I say this with love, because I’ve done it myself—got lost in the wiki, the timelines, the pantheons, the politics, the maps, the dynasties. Pages and pages of notes. Thousands of words written.
But not a single scene.
No characters speaking.
No choices made.
No tension.
No story.
World building feels like writing—but it isn’t.
It’s adjacent to writing. It supports writing. It’s the foundation your story might stand on.
But it isn’t the work. Not the real work.
Writing means sitting down and putting characters in motion. Making choices. Creating conflict. Moving forward through story, sentence by sentence.
World building, on its own, is scaffolding with no building inside it.
So why do we get stuck in it?
Because it feels safe.
You can build a culture or a language or a city and never risk anything. No messy dialogue. No emotional exposure. No bad prose.
It’s productive procrastination.
You’re working hard, but avoiding the hard part.
And if you’re being honest with yourself, you probably already know that.
I’ve been there, done this. Something like 80,000 words of world building notes, structured and organised. For a story that was, at that point, less than 100,000 words. There was a five suited deck of cards, a five person card game to go with it (there were betting rules as well). I could look up or figure out a realistic price for anything from a street vendor’s meat-in-a-bun to a moderate sized mansion in any of the five duchies.
The story hadn’t yet left the duchy where it started, and the card game appeared, as background to a scene, for about two pages.
Did I mention that the suit symbols on the cards were based on the primary industries of the different duchies? I was quite proud of that detail.
It never surfaced in the story.
It felt like writing when I was doing it. I was creating, building, crafting. I was thinking about, dwelling in that world I’d created.
But almost none of it advanced the actual story.
So. Here’s the trick: Build only what you need, when you need it.
Start with the story. What does the character need to encounter? What conflict requires context?
Build the scaffolding needed to support that.
Is your character a smuggler? Okay, what laws are they breaking? That’s the bit of your legal system you need to invent. The rest of the legal system is just background noise until it becomes relevant.
Is your heroine walking into a temple? What does she see, smell, hear? That’s the slice of your religion you need to figure out. The rest? Leave it in your notes until the story demands it.
My current WIP is a science fiction novel, with space travel involved. I knew roughly the shape I wanted it to have, I knew what I needed the story to look like. Travel needed to be more on the scale of ocean journeys more than international flight – travel between star systems should take days at least, weeks or months for larger trips.
So, my world building has brief notes (less than a page) on the three modes of travel – one is for manoeuvring or combat – thrusters, basically. The second is a form of gravitational drive – this is hand-wavey McGuffin-tech. This is used to get the vessel to a location of some sort of hand-wavey gravitational Ley-line intersection, which allows jumps between systems. More waving of hands, more McGuffin-tech.
Note the complete lack of science there.
My characters aren’t scientists, nor are they engineers. Hell, they’re not even pilots (at this stage, there’s been no need for them to be). Intricacies of space travel are just facts of the universe they inhabit; they understand less about how it works than I understand about the operations of an internal combustion engine.
Build for purpose, not for pride. Believe me, I felt the desire to delve into that, the history, name the inventors of the various drives, blah blah blah. Maybe that will come up later, and I can slot bits of it into the story as written—it might be some nice flavour that I can add in later on.
But it’s not the story I’m trying to tell.
You don’t need to write an encyclopaedia. You’re not Tolkien. And frankly, if you were, your publisher would make you cut half of it.
The reader doesn’t care how many moons your planet has unless those moons matter.
It’s OK to have notes about your world be incomplete.
“Multiple moons. Effects on tides?” If your characters are inland, not concerned with fishing or ocean travel, do the tides really matter to your story? If not, why are you figuring out tidal information?
At the same time, don’t be afraid to indulge yourself a little. If you want to work out the tidal situation? Go for it.
Just don’t tell yourself that you’re writing. You’re world-building, and you’re doing it for your own enjoyment.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not what your readers will care about.
They care about the people. The choices. The emotion. The action.
World building supports writing—but it is NOT writing.
If you’ve been “world building” for six months and haven’t written a single scene, this is your sign.
Open a new file. Put a character on a page. Give them a desire and an obstacle.
Start writing.