eagles just fly Frodo to Mordor?) are really symptoms of readers trained to expect a story to resolve into an internally airtight system, rather than accepting a work on its own terms — pointing to Kobo Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes as a book that only works because nobody asks how the sand village could survive.
Round 2: Temple’s rebuttal (“In Defense of Worldbuilding,” LitHub, April 2017)
Temple concedes almost everything except the definitional question. Her real disagreement is that Michel’s narrow definition (exhaustive, encyclopedic detail) isn’t actually how most people — including the “wide” guides Michel links to — use the term. Her working definition is much broader: worldbuilding is the existence of an internal logic, mood, or set of descriptions that gives a work a sense of context, which may or may not be spatial or historical. Under that definition, she argues, even a book Michel cites as ruined by worldbuilding (Abe’s Woman in the Dunes) is actually a good example of it — just a minimal, complete one built around monotony rather than richness. lithub
She also pushes on his “realism” critique: since no one experiences the same reality, and a story read as straightforward realism by one person might read as fantastical to another, she thinks realist fiction does its own worldbuilding whether writers admit it or not. And she closes by folding “worldconjuring” back into “worldbuilding” — to her, they’re the same activity, just different tools for building the same kind of castle. lithublithub
Round 3: Michel’s follow-up (“More Thoughts about Worldbuilding and Food,” Electric Literature, May 2017)
This is where the exchange gets sharpest, and where Michel brings in outside allies. Key moves:
- He directly rejects Temple’s “wide” definition as unfalsifiable. His argument: if mood, voice, character, and plot are all worldbuilding, the term stops doing any work — you couldn’t say a story needed “more worldbuilding” without it meaning almost anything.
- He recruits two outside quotes that became touchstones for the “anti” camp. Novelist M. John Harrison, on worldbuilding: it is dull, it literalizes the urge to invent, and above all it is the “great clomping foot of nerdism”. And William Gibson, describing game designers trying to adapt Neuromancer and asking where the food supply came from — Gibson’s reply was that he didn’t know, it was “a lot of krill and shit,” and that hyper-detailed consistency was beside the point of what he was doing. electricliteratureelectricliterature
- He gives his most concrete craft argument: excessive worldbuilding paradoxically breaks immersion for him, because it’s usually delivered through unrealistic “as you know” exposition between characters, and the more detail a work provides, the more surface area it gives readers to find contradictions — which is why he thinks Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings attract so much nitpicking, while a stranger, less-explained book like King’s The Gunslinger mostly doesn’t.
- He clarifies (importantly) that this isn’t an anti-genre argument. He’s explicit that he loves SF/F and teaches Le Guin and Vonnegut — his target is the expectation of realism-as-craft-standard, not fantasy or invented settings themselves.
Where the two sides actually diverge — and where they don’t
The genuine disagreement is narrower than “worldbuilding good vs. bad”: both writers agree that thin cultures, inconsistent logic, and info-dumping are real craft problems. What they disagree on is whether “worldbuilding” is a useful name for that problem, and how much weight internal consistency should carry as a reading standard. Michel wants a narrow, technical definition so the term stays diagnostically useful (you can say a specific work has too much or too little of it). Temple wants an expansive definition because she finds internal logic and atmosphere present in books that don’t fit the “second-world fantasy” mold at all — and thinks refusing to call that worldbuilding just cedes a good conceptual tool to a narrower genre reading.
If you want one more thread to pull, Michel’s essay also links to Charlie Jane Anders’ “7 Deadly Sins of Worldbuilding” (originally io9/Gizmodo) as the pro-worldbuilding craft piece he mostly agrees with in substance while disputing the framing — that’d be the natural next stop if you want the “best practices” camp’s own account of what goes wrong, rather than the meta-argument about whether the term itself is useful.
I lean toward Michel, but not all the way, and for a slightly different reason than either of them argues.
I think Temple’s “wide” definition is correct as a description of what’s actually happening in good fiction — every story does have to establish internal logic and atmosphere, realist or not. But I think Michel’s underlying instinct is right anyway: a definition that broad stops being useful as craft guidance. If “worldbuilding” means everything from Kafka’s opening sentence to a fifty-page appendix on Numenorean bloodlines, the word can’t tell a writer what to do more or less of. Temple wins the definitional argument and loses the practical one.
Where I actually agree with Michel most is his point about exposition and surface area for nitpicking. That’s the sharpest, most falsifiable claim either of them makes, and I think it’s demonstrably true: the more a text explains its own machinery, the more seams it exposes. Readers don’t ask how the eagles-and-Mordor thing works because Tolkien is bad at worldbuilding — they ask because Tolkien did enough worldbuilding to make the question answerable in the story’s own terms, which invites readers to check the arithmetic. A book that never shows its arithmetic (his Gunslinger example, or Abe’s sand village) doesn’t get audited that way, not because it’s more skillfully “built” but because it never opened the ledger.
The place I think Michel overreaches is the political/formal claim — that “worldbuilding” as a compliment is reserved for white Western writers while comparable work elsewhere gets called “magical realism.” That’s an interesting observation about critical vocabulary, but I don’t think it does the work he wants it to do for his central argument. You could accept his whole “worldconjuring vs. worldbuilding” distinction without it having anything to do with who gets which label — Kafka is Czech and Abe is Japanese, and both are his own worldconjuring examples. It reads like a second essay grafted onto the first.
And I think both of them underrate genre-dependence. For a novel, I’m fully on the “worldconjuring, mood over mechanism” side — Gibson’s krill-and-shit answer is the right instinct for prose. But that instinct doesn’t transfer cleanly to a tabletop campaign, which is a different kind of artifact: players will actually go check the ledger, wander off the plotted path, and ask “so what do the eagles do all day.” A GM’s world has to hold up under a kind of adversarial, exploratory use that a novel’s readers never subject it to. So the amount of explicit, consistent machinery that’s a liability in a novel is closer to a requirement in a campaign.