World-building is not just for genre. It paints the interior of your story by using understanding.
Authors of all kinds hear about the rewards of world-building. The construction answers fundamental questions about how a story’s world gets along every day. World-building isn’t restricted to location or a time frame. though that’s the easier part. World building evokes the powers of background and backstory, the kind of writing that’s almost impossible to do without narrative prose.
Sure, you want to hear your people speak. Yourself, even, when you write a memoir. Characters, while you’re fleshing out that memoir, or creating a novel or short stories. But you go beyond dialogue to build your world. Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabrial Garcia Marquez, tells its love story across acres of dialogue-free pages. Out of more than 500 pages, fewer than 50 have dialogue.
But oh, what a rich world Marquez built. You get majesty, sweep, an arch tone — the knowing voice that readers learn to trust. Dialogue delivers the sparkle, but it’s narrative that does the heavy lifting to bring the story structure into view. You build worlds with the voice of telling. Then you populate that world with scene and dialogue.
Much more than dialogue
If your early work leans hard on dialogue and people acting within scenes, we may not understand your world enough. Readers might pause and say, but why? If you’re writing your first piece of nonfiction, you can feel more confident about our patience when you tell us how your world works. So instead of having to discover chapter by chapter what those things really mean, you lay the rules out for how your universe works.
Authors and readers sometimes believe that world building doesn’t apply to a contemporary or modern story. World-building is for every story, to ensure we know what makes sense. Fantasy or speculative fiction can supply powers to characters. This is the spell that they use. It’s only the first steps when you build a story and you tell us “that building’s there,” and this is the transport that people use. And here’s how money and jobs operate. Your people wear this, eat that, worship there. All best done in narrative, for most of us.
Nonfiction narrative, memoir, needs world building. In particular this is true when the story time is decades and decades ago. In nonfiction, so long as you’re not giving away anything that robs your story of its suspense tension, I say go ahead and build the world.
Early in my memoir Stealing Home, I explained my emotional world: why I was so anxious about being a divorced father, taking a son out on the road for a two-week baseball trip. You would think I’d look forward to it. How could something so sweet go wrong? As it turned out, the trip was going to have to be perfect, if it would achieve all I needed. Structuring a world goes right down to the emotional foundations. Use narrative to lift the beams and stucco the walls.
