In this second half of my worldbuilding post, I’ll hit upon the creative aspects. For the first one on bookkeeping, click here.

As mentioned in part 1, it’s good to have a macro view of what your universe looks like: the geography, the governments, the religions/beliefs, social structures and technology levels. The problem often associated with developing this broad view is that it’s very easy to use it as a justification to never start writing the story.

People will forgive a lot of fuzzy worldbuilding if you have a compelling story and vivid characters, but people will abandon a beautiful world if there’s no reason to stay. This is not an excuse to slouch on worldbuilding, but it should give you a sense of your priorities.
 
So here’s a bit of pre-advice advice: once you have the broad strokes, make a rule to spend the same amount of time story building as worldbuilding. If you write for three hours on the intricate religions rituals of the Shak’laree, spend three hours outlining the story. If you’re not sure where the story should begin or what the central conflict is, take a section of your worldbuilding and write from the perspective of ANYONE associated with it. For example, if you’ve developed a race of ancient warriors and you’re working out the complex lineage of their tribes, write about one of those warriors who doesn’t belong to any tribe.

Boom, conflict.

Once you know what’s important to your society, you have a blueprint of how to create conflict: subvert what people hold dear, and sparks will fly.

On to my top 4 pieces of creative worldbuilding cake.

The one race, one personality (or one world, one biome/climate) feature is a sci-fi/fantasy trope. It’s basically a shortcut because, no doubt, writing diversity is a massive undertaking. You have to come up with a cascade of details and shadings that make your cultures and people feel four dimensional, with the 4th dimension of time being that things change, and that development is often staggered and/or unequally distributed.
 
For this, you have to put in the work. But here’s a little trick that can save you time: write the macro stuff, then write the small, personal moments, and the middle ground will often grow organically from this.
 
Another source of material is real life, throughout the ages. If you (respectfully) draw inspiration from real cultures and wrap them in your own creativity, this can be pretty effective. You can even use it to make social commentary.

What do your characters do for fun? What do they eat for breakfast? Do they even eat breakfast? How about work hours; is it a 7.341-to-42 hour/18-day-a-week world? How about romantic relationships, sex, and marriage? Are children forced to eat their greens or work in the crystal mines? Even the smallest quirk can be telling if it connects to a larger theme.
 
You don’t have to answer all of these questions (remember the window), but don’t avoid them as your characters move through their lives. Even if your characters aren't participating in the daily hum-drum, other people in the universe are, so let us see it. This doesn’t mean you want to spend ten pages on how people wash their feet (I guess?), but a paragraph here and there will give a sense of life beyond the story.
 
And this brings up a related key point: show us how the world works through character actions and dialog as much as possible, rather than through giant blocks of exposition.

Never forget that events have consequences beyond the immediate. When havoc is wrought and dogs of war set loose, they bite everyone, and those people complain to their friends.
 
The assassination of a duke, an attack on mass transit, the marriage of celebrity cats, they all create ripple effects, even if it’s just to change the topic of dinner conversation. In addition to creating a more living, natural world, showing your characters reacting to the same event with different attitudes is a good way to develop them as individuals.

If your characters have game changing technology and/or magic there are (at least) 3 things to keep in mind:

What are the rules?
Without establishing the rules of what is or is not possible, you can quickly drain the tension from scenes.

I think shields/armor in sci-fi often exemplify a cheap trick mechanic, because they allow characters to sustain the exact right amount of damage to create *dramatic plot moment*. This isn't always bad, but if you can show the limits/costs/side-effects of tech, it'll keep the reader grounded in a greater sense of reality.

For magic, give us a sense of how hard and what's required for a mage to cast a fireball of doom versus a tickle spell. Is it incantation based, are there ingredients, do spells require time to cast? What is the price of failure or a miscast?

Find clever ways to show these things without lecturing, like having characters fail and learn why, or exceed limits early on and pay the price.

Why doesn’t everyone have it?
This point is easier to explain: money, rarity, opportunity to acquire it. Whatever the reason, if Steely McHero is wielding a gravity gun that levels mountains, why don’t the bad guys also have one? Or any idiot with enough cash? Because there are plenty of those.
 
What are the other implications?
This one is trickier, as a domino effect of influences can travel very far and not be obvious at first glance. If 10 second time travel is a thing in your world, how does that affect stock trading? If you have pervasive teleporter devices and cars in the same world, why? 
 
You don’t need to go too crazy with minutia, but you don’t want to hang obvious, world-breaking mechanics out like dirty laundry for readers to get wrapped up in.

Final Thoughts (for now):
In the end, your world is there to support your story, not the other way around. Put love and care into worldbuilding, but also make sure it’s not all clingy and jealous of your characters, smothering them with incessant demands for attention. If your world is the most interesting thing in your book, then it’ll sit in your driveway like a totally sweet sports car with no engine in it. I think two metaphors is enough here, go forth and write!

Which came first, the chicken or the galactic empire? Although science has determined the egg came first, our imaginations rarely work in such a logical order.
 
Sometimes it’s more top-down, beginning with the broad strokes—ancient/futuristic, egalitarian/dictatorial, coffee/whatever else isn’t coffee—and fill in the details as we go.
Other times it’s bottom-up, from the faintest whiff of idea pollination: a character quirk, an interesting street corner, a recipe. Often it's a muddle of the two.
 
For me, the idea for Naion (the megacity setting of Centricity) came from an image. From that image, a sediment of paperwork accumulated, both physical and digital. A thousand inchoate descriptions, from social morays to technical blueprints to character traits. Little by little, this chicken-scratch buried me. It's as bad as it sounds; suffocating under a heap of angry chickens is a terrible way for stories to die.

Every time I needed to access one of these nuggets of imagination excreta, I had to sift through so much irrelevant stuff. I wasted hours and days looking instead of writing. If you’ve ever read The Phantom Tollbooth, I’d become my own personal Terrible Trivium, moving sand endlessly back and forth because I hadn’t bothered to do the things I'll share with you here.
 
I now do, mostly. Growth.

Deep world building is history building (even if it’s an implied history since things don’t just poof into existence) and *accurate* history is about record keeping. Kings, robot clones, corporate spies, battalions of elite ferret shock troops all make for exciting stories, but empires last because Johnny B. Accountant stayed late at the office.
 
Keeping records as you go, and updating them as needed, will be a gift to your future self. Love yourself.
 
Which records? Here are 5 suggestions to get you started.

Some prefer “book bible,” I like encyclopedia. This is pretty self-explanatory. The moment a concept or word that does not exist in our reality springs forth, record it and define it. You can categorize it by type (for example, technology) and sub-categorize it alphabetically.

To go one step further you can track the location of every instance a term shows up in your manuscript.

See how I wrote timelines three times? That’s because I suggest making three of them. You could try jamming all the information into one. If you’re a master packer. I’m not.
 
The first is for scenes: who, what, where, when.
 
The second is for character arcs, which track the growth of your characters over time, and what inspired their change. Don’t forget the world itself, which is also a character that changes. For example, if you have a gun battle at the starport, it may increase security for other characters not involved. This cross-referencing will help your world feel more real.
 
The third is the plot arc, which, as it sounds, tracks your progression through the plot, with major events highlighted.
 
I use Aeon 2 but there are lots of options.

Your name doesn’t need to be Rand McNally to sketch out a basic map of the area(s) where your story takes place. This is important for judging distances and travel times. All other things being equal, it takes longer to go 10 miles than 2. Don’t forget to take into account terrain, mode of transportation, etc. when determining if Jackson can swoop in to save Mike in Grimsville five minutes after defeating Mr. Evil at Dark Pond.

In an unpaid endorsement, I have found the Scrivener app to be a lifesaver in more ways than one, but primarily for its ability to organize metadata. For every scene/chapter I write, I keep a running tally of all the people and stuff that shows up.
 
This is possible in a basic word processor as well, and if that’s what you’re using, you can use the insert > table function to create a table. On the left hand, your chapter titles, at the top, the categories to keep track of, including but not limited to:
 
People
Groups (Companies, Government Agencies, etc.)
Places
Tech/Magic
Society (for laws, social mores, taboos, etc.)

Cross-reference
You can create links to documents on your own hard drive or cloud account. This way, the information is made easily accessible without cluttering up the document you’re working on.
 
Update ASAP
As soon as you make a change to your story, change the tables/maps/etc. that the change affects.
 
Why?
Because you want to be kind to your future self, and not leave them with a tangle of accumulated changes.
 
Also, you’ll be able to see immediately the ripple effects of your change. You may remove a character, thinking he’s unimportant, only to realize he’s the one who bought the poisoned milk in chapter two.
 
Don’t throw anything away
If you remove a big chunk because it’s not working, ctrl-X cntrl-V it to a new file. However, you’ll want to keep these organized. Create folders named things like “city descriptions.”
 
Save multiple versions
I can’t tell you how many times I changed something, only to later change it back. Or how many times I wrote a scene for one character that got cut, then used it later for a different character. You can even make different folders for different types of material (character descriptions, locations, etc.) With any major rearrangement, save a new version of the draft, and hack away, carefree.
 
Hopefully this helps! Write on!

In our mission to get a story on to paper, we are often starting from less than zero, because zero assumes your only obstacle is the blank page, with you possessing no qualms, an unwavering confidence in your writing acumen, and knowing exactly who your characters are and where they’re going.

If that’s you, teach me your secrets. Otherwise, we have to cross a chasm of self-doubt. I have spent many infuriating hours staring at the computer screen, willing greatness to emerge. Unfortunately, my computer is not haunted by the ghost of Philip K Dick or Robert Heinlein.

Here are a few ways to get you to the other side.

Beginning in media res (in the midst of the action) is an excellent way to stab the reader right away ... or is it grab the reader? No, stab sounds right. Anyway, this works for finished products but can trip us up on first drafts. We end up fretting and dithering because everything is important from word one.

Instead, back up a little. Or a lot. Write about a character’s morning routine. Their trip to the grocery store. Deliberately choose the most boring thing they were doing before the action starts; you now have the freedom to hack it off later without remorse. There’s also a chance of producing unexpected insights into a character’s personality: steamed milk latte or convenience store sludge? Daily life can be illuminating.

We all inevitably produce garbage along the way to eloquence. That’s the way the brain works—until we can replace our wetware with something better. Your goal should not be to avoid garbage, but to use it as compost. Accept it, wallow in it. Even go one step further: tell yourself, “Today, I will write the most cringe-worthy version of this scene I possibly can. I will aim for awful, create catastrophe!” Then you can’t be mad at yourself, because you did it on purpose. It was all part of the plan. So go ahead, write it bad—but write it.

This method involves writing in passes. For example, write out all the dialogue, nothing else. Next, internal reflection. Then setting description. Do this until the section is complete. The order you do it in isn’t important, the goal is to make the whole less intimidating by dividing and conquering (and you are very much a conqueror, having overcome the desire to return to your snicker doodles and binge watching). An added benefit is that layering will help you better judge if the ratio of content is working.

When I’m staring at a giant to-do list of chapters I have to write, bleary-eyed, overwhelmed, and not sure where to start, I hop through several chapters in a short amount of time. I’ll write somewhere between a paragraph and a page starting anywhere in the scene, then move on to the next. I find this to be a real present to my future self, who will be tackling a half-done chapter instead of a none-done one.

But in a good way. It’s much easier to make excuses to yourself than to others. Call on a friend—or anyone willing, really—and make them a promise. Promise them you’ll be finished with a chapter by the end of the week. Even better if they also promise you something; doesn’t have to be about writing. Maybe they need to complete a human diorama for … whatever project requires one of those. Up the anti by devising a punishment. For example, you have to take them out for dinner. You don’t want to disappoint Edwin the building handyman who dabbles in human dioramas, do you? No. So finish that chapter!

When my energy is at stagnant-pond levels, I go on to YouTube and find movie trailers that match my genre. These micro-bites of condensed action and storytelling pump me up and can kick-start my own mojo. Just be careful not to get lost in the infinity chain of YouTube links. Set a time limit of 10 minutes or so.

Be wary of that infection known as “perfection.” Avoid the urge to tinker until after you've finished. Instead, use top-down editing: story --> chapter --> scene --> line. It'll save you cargo loads of time. When you edit chapter by chapter, you are potentially spending hours fixing something which you'll have to tear out anyway. The first version never survives, no matter how much energy you pour into it. So don’t waste your finger sweat.

I hope these words get your own flowing. They’ve helped me. An encore of inspiration can be found here, to remind you that even the Great Writers had to struggle, just as you do:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-storytelling-animal/201203/crappy-first-drafts-great-books?amp
 
Now, get to it.

Nathaniel Henderson is an author currently working on a cyberpunk-injected book series. For updates and exclusive content, sign up for his newsletter.