Some Quick Thoughts on Worldbuilding

By jan Alesanjo

Worldbuilding is such an odd hobby. It may not seem like so for those of us who indulge in it, but it becomes clear when you try to explain it to other people.

You could start by saying, "oh, I am a fantasy/sci-fi writer," but that wouldn't be quite right. We often conceive worldbuilding as a part of storytelling, but this is not always the case. For me and many others, weaving a particular narrative comes secondary to the worldbuilding process. If I was asked what my story is about, I wouldn’t be able to give a coherent answer, because I simply do not have a story to summarize in the first place.

You could try to explain that you like making languages and scripts for fictional settings, but this only works if you are specifically into conlangs or neography (hobbies that are only slightly easier to explain to an outsider, though not by much). You could tell them you like to draw fantasy maps or designing spaceships, but even then, you wouldn’t be covering the true extent of what you do.

It's not like crochet, or drawing, or sculpting, or playing an instrument. There isn't a thing you can show them and say, "this is what I do in my free time," because worldbuilding is at once extremely broad and extremely niche. It covers fields of study from biology to linguistics, to astronomy and anthropology, it can be expressed in any medium of art, be it drawing or writing or music or whatever else. All of it at the service of creating a fully-fledged alternate world with no purpose other than its own imaginary existence.

You can wear the scarves you knit. You can hang a watercolor painting on the wall. You can publish a novel, sing a song, print a picture. You can collect postage stamps and put them all in a binder, pin beetles to a board.

But what does worldbuilding, on its own, amount to? What is it, if not an extremely complex, demanding version of daydreaming? All that effort researching and learning and creating, out towards something that doesn't materially exist, that lives only through spreadsheets and diagrams and private wikis, and other such arcane things that are only comprehensible to their author (and sometimes, not even that).

Yes, it's hard trying to get people to understand that one of the things you love to do the most, that you willingly spend hours every week working on, has no practical applications whatsoever. It is entirely useless, intangible, abstract. It is like love poured into the void for the sake of love alone.

I am not a religious person, but maybe this is what God must have felt like when They spoke our world into existence.