Reflections on Minimalist Worldbuilding

By those unfamiliar with the community, worldbuilding is not typically considered its own hobby separate from writing. This mistake goes so deep many writers have decried ongoing, in-depth worldbuilding as a form of procrastination - because, of course, if you aren't going to write about your world eventually, what's the point in making it in the first place? Even in the tabletop community, I've watched the rise of an oddly common sentiment, the idea that a Game Master shouldn't bother worldbuilding that much because "it's not like players are gonna pay attention to any of it."

(Side note: I'll probably write a whole rant about that last sentence someday; I consider it thoughtless, ungrateful, and rude behavior from people who wouldn't be able to play their favorite game without all the GM's hard work. But that is neither here nor there.)

I do think some writers use worldbuilding and other forms of research and prep as a form of procrastination, yes, but I also think it's a mistake to lump all these people in together. A lot of people simply enjoy building worlds without being novelists. Sometimes they do write novels, but the act of telling stories comes secondary to the joy that comes from considering magic systems, mapping the formation of landmasses over millennia, and constructing fictional languages (called conlanging).

But this essay isn't about how worldbuilders should be respected as creators in their own right and their content read for fun even though it isn't written in narrative prose, though I do believe that is true. It's more about how I, someone who used to love cranking out pages of sprawling lore, have had to accept my own limits.

The past decade has been hard on me, for a variety of personal reasons I don't feel inclined to recount for strangers on the internet. Somewhere in the midst of it all, I lost the bottomless well of passion and enthusiasm that effortlessly poured out of me in the form of my creative pursuits. It had evaporated, leaving behind nothing more than a damp mud pit with a few puddles in the bottom.

Gone are the days when I could sit down in front of my laptop and write thousands of words every evening. You could call it executive dysfunction, or chronic fatigue, or brain fog, or whatever else it might be. But the name doesn't matter to me so much as the effect.

I am no stranger to losing inspiration and setting my writing aside until the desire returns to me. What's new is my inability to even plan anything creative. My worldbuilding lore documents suffer abandonment to the point where I'm having difficulty remembering where I left off. My characters, a constant chatter in my head, lapsed into silence except for the occasional stray comment.

I don't list these symptoms in anguish or to elicit pity. I am, first and foremost, a problem-solver. My first thought as I strive to pull myself out of this funk is, "How can I go about worldbuilding in a new way that is easier on my limited energy levels?"

This is the question that led me to the impasse outlined above. The most logical conclusion for me was to seek out a more minimalist worldbuilding and lore-writing method. If I was having a hard time writing a lot, then wouldn't it make more sense to aim to communicate as much as I can in as few words as possible?

However, when I tried to seek articles, essays, forum posts, and templates on this topic, I found they approached worldbuilding with a strange sort of cynicism, possibly even derision. I had stumbled across a strange binary: a community of verbose worldbuilders whose templates and advice columns dive into more depth than I am currently capable of managing vs. the writing and GM advice bloggers who aim to get worldbuilding "out of the way" so they can focus on what "really matters."

I found neither of these approaches useful to me. So, as usual, I have to make everything hard on myself and build my own method from the ground-up (my therapist may or may not have recently implied this is the reason I feel so exhausted all the time... shh).

In my opinion, a more minimalist approach to worldbuilding should have the following two traits:

• First and foremost, the amount of work that goes into the project should not exceed the worldbuilders' personal capacity. I know, this is pretty "common sense." But it's something I, and, frankly, most people, struggle with. Burnout is at an all-time high because we are always pushing ourselves past our limits. A good worldbuilding project only demands as much work as is sustainable for the creator.
• The worldbuilding project should be intelligible to readers. This is where things get tricky. A lot of people have a more minimalistic approach to writing lore for themselves. It's easy to jot down a few errant thoughts like "air spirits living in cloud kingdom" or "glamour magic acting troupes" because you know what these phrases mean even if nobody else does. However, I like to share my lore with others, so my goal would be to find a minimalist worldbuilding method that allows readers to understand me.

I currently have no clear solution to my own problem. It appears even my brainstorming capabilities have been limited by my mysterious affliction because I'm rapidly running out of the ability to finish this essay, lol.

I'll finish on this note: this is an ongoing effort to find a creative process that is sustainable and accessible for me. Perhaps as I share this process and my findings I can also help others. Perhaps you are someone who's always wanted to put pencil to paper (or text to screen), but you found the amount of work others sink into their impressive archives intimidating and insurmountable. Or maybe you love worldbuilding but have found yourself feeling like you're "wasting your time" working on lore and characters as opposed to writing about them, and you need a place to start that doesn't hit that pain point. Or maybe you've stressed out over the labyrinthine nested folders and hierarchies of your notes and find yourself thinking, "There has to be a better way to structure this."

I don't have all the answers. But I'm gonna try.