There’s been an implicit assumption in most of my essays — and often an explicit one in certain craft-0riented theory essays — that I’m talking about worldbuilding in the context of prose fiction: short stories, novels, and the like.

That isn’t terribly surprising, given that when I started this Patreon, prose fiction was very nearly the only thing I’d written. But even then, I’d done a bit of work for tabletop role-playing games, where the dynamics are different: there, you are often expected to provide the reader with straightforward exposition about the setting, with an eye toward helping them generate their own stories out of that material. In that sense, it’s more akin to the approach I’ve taken in the regular essays here, albeit pegged to a definitive canon rather than proposing a bunch of interesting possibilities.

But in one of my bonus essays for my higher-tier patrons, I talked about worldbuilding for poetry — because that’s something I’ve started writing in more recent years. And it got me thinking about how this task changes depending on what kind of work you’re trying to produce.

Prose excels at delivering contextual information, like historical background, that is much more difficult to convey in other modes. In comic books, you would have to cram that into a box of narrative text — which is generally deprecated in that medium; you can do brief bits, but a multi-sentence paragraph comes across as clunky. Alternatively, you engineer some reason to put it in dialogue . . . if you can find a way to do it gracefully. A/V media like TV and movies don’t even have the narrative box option; they’re stuck with dialogue alone, or sometimes a voiceover (equally deprecated). Video games, rather notoriously, will fill up a series of “codex entries” that players may or may not even bother to read — so while you can hold forth on the history of your setting there, you probably can’t use it to convey anything load-bearing, lest the player get stuck or confused!

But that isn’t the same as saying that those other media are worse at worldbuilding. The graphical nature of comics, TV, movies, and video games means they can convey in a single panel or shot a wealth of visual information that a book would have to spend paragraphs on — paragraphs which the reader might find tedious and skim over. Intricacies of architecture, clothing, people’s physical appearance, and more: the viewer or player can take all that in with a single glance (or, in media like comics, spend as much time as they like examining).

Leaving behind the comics, the other modes can also communicate sound and motion. Want to go into detail on what the music of your society sounds like, or how their dancers move? That will work far better when we can hear and watch it for ourselves. Prose can only approximate them at best, and readers who have trouble visualizing or . . . we don’t really have an equivalent word for sound, do we? . . . anyway, they’ll likely get very little out of a verbal description of such things.

I’ve been talking about those four media because they’re some of the most common, but of course they aren’t the only options out there. Podcasting, for example, is increasingly popular these days, including for narrative purposes. That generally takes either the form of reading a prose story, with or without full voice casting — at which point it’s essentially the same as an audiobook — or something akin to the old radio plays. When those go pure dialogue, modulo a few sound effects, they’re operating in possibly the most restricted narrative space imaginable: everything has to be conveyed through speech or raw sound, with no visual or expository component.

Then, of course, there’s purely static visual art. If you don’t think that can convey worldbuilding, you haven’t looked at enough fantasy art! In fact, I love images that suggest stories to me; they’re one of my key sources for poem ideas. As I mentioned above, poetry is another realm where you might need to worldbuild . . . but not in the same way as you would for a prose story. (Not unless you’re writing an extremely lengthy narrative poem, which most poets are not doing.)

But it isn’t just a question of what channels are available to you for creating your setting in the mind of the reader. You also have to ask yourself: what effect are you trying to achieve in the first place? What will play best with the strengths and limitations of your medium?

I already nodded toward the answer for tabletop roleplaying games. If you’re writing setting material (as opposed to a scripted adventure), your goal is not to tell a story, but to create a fruitful space for stories. You want to toss out lots of conflicts and secrets and hooks somebody might use to run their own adventure — which means it benefits from you building in things like rival factions that might go to war, hidden truths waiting to be uncovered, and ticking time bombs that can go off whenever the game master wants them to. The novelist shouldn’t introduce those unless they’ll be used soon, lest their tension fizzle out; the game writer can mention their existence at any time.

In poetry, by contrast, you don’t have a lot of room to maneuver: even a moderately lengthy poem barely adds up to a flash story’s worth of words. Poetry’s worldbuilding, therefore, is often going to be more about evoking a single, vivid image or concept, and not worrying about anything else around it. You can just describe the ruined temple, without explaining much about the religion once practiced there or why it’s abandoned now. That type of poem tends to be more akin to visual art . . . but even one that conveys some amount of narrative is going to leave most of the context and detail to one side, in favor of a laser focus on the point of the poem.

I don’t claim to speak with great authority on all these media and how to worldbuild for them. Quite frankly, any of the ones I haven’t written for personally are terra very little cognita for me, just impressions gleaned from listening to other people talk about them. I will, however, stand by the core thesis of this project: that there are many, many aspects of a world that can be built, and the options for what to do with them are far more varied than our genre would sometimes suggest. Which ones you choose will vary based on what you’re doing. But if this inspires some comic book or screen writer to make more interesting and considered choices, I’ll be glad of it!