Do you have Worldbuilding Disease?

I did, hi (Eva here). You've probably suffered from it too. Worldbuilding Disease inflicts most fantasy and sci-fi writers. For some, it becomes a chronic condition that prevents them from writing a single word of their novel.

Like many things, it starts innocently enough with good intentions: The joy of worldbuilding and the desire to make your world complete.

And it ends with never writing a novel--or in my case, learning how to set up a wiki on a private server to store the worldbuilding for a book that I never finished.

So, let's dig into what Worldbuilding Disease is, how you know if you have it, and how to overcome it.

What is Worldbuilding Disease

One reason worldbuilding is tricky is that there is no clear end to it. You can build the same world for the rest of your life (ala Tolkien) and never finish it.

Worldbuilding Disease starts as worldbuilding for the sake of a novel and ends with worldbuilding being the only thing you do.

You research and tinker. You add a fifth continent and a tenth society and decide that a species will be amphibious rather than fully aquatic. It might be enjoyable, but in the end, none of it matters because you spend so much time worldbuilding that you never write the actual story.

Symptoms include:

Changing worldbuilding details without solving inconsistencies or adding info that will be important to your plot or characters.

In other words, making things different but not better.

Building parts of your world that have no bearing on your conflict or characters.

For example, your story is about court politics in a galaxy-spanning empire, but you spend weeks creating a black market on an asteroid that your characters will never visit and that has no effect on their lives.

Researching minute details that don’t change your conflict or characters.

For example, looking up the size of wagon wheels in the medieval period for your fantasy book about defeating a dark mage. You’ll never include the measurement of the wheel in your novel, and it changes nothing about your world’s methods of transportation.

Note: I’m not saying to never do research. If the size of a wheel somehow changes an entire plot point, then yes, look it up and include it! But if you’re doing research that ultimately makes no difference to your story, you don’t need it. Stop and write instead.

The one exception to this is if you’re writing historical fiction. In this case, you do need to know niche details.

Googling worldbuilding questionnaires and trying all of them even though you already created your world.

Yeah, that was me. It’s why I started work on The Essential Worldbuilding Blueprint back in 2012, so I’d have a system and stop researching every method out there.

What causes Worldbuilding Disease?

The obvious cause is that worldbuilding has no clear end. There’s no point where it’s “done” so you just keep going because who knows when it’s right to stop?

But often, Worldbuilding Disease has a deeper cause: Procrastination, fear, and perfectionism.

If your world is never "done," you never have to start writing but you still feel like you're making progress on your project--without making actual progress.

Fear might underlie that: fear of starting a new project, fear that you can’t write the story well enough, or fear that you’ll “fail” in some way. Endlessly working on the worldbuilding beyond what you need feels safe.

That was true in my worst case of Worldbuilding Disease.I didn’t know how to tell the ambitious story in my head in a way that would do it justice, so I kept making up new planets with the hope that my characters would visit someday.

Spoiler alert: They never did. That series never got written.

Tinkering with your world might feel like you’re making progress but after a certain point, you’re not, which is another downside of Worldbuilding Disease. Your world may need to change once your characters and story run headfirst into it. You can’t make your world better by adjusting it for years, only by writing the story and then seeing where it needs more details or things changed to fit the plot and characters.

On a less depressing note: You might worldbuild so much that you never write because you enjoy it. Worldbuilding then becomes the whole point, and the story is not even necessary for creative fulfillment. In this case, you're free of the disease and just have a worldbuilding hobby rather than a writing one.

The cure to Worldbuilding Disease is simple but hard to implement (*sigh* like most things in life)

Set boundaries, like one of those 3-foot high walls that RPG characters can never climb over.

We fall into Worldbuilding Disease so easily because worldbuilding is not like building a bookcase where it's clearly done at some point. There is no actual finish line.

So, it becomes easy to get carried away or to tell yourself that you’re making progress while you’re just making your vampire coven different not better.

To cure it, give yourself an endpoint.

Decide you're going to build certain aspects of the world to a certain level of detail, and when those are done, that's it. You write. Like a trail map for hiking, lay out where you’re going to start, where you’re going to stop, and what you hope to discover along the way.

That doesn’t mean the world has to be fixed in stone forever. You can change it as you write if you realize that your worldbuilding doesn’t fit the story after all. Plans often change when they hit reality, or in this case, the reality of your characters and plot.

Of course, setting boundaries sounds easy, but how do you decide how much worldbuilding to do before you start writing? How much is enough? And how much is so much that it becomes a problem?

How to set limits to your worldbuilding

There is no one right answer for how much worldbuilding is enough. It differs for each writer and each project. As you write more books and build more worlds, you’ll get a sense of how much worldbuilding you need before you can write your story.

But if you’re not there yet, here are four steps to set a limit and cure Worldbuilder’s Disease:

Step 1: Are you a planner, pantser, or planster?

Planners, as the name suggests, plan their entire book before they write a word, down to each chapter and scene. They need to do all their worldbuilding upfront.

Pantsers, well, pants it. They make it up as they go and because of that, they rarely get Worldbuilding Disease.

Plansters, the most common type of writer, plan part of their novel beforehand and discover the rest as they write. They need to do some worldbuilding upfront.

Knowing your type gives you a general idea of how much worldbuilding you should do before you start writing (if you don’t know your type, The Pando Tree Method includes a section on figuring it out!)

In the end, both planners and plansters end up doing the same amount of worldbuilding. Planners just front-load the work while plansters and pantsers spread it out and end up doing some of it during the revision process.

Step 2: What elements of your world are central to the conflict or characters?

These are the elements that you should plan in detail upfront (unless you’re a pantsers who can’t write if you do any planning). Every other part of your worldbuilding can be skipped or created in less detail.

If you’re not sure what elements are going to be super important, ask yourself if I have to change this element after writing half the novel, will it be a big rewrite? Or will I just have to update some descriptions?

For example, if magic is part of the story’s main conflict, you’ll want to know the details before you write. If you decide to change the magic system halfway through your novel, you will have to rewrite EVERYTHING you’ve done so far.

If something will be easy to change in revision because it’s more set dressing, then you can either skip the upfront worldbuilding for it or do it in less detail.

In other words, if you think something is central to your characters or plot, build it in detail. If it’s just there to make the world feel more colorful, keep the worldbuilding details short.

Step 3: Do you feel like you have enough information to write your first chapters?

If you know enough about your world and characters that you can envision your first few chapters, then you’ve probably done enough worldbuilding.

If there are other scenes and events you want to include later in the book and you know enough that you could write them right now, then you’ve done enough worldbuilding to start.

Note: this is about if you have enough knowledge of your world to start writing, NOT if you feel capable because as we discussed above, fantasy and sci-fi writers sometimes use worldbuilding to avoid facing our fears.

So, you’re not asking yourself if you feel ready. You’re asking yourself if you know enough about your story to write it.

Because the thing is: You might never feel ready.

I’ve published 20 books and written a bunch more that haven’t been published yet... and I still feel like I’m not capable sometimes. Being an artist of any kind means facing the feeling that you aren’t good enough and creating something anyway.

Step 4: Do you have a worldbuilding system?

One way to decide on an endpoint is to use a worldbuilding system like The Essential Worldbuilding Blueprint and Workbook.

A workbook, whether this one or another, gives you clear steps and an endpoint. It helps you focus your worldbuilding on the details that are most likely to impact your novel and best of all, you know when you’re done! Once you've completed the sections that apply to your story, your world is complete enough to write your story.