What is the biggest thing that sets fantasy apart from all other genres? Without a doubt, it has to be worldbuilding. In every other genre (even science fiction, to some extent), the writer can get away with a loose or surface-level understanding of the world. But in order to do fantasy right, you have to build the world from the ground up, and include such an immersive and visceral level of detail that the reader feels like it’s a real world that they can lose themselves in. That is the feeling that readers want when they pick up a fantasy book.
At the same time, I think that most writers put too much emphasis on worldbuilding. It’s become trendy in writerly circles to talk about worldbuilding, almost as if it’s something you do for its own sake. In the best books, though—even in the best fantasy books—the worldbuilding is always in service to the story, and not the other way around.
For many of us writers, the act of dreaming up a world is the thing that immerses us the most in it. Daydreaming about our fantasy worlds and working out all of the details about it—that’s often the fun part, and the thing that got us into writing fantasy in the first place. But it doesn’t translate very well to the page. The things that seemed so cool to us when we were dreaming them up often come across as dry and boring when we write them out in a huge info dump.
In order for a reader to feel immersed in the world, they need to have a character that they can follow through it. The character’s experience of the world becomes the reader’s experience. But the character needs to be in motion—they need to have some sort of goal or objective that they’re working toward, even if they don’t consciously realize it yet. And it needs to be a struggle for them, at least on some level. Even in cozy fantasy, where the stakes are typically pretty low, the characters still have to put some effort into getting the things they want.
That’s because characters show us who they really are through the trials and struggles that they face. Just like in real life, hard times make us see what people are made of. Without that, readers have a difficult time connecting with the characters through whose eyes we want to show them our fantasy worlds. It’s through a character’s struggle that we find that we can relate to them.
Another thing I’ve noticed, particularly in some recent big-name traditionally published fantasy, is that the viewpoint characters are often just terrible people. If I met them in real life, I often think that I would find them petty, narcissistic, and repulsive. At best, they are amoral, and at worst, they are little better than the villains who oppose them—and yet, from the way they’re written, it’s clear that we’re supposed to latch onto them simply because they are the main character.
As a reader, that doesn’t work for me. If I’m going to connect with a character deeply enough to get that immersive fantasy experience, I want them to either be the kind of person I can admire, or the kind of person I feel like I can hang out with. Preferably both. And if the character is going to do something morally repulsive early on in the book, I need to see them wrestle with the ethics of it first, and perhaps feel some remorse afterward. Otherwise, it’s going to throw me out of the book.
Anything that throws the reader out of the book is also going to kill that immersive experience, rendering all that worldbuilding utterly ineffectual. In some ways, the reader first has to feel immersed in the characters before they can feel immersed in the world.
This is why the characters in the best fantasy books often have more depth and nuance to them than the characters in any other genre. When the book is set in our own familiar world, the characters themselves are often larger than life. The heroes are billionaires or ex-Navy SEALs, the love interests are supermodels or billionaires, and the villains are criminal masterminds or rival billionaires. But in fantasy, the larger-than-life element is the world itself, so the characters (or at least the viewpoint characters) often feel much more like real people, so as to ground us in the story.
I’ve often heard people say that worldbuilding is a bit like an iceberg, in that only 10% or so should be visible. But I think it’s more precise to say that worldbuilding should be grounded in the character (or characters) through whose eyes we get to see it. Of course, those characters are grounded in the conflict or plot of the story, since that’s what shows us who they really are. And the plot itself is grounded in time and space, which brings us back full circle to setting and worldbuilding. So ultimately, it’s all a virtuous cycle.
I don’t think I’ve ever found an author who does character better than Ursula K. Le Guin. I haven’t read much of her fantasy, but I did read Powers, and I felt so totally immersed in that world because I felt like I knew the main character even better than I know myself. It was an incredible reading experience, just like the best of her science fiction, which I adore.
Brandon Sanderson also tends to buck the current trend of morally ambiguous main characters who never really earn our sympathy or admiration. In almost all of his books, his protagonists strike me as good people—the kind that I can admire and hang out with. That fact, combined with how his books tend to be much cleaner than most contemporary fantasy, go a long way toward explaining his tremendous success (though of course, Sanderson’s greatest strength is his ability to write killer endings).
Bottom line, the best worldbuilding in fantasy is only as good as the characters through whom we experience it. Worldbuilding should always serve the story, and not the other way around.
