It's time to sit down and get serious with whatever this thing is. But it's more for me than for you, since I'm the one writing this poor excuse of a world building book...guide, thingy. Since we have already established in the previous article that the process of world building is kiiiinda important for your SF story, this article will therefore give you a run-down on how to do just that.

There are many ways you can approach this seemingly daunting task. Look it up on the internet (I certainly did, beat you there, and wrote a book about it), and you'll be bombarded with articles and tips on how to build your worlds.

I'll be the liberal guy here and tell you: it doesn't really matter how you do it. What matters is that, to start, maybe you need a gentle yeeting into it. And what gentle yeeting do you need than this article right here?

So, welcome to our topic for today, which are the methods of World Building. I will be listing a few and giving them my version of explanation, but these certainly didn't come wholly from me (see References part). Don't go thinking I'm suddenly this visionary, Einstein-ing my way into Writing Theory and all that.

The Top-Down Approach
This approach is also referred to as "outside-in", and you probably know in theory how that works. First, we start from the top (or the outside, whichever way you look at it), the biggest and baddest of the stuff you'll ever face in this journey. Kind of like deductive reasoning, where we start with something more general stuff and work our way to have specific ideas.

It's the same principle here. We start out with an overview of the world and define its characteristics such as its people, technology, geography, territories, and history. Once that's developed, we will be going into each of the divisions you have set out and refining the details.

This approach can also take the form of building, first, the world's basic rules, limitations, and magic system before going on to define the continents, civilizations, nations, and all that pizazz.

Pro: Worlds built this way tend to be a well-oiled machine, with every part clicking together perfectly.

Con: You will be bombarded with a ton of world building work before you can have enough details to build a setting out of for your story.

This method is what I used in developing the universe of The Chronicles Fantasilia, and I can honestly say that the pros and cons are true. When I first built Fantasilia as a world, I started by defining its rules, magic system, and the basic concepts regarding its inhabitants.

In Fantasilia, it's forbidden to kill your blood relative with magic to prevent its misuse (rule) but some people found a work-around with that (magic system...ish). The most basic thing you need to know about Fantasilia is that it's a world made from dreams and that magic is technically the whole force holding this world together (world overview). Without magic, this world will collapse. Magic from the dreams, that is. This brings us to the fact that all of its people, since they're living inside a world made of magic, are held together by magic as well (inhabitant info).

That's why beings in Fantasilia cannot function without magic and why they seem to treasure it so much. But, since it's an abundant resource, they also kind of take it for granted.

See what is already happening there? By defining the overview, you are slowly shaping your world, building upon the most general thing as naturally as you could until you have a semblance of history, magical limits and punishments, and even a subconscious detail about the people's culture/psyche.

But the big (and by big, I meant BIG) problem is, with this method, at the first instance, you're going to get what I like to call a half-baked world. What you have is a smol idea of what you want the huge thing to be, with no idea where to yeet your characters into and where your plot should be. To be able to ascertain that, you'd need to think deeper and deeper, refining and defining everything inside this big world of yours before you have anything concrete to set something on.

This is what happened with COFU. I ended up adding a bunch of stuff that I won't even be using in the main series because I need to work to make each country/town come alive by the time the characters eventually make it there. And with this method, you're more likely to end up with 150,000+ words of world building info where you will use less than 10,000. Fun.

The Bottom-Up Approach
This method can also be called "inside-out" and is basically the reverse card of the first method we talked about. Instead of starting out with the general idea, we'll begin with the specific first. Think of a place or something in your world. Now, figure out all of the details in that place/thing. What of its geography, culture, social structure, government and politics, and trading and economic situation? What type of textile are they using? What clothes are they wearing? Where do they get their food? Stuff like that.

From there, you can say that this city gets their food from a neighboring merchant city, and from there, you'll be building this web of intricate connections until you eventually reach the bigger umbrella. This is a perfect spot to chuck in small details like literature and in-world idioms and you're even sure that you'll be able to use exactly what you throw in there.

Pro: You'll have a semi-complete world with the same initial hours you put into the top-down approach if you use those doing the bottom-up approach.

Con: This method is prone to inconsistencies, since you're basically making things up as you go bigger and bigger. There is also the danger that after doing all of the work from the bottom up and reaching the top, you'd find that from the aerial view, some of the stuff doesn't really make sense. Then you'd have to track it down and make that teeny-tiny tweak, which in turn, can uproot other details you have already established in other parts.

(I know I might sound biased, but yes, this is true.)

The works where I used this method are in the standalone novels, Scapegoat and Libelle. Since they are, in fact, standalones, I don't want to go too deep into worldbuilding and instead focused on one city/town and went from there. This way, I wouldn't feel like I wasted my effort by building a huge world and using a small fraction of it for the novels' setting. That, and the fact that I don't want to be inspired to write a truckload of series(es) and all kinds of spin-offs to an otherwise finite story and world.

And with that, I can see that there are all sorts of problems that creep out when I use this approach. I ended up skimming a lot of things, and some of those things are the most important ones. Things like the origin of the circumstantial villain in Scapegoat and the differentiation of fae races in Libelle—all because I don't want another COFU.

So, yeah. This method isn't something I'd recommend for beginners, but if you're at a higher level—that of the writing gods—then by all means, employ this method. Do tell me how that worked out for you and I might learn the hidden ways of the masters. xD

A Little Bit of...Both (not Monica)
There are also the meta-builders who like to mix-and-mash these two methods. What they'd do is figure out the basics and then focus on the specifics, then back to the general again. This way, they seem to be working from both sides until they eventually meet themselves in the middle.

Pro: You can enjoy the benefits of both, such as less time-consuming and not being prone to inconsistencies.

Con: Since you enjoy twice the benefits, you also get twice the amount of work. Why? Because while you're out building the general ideas, you're also fine-tuning the small things further down. It's like being meta about being meta. Fun, but it could deplete your brain cells in one go, like it did to Briam's siblings.

Because, believe it or not, I have a similar experience. For the record, I wasn't sure if it counted as this hybrid method, but I pulled this one when I was preparing COFU for the series-wide developmental edits and for the prequel series of sorts, Memoirs of Mayhem.

What happened was that I took all of the stuff already established in the main series and worked on to refine it some more. This meant that I'm working on the general state of the island, Umazure, all the while attending to its various territories and the people living in them. I started with developing Cardina, the Human territory, because that's the first setting of the first book of The Chronicles of Fantasilia.

From there, I'm working on building the culture of Umazure, all the while taking into account what Cardina, as the only Human territory, have in common and doesn't have in common with all of the different races around them.

So now you know what happened for Briam to become the Last Brain Cell.

Inferred World Building
Because we're still not apparently done, there is this thing referred to as such. In this method (well, it's not really a method), it acknowledges the fact that for all our efforts, there are places/details that we just can't reach anymore. So, we use this concept where we just kinda let our readers derive further details based on the details we already gave.

One example of that (and probably me going on a huge detour) is this YouTube channel, ScreenJunkies, in their Honest Trailers video, basically extrapolating from the Cars universe that because there's a Car-Pope (seen attending the race thingy in Cars 2), there must be a Car-Jesus somewhere in the history of that world.

You know, things like that.

And with all of that out of the way, how do you go about creating the overview of your world? There are a few tips and tricks about that.

Amplification and Elaboration
We define amplification as the process of picking out one very real element in our very real world and basically amplifying it. For example, we take the geographical element of whales. By amplifying it, we're basically saying that the whales could be as big as an entire ocean. And what if there are a whole species of them? The world will be overrun by gigantic whales.

Then, what you're going to do is to elaborate on the thing you amplified. You start to think of the minor details that this certain amplification can uproot, tweak, or maintain. Let's take the whale example. Now that we know that the world is overrun by whales, what happens to the humans? How did the seas even accommodate this? Where did the whales come from?

And from there, you can already get the wheels of your brain (ehem, briam) to turn and really imagine a world overrun by gigantic whales.

This method could very well apply to any element of worldbuilding, and welp, if you try it in every single one, you'll have a ton of worlds to build already! Word of caution, though: not all ideas/half-baked worlds are worth pursuing.

This method is perhaps the most common world building thread in the speculative scene, mostly because for a world to be distinctive from reality, there needs to be some element that is amplified, and therefore, elaborated upon.

Reduction and Elaboration
This is basically the same thing with the first one, but this time, instead of amplifying, we're removing stuff, either by making it smol/scarce or completely poof. The most common iterations of this method is in post-apocalyptic worlds as well as in alternate reality fiction, where both are asking the question of what happens if something doesn't exist or if something didn't happen. Of course, elaboration is sure to follow.

There are also instances where reduction and amplification happens at the same time. A perfect example of that is the classic Noah's Ark story. Like, there is an amplification of water and the reduction of the human race. So like...best deal, ever?

Layering
This is the amplification or reduction method on steroids. What is happening is basically putting layers upon layers of amplified or reduced elements to make the world richer and fuller. Sometimes, it's an alternating amplified and reduced element in one narrative, too.

This is evident in Frank Herbert's Dune, where there is an amplified element of the desert and sandworms, all the while balancing the reduction of religion (there's only one) and commodity (the spice thingy). From there, we can see how much the world of Dune breathes and functions on its own.

A little bit of warning, though. We must be careful in choosing which elements to amplify and reduce when we are layering. We need to be sure that these elements complement each other and not contradict or diminish the value of another element.

Fracturing and Nestling
The concept of fracturing is described as the process of taking one complete thing in your world and breaking it into different factions, facets, or iteration. The variation within these factions could be minimal or great, and they are often treated as new examples of the same element.

I think an example of this is, in The Chronicles of Fantasilia, where I took a general term, European Fantasy Races, and split it into different factions as the inhabitants of the world of Fantasilia. They are thoroughly distinct in features, basic concepts, and pretty much everything else, that they have become a different example of a European Fantasy Race.

Nestling, meanwhile, is the process of taking a unified thing, and instead of breaking it into different elements, you get to create a smol space for the thing that's going to be different. While fracturing creates an entirely new iteration of an element, nestling makes the new thing fit within the confines of a previously-created element.

An example of that is when I isolated the Fairies as a race and split them into 13 sub-races, all different in the specifics but similar in the generals. Another example is when one of those sub-races, the Nature Fairies, are further differentiated into Plant Fairies and Animal Fairies. Even then, both of them are still the same Nature Fairies.

These methods not only provide depth and detail into your world, they also drive the point that variation is a common thing in your world as much as it is in our reality. And you'll get bonus realism points for that.

Discussion Questions
1. What method of world building appeals most to you? Why?
2. Which method seems shocking/confusing to you at this moment? Why do you think so?
3. Do you know any other method of world building that is not mentioned here? Comment in this line and let us know!

References
Other Atlas. (2023). Methods of Worldbuilding. Other Atlas: Resources for World Building. Retrieved January 31, 2023, from https://www.otheratlas.com/methods-of-worldbuilding/.

Worldbuilding. (2023, January 16). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldbuilding.

So...that's it for the methods of world building, which, in my opinion, has dragged on for longer than I thought. For the next article, we will be talking about: Types of Worlds in Speculative Fiction.

>>>>>>>>