Why Your Contemporary Fiction Needs Worldbuilding Too

If you’re like most writers, worldbuilding feels like the province of sci-fi and fantasy authors alone. Sure, it’s crucial if you’re populating a distant planet with intelligent life, or piecing together the history of a kingdom ruled by fire mages. But it’s less useful if you’re writing about a town full of ordinary people. Right?

Actually, crafting contemporary fiction with a worldbuilder’s mindset can take your storytelling to the next level, no matter how seemingly ordinary your setting. At the end of the day, every book is a world unto itself, set apart from real life by boundary lines drawn by the author’s imagination.

When you write your book, you’re creating a space for your readers to linger. If you want them to relish spending time in the world of your story, try taking inspiration from sci-fi and fantasy writers. Here are three reasons to follow their lead.

1. It forces you not to take everything for granted

When we write contemporary fiction, it’s hard not to fall back on conceptual shorthands to draw the reader into your story. Think about a signifier like “high school” and all the images it brings to mind, from lunchtime cliques to the disorientation of standing on the cusp of adulthood.

If your story takes place at a high school, it’s fine to tap into these ready-made associations. But rely on them too much, and you risk ending up with a story that feels mass-produced.

If you find yourself leaning into conventions, take a look at how settings work in strong, original sci-fi and fantasy. The best of them remix genre mainstays — say, the telepathic alien species or the faux-medieval kingdom — with original details you won’t find anywhere else.

That’s a worldbuilding trick you can use contemporary fiction to create memorable, immersive settings. Just think: how is your high school different from other fictional high schools? Which details make your story recognizable as a high school story, and which ones make it unique?

2. It helps you flesh out your characters

If a work of speculative fiction takes place in a setting that’s markedly not our world, its characterization should reflect that. Everyone, from the hero to the villain’s stepmom, will share a baseline set of assumptions. And these might look very different from what we’re familiar with.

For instance, picture a fantasy world where meddling gods regularly show their faces. Atheism might be common in our world, but it makes no sense for someone in that world to be atheist — how can they be, when they saw the water god the last time they went fishing?

If you’re writing contemporary fiction, you should still consider the influence of setting on characterization. Think through that, and it’ll help you make sure there’s nothing about your characters that strains plausibility.

For example, say your story takes place in a densely populated city: high-rises stacked together, and no green space in sight. Would it make sense to give your protagonist hobbies like horseback riding and apple-picking? Probably not, unless you have a good explanation in-story — say, summers spent at grandparent’s house in the country.

3. It will make sure your writing isn’t all over the map

I started this post by alluding to the maps you so often see at the beginning of fantasy books. But in speculative fiction, worldbuilding isn’t just about deciding on the location of a fictional continent’s highest mountain or biggest seaport. It’s also about defining a sensibility, an emotional texture for the story.

That’s why the Harry Potter series, full of wonder and whimsy, gives us a magic system filled with punny spells. The highly cynical Song of Ice and Fire books, meanwhile, offer a darker take on the enchantment, where the dead stand up to fight and mystical swords are forged with blood. The tenor of the setting fits the tone of the story — you won’t find bumbling House-elves or goofy Boggarts in the chill of Westeros.

Take inspiration from JKR and GRRM: make sure the world of your story works with its sensibility, whether that’s somber or silly, hopeful or grim. After all the work you’ve put into your writing, the last thing you want is to make your readers laugh when they should be crying. Approach your storytelling with a worldbuilder’s sensitivity to setting, and you can rest assured they won’t.

Lucia Tang is a writer for Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the book industry’s best editors, designers, and marketers. To work on the site’s free historical character name generators, she draws on her knowledge of Chinese, Latin, and Old Irish —  learned as a PhD candidate in history at UC Berkeley. You can read more of her work on the Reedsy Discovery blog, or follow her on Twitter at @lqtang.