How Setting can be Your Greatest Strength and Your Greatest Enemy

Told by a writer that absolutely loves worldbuilding but does too much of it.

The setting of a story is one of the most important aspects of a story and, depending on the reader, is sometimes more enticing and interesting than the characters themselves.

Let me explain.

People are people. The characters in stories (if they’re written well) are at heart, people like us, people we can relate to. But the setting is the thing that the writer gets to create out of whole cloth. We can throw whales, unicorns, and a post-apocalyptic Zombieland together if we want to. The setting of the story can be as fantastical as Star Wars or as mundane and recognizable as your backyard.

There are a few aspects that make a setting successful: believability, consistency, and actual world-building. If we writers can get these right then the setting will be a-ok.

1) Believability. Let’s start with what it isn’t. Believability doesn’t mean realism or being believable in our world — it means believable in your world. You’re creating a setting or world of your own to do with as you will and that’s a lot of power. And as the old adage goes, with great power comes great responsibilities. A world or setting has to have rules to be believable and those rules can be as loose or strict as you want them to be but they have to both be established and you should tell your readers what they are. If a world will explode if the tower over the monitoring pool gets destroyed then tell your audience! Same even for smaller things that connect to the plot, for example, if your characters are traveling from the Star of David City to the Supernova of David City via teleportation than you should tell the audience the limits (if any) on teleportation, how many people, the max distance, etc.

That brings me to my next point. Limits. Every world has its limits, be they physics or the borders of a magic system. If you have a soft magic system where the villain is drawing power from an infinite well of energy and can never get exhausted then it feels unfair with impossible stakes. If vice versa then, in direct opposition, it feels like there are no stakes. So be it money or magic make sure you establish limits to the propulsionary devices of…