Worldbuilding for Masochists

It's the start of SEASON SEVEN! And original co-host Rowenna Miller is back to join us in a reflection of how multiple years of doing this podcast has affected how each of us thinks about worldbuilding. What have we learned from our many amazing guests, and how have they inspired us to think about worldbuilding in new

It's one of the first choices you'll make when writing a story, consciously or not: what point of view are you writing from? First person singular? Third person limited? Omniscient? Something else? The POV can affect a reader's experience of the narrative and the worldbuilding, either subtly or dramatically -- so how d

We often think about "making things make sense" in worldbuilding and building internal consistency, scientific realism, and other logic-based considerations into our fiction -- But what happens when your worldbuilding principle is “What would be awesome?" Jim C. Hines, who embraced this principle for a forthcoming book

We often think of worldbuilding happening on a grand scale, with huge maps and the sweeping narratives of nations and world-changing events. But that's not really the stuff that makes a world feel lived-in. The granular choices are what show day-to-day life, and day-to-day life illustrates so much about how a world has

How can language help shape your worldbuilding? We're not necessarily talking about conlang here -- that can certainly be part of worldbuilding, but it doesn't have to be, and many works of speculative fiction manage perfectly fine without invented languages. But the words you choose in description and dialogue will al

Sometimes, people will say of a book that "the setting is another character". But what does that really mean, and how can a writer craft it? Ai Jiang joins us to discuss creating worlds and settings that have their own personalities! From the physical geography to the architecture, from the scale of the location to its