Worldbuilding Pillars | Identifying Your World's Key Elements

One of the most nebulous, cerebral parts of worldbuilding is just figuring out what kind of universe it is you’re creating. What makes it unique, what inspired it, what’s its tone or vibe, all those things that can be really hard to actually explain. So far we’ve talked about all the different options for worlds you might create in terms of genre, or where they fall on scales like hard sci-fi vs soft sci fi.

But again and again we’ve needed to reinforce the fact that ultimately these labels will not fully encapsulate whatever it is you’re trying to build. “It’s fantasy” is technically an answer to what Middle Earth is all about, but it doesn’t quite capture the nuances of the world. So in this nice and brief episode of the Way of Worldbuilding I want to explain one method you might use to distill your world down into its core elements, tenets, pillars, whatever you wanna call them.

The things that make up the foundation of your world and ultimately mark it as something unique. Although let’s preface that by first reviewing why you might want to do this in the first place. That’s it, nice and easy in this episode.

Now I have a mind like a steel trap. But like, a steel trap that’s been on an Australian fishing trawler for a bit and got all banged up and generally abused. Like, it’ll probably hold but I wouldn’t wanna trust it with anything important.

And that’s a rough place to be starting from in a world building project. If you’re not familiar with this series, we’re not producing this guide in isolation, to serve as a case study we’re also in the early stages of creating our own fictional universe. That means at some point in the future as this project continues, I’m going to be saddled with a ton of different documents and notes and I will need some way to organize it.

We’ll have a lot more to say about this in the future. For now though, the only thing I really have is my original spark of an idea. But keeping that organized I think can be just as important.

This universe I’m creating, I might end up working on it for years, and it's natural that my idea will evolve and change and grow and will end up looking very different from how I first envisioned it. But there is a risk that my world might change, not because of any intentional choice on my part, but rather because I forgot or just maybe drifted away from my original idea more than I intended. If you’ve ever worked on a project over a long period of time, you probably understand how hard it can be to maintain a consistent vision.

So the main benefit to figuring out the core pillars of my world, is that if 5 years from now I feel kinda lost and I’m not sure if what I’m working on really fits in my universe, I have this kind of compass that I can fall back on to lead me to my original vision. And depending on how your own worldbuilding process looks and the nature of your project you might be handling all this unconsciously. During smaller projects produced by the Templin Institute, we never actually needed to write this stuff down.

They were limited enough in scope and timeframe where we could remember everything well enough. For a bigger project like this, that might not be the case. A lot of worldbuilding ultimately comes down to just “what feels right” and on a bigger long-term project, keeping track of these core pillars, might make that feeling easier to hold on to.

But a potentially even larger benefit to going through this process is that if you’re working as part of a team, this tool, this compass, can be used by everyone to keep the tone of your shared world consistent. And if someone new joins the team, you have this first easy step in bringing them up to speed on what your universe is all about. Over the course of this series the Templin Institute hopes to be working with multiple artists in bringing our world to life, so we’ll be including the core pillars of our world in any design brief we send out.

Will that actually make the work of an artist easier? I don’t know, we’ll find out later in this series. Okay, so with the benefits of figuring out your core tenets out of the way, what are the methods you might go about it.

And unfortunately this is one of those things that engineering students really hate and all those creative types with their excessive hair color really love: in this there are no right answers. There is no wrong way to make a world. But we did get a bit of a glimpse into how the professionals do it when Star Wars was launching its High Republic Era of storytelling.

Writers are constantly trying to hide the realities of their profession, that 90% of their time is spent crying in a bathtub staring at a blank title page on something that’s due in 6 hours, so they put out this bit of propaganda pretending that creative writing is actually a fun, inspiring exercise set to dramatic, tense, but ultimately non-threatening music. Now I wasn’t invited to that meeting, which you know, it’s their loss, so I can’ really speak to what’s going on in this footage. Here’s somebody, they turned the force into a pie-chart, this person is connecting some dots.

Who knows. But at one point, they seem to have conducted the same exercise that we’re talking about now, distilling Star Wars down to its core essence. And if you have any doubts that the foundational pillars of a world are important not only to its creators but also its audience, when this behind the scenes footage was released people were furious.

But that’s a video for another time. Instead, I'm looking at their method and it seems like they’re using the good ole, write a bunch of words on a whiteboard. That makes sense to me, but I’m gonna switch up the categories here.

Right now, at the beginning of the process, my world is just a bunch of swirling ideas in my head, vaguely resembling an angry beehive. But I think we can sort those angry bees into 3 basic categories. Inspirations, themes, and, let's call them tenets.

Together, these form our core pillars. The wording isn’t so important so much as what each category is trying to do. Inspirations is an easy one.

No fictional world exists that wasn’t inspired by something else. Things in this category might be other works in a similar genre, your own life experiences and interests, historical, mythological or cultural influences, and more likely than not, all these things merged together. Themes is a bit more complex.

This category is essentially trying to convey how the world makes you feel, what emotions and thoughts it is trying to evoke and does it have anything to say about important things like love, war, power, the human condition, whatever. And tenets are going to be the most diverse of the three, essentially all the unique components and fundamental principles that give your world its distinctive identity. Tenets might include a magic system, or some kind of unique technology.

Fantasy races like orcs, goblins, elves etc might fall into this too, especially if they’re some unique creation rather than a staple of the genre. Same thing with aliens in science fiction. So that to me is the most natural way to break down a fictional universe.

And it should be at least mentioned that your core pillars, once you’ve identified them, don’t need to be set in stone. As we mentioned your world is going to change as you develop it, and there’s no law that says you can’t swap around your sources of inspiration, your themes and tenets as you understand the nature of your world more and more. Nor should these categories be taken as an absolute, the borders between them and in which category a pillar makes the most sense, might be blurry at times so don’t worry too much about it.

But what method are you using to distill your fictional world down to its core pillars, or whatever you want to call them. Does your process look anything like mine? And if so, how did you decide to label your categories?

Next week we’ll be presenting the three options we’ve prepared that might become the world we’re creating as part of this series. In each video, we’ll be including a breakdown that covers their respective themes, inspirations and pillars. Our next immediate episode though, will be covering what makes a good setting.

Having covered some of basic fundamentals of worldbuilding, I’m now in a place where I have an idea of what I want to accomplish with my world. From there I can start thinking about elements it needs and look at some shared universes in popular culture that have succeeded, failed or struggled in this. Until then, let me know in the comments what method you’re using to organize your thoughts, and good worldbuilding.