How Detailed Should My Worldbuilding Be? | Dear Writer # 22
101 Writer Questions Answered!
I'm having an issue with my world. It is fairly modern, international, and interlinked, but in the real world, you have 196 countries with far more ethnicities and sub-groups, political factions, etc. I don't want to be in the business of shooting off a bunch of names of countries that never come up again because I feel like it would be obvious that they're just generic "Republic of X, next to Emirate of Y," etc. Yet there are also obviously going to be cultural groupings, a la the Scandinavian countries, the -stans, etc.
Normally this might be alright - just don't talk about them until they're needed, right? Unfortunately, I've started myself in a narrative hole by having an Olympics-style convening of nations and want to introduce the scale of the world I'm building without it seeming like they exist in a vacuum, with no influence on global politics.
What's the best way to pull this off without writing a time-consuming and complex history? How relevant is your average country that I would need to correctly reference their relationship with other countries in considering geopolitics, or do you think it would be okay to leave the "big game to the big kids", so to speak?
Dear Writer,
I don't think you've written yourself into a corner, here.
You're raising two essential questions which we'll deal with in order.
First: "Do you need to actually carve out all the details of the world you're building?"
You don’t.
You must carve out the illusion of detail and depth sufficient to serve your story.
For some authors, this actually means doing a lot of hard work worldbuilding. Others—most, really—create the illusion without doing all the work.
Second: "How much of my worldbuilding do I need to show to make it believable?"
That depends on a lot of factors and how they work together in your story. But the guiding principle should always be story first.
Your audience doesn't care about your worldbuilding until they care about the story: the characters, their motivations, and what actions they do or do not take.
Once the audience cares about the characters and their story, they're more willing to show interest in some of the other details of the story world.
On the specifics of your issue: Just because it's an Olympic-scale event doesn't mean you need to take fifty paragraphs explaining each nation, what their flag and their people look like, etc.
This is where "telling" comes in handy and why "telling" isn’t objectively worse than "showing."
In such a scene, you focus the "narrative camera" onto the narratively-significant details of the scene: the nation the protagonist and antagonists are from, for example. You show those details because they matter.
For the non-essential nations, a passing reference or a summary paragraph will suffice for capturing the sense of scale of the event without bogging down the audience with vestigial details.
Best,
DRM
DANIEL RODRIGUES-MARTIN is the author of books, articles, essays, poems, reviews, and countless rants since 2004. His debut novel, GODDESS FROM THE MACHINE, earned a Kirkus Star and is available from most major carriers.