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Ooh, I got a request for a thread about world building without info dumping, and this is always a fun topic, so here we go!
So, I'm a big fan of what I think of as immersive world building. Plunge your readers into your world without a ton of explaining up front.
So, I'm a big fan of what I think of as immersive world building. Plunge your readers into your world without a ton of explaining up front.
If you ground your readers in what your world is like with sensory details and relatable characters/situations right up front, they have stable ground to stand on and don't necessarily need to understand everything about this new world they find themselves in yet.
We SFF writers have access to this whole new source of tension—the "I want to understand this world and its mysteries" tension that can unfold so deliciously in good SFF! Use that! Build your readers' curiosity and hunger to know more.
A couple of books that leap to mind that do this kind of immersive world building beautifully are THE FIFTH SEASON and GIDEON THE NINTH. In very different ways, both plunge you into a world that you're feeling and seeing before you truly understand it. Stuff gets explained later.
But the world is REAL to you immediately. One of the strongest ways to establish this is to show your characters confidently inhabiting their world in a way that shows you that THEY know it, at least...they have habits and rituals, muscle memory for this world.
Give us the world through the lens of your POV character and you strengthen both, building character & world at the same time. Murderbot is another great example of this. Up front we don't fully understand even what it is, but we sure understand what annoys it about its job.
There will come a time when you do have to come out and explain stuff, of course. Sometimes the hardest part is knowing when!
Some tips and things to keep in mind:
Some tips and things to keep in mind:
Consider when your readers need to know worldbuilding information. Make sure they have it by the time they need it. If they don't need it for a while, you don't need to dump it right up front; find a good moment to smoothly insert it.
Avoid overloading your readers with too many names and terms up front (or in any one section, but it's most likely to happen at the beginning). We can only process so many new names and concepts at a time. Keep to the minimum and introduce more characters & ideas as you go.
Trust readers' intelligence. Often they can figure out what a thing is from context without you needing to explain it with exposition. (For instance, in THE FIFTH ELEMENT, my go-to movie example of immersive worldbuilding, they never explain what a Multipass is, but you know.)
When you do have to just flat-out explain something in exposition, consider how to deliver that information. If readers are STARVING for this info by now with desperate curiosity, you can get away with bigger chunks at once. Otherwise you may need to trickle it out.
Dialogue is a great way to deliver worldbuilding info, but only when it's natural for a character to be talking about this stuff. You need someone who HAS the knowledge & someone who NEEDS the knowledge. Avoid "As you know, Bob," situations.
Even then, it's more interesting if there's something at stake in the conversation. Maybe A is trying to hide that they don't know this stuff & teasing info out of B. Or A has a deeply vested personal interest (the flesh-eating alien parasite being described is ON THEIR EYEBALL).
Snippets of atmospheric lore can be fun. (Or atmospheric WARNING signs! Whatever fits your genre & world.) Anything you can work in naturally.
You can also use little bits of internal monologue, especially when your character would genuinely have thoughts on what's going on—like if something unusual is happening, they might compare it to how things usually go. Or if there's something they don't want to say aloud.
Always, the key is to keep it in character and in world, to make it flow naturally and enhance the reader's immersion rather than breaking it.
Remember too that this is something you can clean up in edits!
If it works best for your process to just vomit exposition onto the page in drafting and then work it in more smoothly in edits, that's fine.
If it works best for your process to just vomit exposition onto the page in drafting and then work it in more smoothly in edits, that's fine.
I often like to write with minimal explanation in my drafts...Try to get away with doing as much worldbuilding by inference as possible, erring on the side of NOT explaining. Adding more later is easier for me (and I can ask beta readers to point to where they're confused).
Got pulled off into something else, but I just wanted to add that there are of course other ways to get your worldbuilding across besides this immersive way! Do what works for you & for your story, always. And happy worldbuilding!!!
