World-building Techniques ALL Writers Should Steal From Speculative Fiction

From 'The World-building Collection' with Amy Shearn

Amy Shearn

and

The Forever Workshop

Sep 03, 2025

World-building Matters: What ALL Writers Can Borrow From Speculative Fiction

Hi, Forever Workshoppers! Welcome to The World-building Collection with Amy Shearn.

In these weekly lessons, we’ll explore what speculative fiction can teach writers of all genres about world-building, imagination, and keeping readers hooked, using examples from a variety of both genre and literary fiction.

Then we’ll practice using these techniques with writing prompts and exercises that will help you to build vivid and memorable fictional worlds.

And by the end of September, you’ll have a whole array of new ways incorporate imaginative world-building and subtle speculative elements into your writing.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

Lesson 1: World-building Techniques ALL Writers Should Steal from Speculative Fiction
Lesson 2: Don’t Make This Monstrous Mistake in Your Fiction
Lesson 3: Your MFA Lied to You About Tropes — Here’s The Truth
Lesson 4: How to Craft Weirdly Compelling Fictional Worlds

I hope this course is a fun way to welcome more imagination and play into your writing life (and maybe, while we’re at it, to chip away at the frequently artificial border between “literary” and “commercial” fiction).

Today’s lesson is free to all subscribers. Paid subs will get a new lesson from Amy every Wednesday in September

Literary VS Speculative? Why Not Both?

I’ve always been a big reader, and started writing at an early age. In my early twenties I got my MFA in fiction writing from the University of Minnesota, where the long cold winters can really help you to stay focused on your creative work. I absolutely loved the faculty I worked with and my time in graduate school – three years of writer camp? Yes please! – but I acknowledge that we studied a pretty narrow range of work, from the literary to… other literary. I can’t imagine what would have happened had someone brought a sci-fi or fantasy story in to workshop – even stories that verged on the romantic were likely to be scoffed at. (Another student once dismissively called my work “that kind of stuff women like to read”... I mean, #goals, but he definitely wasn’t saying it in a nice way.)

While those of us who attended old-school MFA programs may have received some dismissive ideas about genre fiction, the truth is that writers of all kinds can learn a lot of craft elements from fantasy, sci-fi, and the like.

These distinctions can be so porous, too:

Is Colson Whitehead’s novel Zone One literary fiction or a zombie horror novel?
Helen Oyeyemi often includes supernatural elements in her books, but the writing is literary and her books marketed as such.
And hey, remember Hamlet? Was that not a GHOST STORY?

So on and so forth…

For our purposes, I’m proposing that there are some elements of what’s loosely considered speculative fiction that can be useful in any literary work, and we’ll be looking closely at each of them throughout this workshop.

But first, a little bit about me:

A quick introduction

Hi there! I’m Amy Shearn, your Forever Workshop instructor for the month.

I’m the author of five novels, and while they’d all be categorized on the literary-to-upmarket-fiction spectrum, many of them have borrowed elements of the surreal or the supernatural – for example, my second novel, The Mermaid of Brooklyn, features, you guessed it, a mermaid (from the East River, naturally), and my third novel Unseen City is a literary ghost story.

I love talking about books and writing, and helping writers to find their way into their particular stories; I’m lucky to work 1:1 with writers, run writing retreats, and teach for several writing workshops, including Writing Co-Lab, an experimental teacher-run cooperative I helped found. I live in Brooklyn, where I love taking long walks, finding odd corners of the city, and bringing home way too many books of all genres to my apartment’s overstuffed bookshelves.

And I’m excited to talk in these four lessons about what any writer can borrow from speculative fiction.

Ready? Let’s get started!

World-building Always Matters

Picking up a speculative fiction novel, if you’re not used to the genre, can feel a bit like walking into somebody else’s dream. There you are, in your local bookstore, flipping through a novel everyone seems to love and you’re like, wait what? There’s… fairies? Or vampires? Or ghosts? And we’re… on another planet? Or in the deep past? Or the distant future?

Speculative fiction writers know that they need to do some really intense world-building if they’re going to convince you to care about their creations. Often, this involves detailed descriptions of the time and place in which the book is set. Think about Hogwarts and Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter books; or Middle-earth in the works of JRR Tolkien; or Ursula K LeGuin’s Earthsea. Because the writers were setting these stories in fantastical lands unlike ours, they have to establish just what in the Arrakis is happening right away. A spell must be cast from the first page.

This is the beginning of a little book you may have heard of, called The Lord of the Rings, by JRR Tolkien:

When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton. Bilbo was very rich and very peculiar, and had been the wonder of the Shire for sixty years, ever since his remarkable disappearance and unexpected return. The riches he had brought back from his travels had now become a local legend, and it was popularly believed, whatever the old folk might say, that the Hill at Bag End was full of tunnels stuffed with treasure.

And so on.

The details let us know we’re in a fantasy realm. I mean, there’s the idea of tunnels stuffed with treasure, very Arabian Nights-core. Additionally, the word choice alerts us to a reality unlike our own: the names and place-names; the numbering system (eleventy-first!).

The Lord of the Rings is all about that world-building. Famously, Tolkien went balls-to-the-wall (that’s a technical term) when it came to crafting Middle-earth, from its geography and history to its languages and cultures. The deep fictional past makes it feel, in its way, real. The lush descriptions of the hobbits’ houses and life in shire are like travel literature to some part of Scotland only your fanciest friend knows about.

Starting right in the middle of things is a great way to draw in the reader, but there’s also something to be said for situating the reader a bit before immersing them in the wildest elements of a fictional reality.

Let’s look at another example, from the beginning of Sarah J Maas’s blockbuster romantasy novel A Court of Thorns and Roses, which is set in a world full of evil fairies:

The forest had become a labyrinth of snow and ice.
I'd been monitoring the parameters of the thicket for an hour, and my vantage point in the crook of a tree branch had turned useless. The gusting wind blew thick flurries to sweep away my tracks, but buried along with them any signs of potential quarry.
Hunger had brought me farther from home than I usually risked, but winter was the hard time.

What do you notice about this opening?

What I notice is: no fairies. Nothing supernatural at all, in fact. Someone is hunting in a snowy forest, and she is very hungry. That’s practically the opposite of supernatural – as real and as corporeal as it gets. I can imagine a snowy forest. And yet, there’s definitely a sense that we’re not in the world I live in, not exactly. Who hunts alone for food, in the winter? I immediately think I’m either in the past, in some sort of survival situation (I watched too much Yellowjackets, I admit it), or in, perhaps, a fairytale? And something about the language suggests the world of a fairytale rather than, say, contemporary Cleveland – “labyrinth;” “thicket;” “quarry.” There’s something a bit formal about the diction: “Hunger had brought me farther from home than I usually risked” doesn’t sound like how anyone I know talks.

In other words, the author is easing the reader into the world of the book. The opening setting is somewhat realistic, operating according to familiar laws. The narrator seems to know the world well, which in turn makes the reader feel that this:

must be a character with a life off the page, and
must be a world that exists.

Building the reader’s trust is important if you’re about to convince them that the narrator might fall in love with a sinister fairy.

And at the same time, the syntax, rhythm, and diction of the prose signal to the reader that we’re in a bit of a surreal setting, or certainly that we’re out of time – that this is taking place a long time ago, or in a different dimension than ours.

But what if you’re not writing fantasy, or anything speculative at all?

Then you can skip world-building, yay!

Okay, sorry, actually, no. And I have to say, world-building is the thing I often see missing in my students’ writing, especially in early drafts. Characters will float around scenes. I’ll finish reading a piece and not be able to tell you where or when it was meant to take place. This can make it hard to fully relate to the characters, or to really lose oneself in the story. Realistic fiction needs world-building, too.

This is a longish passage, but give it a read:

She stood at a window in the largest of the rooms – the room which, until recently, had been her mother’s bedroom, but was now to be the Barbers’ sitting-room – and stared out at the street. The afternoon was bright but powdery. Flurries of wind sent up puffs of dust from the pavement and the road. The grand houses opposite had a Sunday blankness to them–but then, they had that every day of the week. Around the corner there was a large hotel, and motor-cars and taxi-cabs occasionally came this way to and from it; sometimes people strolled up here as if to take the air. But Champion Hill, on the whole, kept itself to itself. The gardens were large, the trees leafy. You would never know, she thought, that grubby Camberwell was just down there. You’d never guess that a mile or two further north lay London, life, glamour, all that.

Look at how much information this paragraph, from the first page of Sarah Waters’ novel The Paying Guests, packs in.

The setting is described precisely, from deep within the protagonist Frances’s point of view, telescoping outwards (as her worldview will, throughout the novel), from innermost chamber all the way to the glitter of the big city. From the details shared – there’s a “sitting-room,” the roads are dusty, motor-cars are rare – we gather we’re in the early 20th century.

We also learn that a once intimate space of their home is going to be let to outsiders. Like the neighborhood itself, a liminal space between a “grubby” area and the dazzle of London, Frances’s household is suspended between socioeconomic classes – a large lovely home that the family needs to rent out part of in order to survive financially.

We learn that there is an air, in this neighborhood, of blankness, and of keeping to one’s self. Soon enough in the novel we learn that this has been Frances’s life too, until the lodgers come and shake things up. Frances is sheltered, as if trapped inside, describing the world as it appears from her window – to her, London is life, and also, vaguely, “all that.”

As for the prose itself, Frances’s thoughts interrupt the description several times. She notes that this room used to be her mother’s bedroom; she reflects that the houses on the street always have a “Sunday blankness;” she thinks about how you’d never know that there were lively things happening nearby.

As we read this, we sink into this syntax; these sometimes complex sentences. There’s a patient pace that reflects both how Frances lives and how the plot of the novel will unfold. We’ll see only as much as Frances knows, and there’s a lot that she wilfully doesn’t know. Everything the reader needs to know is encapsulated in that opening, though you don’t quite realize it until the ending of the book – a deft trick on behalf of the author.

This opening description contains so much information about setting, but that’s not all that’s involved in world-building. We also learn about the protagonist’s relationship with the setting, and how other characters in the book might perceive the setting as well. We’re introduced to the rules of the reality of this book. In a science-fiction novel, that might look like establishing what planet we’re on and what the natural laws of that planet are like. In a realistic novel, it’s actually pretty similar. Sure, we know we’re on Earth but – when? Where?

Waters’ novel is historical, but guess what babes? Every novel will be historical some day. Even if your book is set in 2025 Brooklyn, New York – a time and place I know all too well – I want to know what neighborhood, and the characters’ relationships with said neighborhood, and what kind of building they live in, and what their relationship to their rent is, and what they do for work and who their friends are and what they eat and what they wear and how much time they spend engaging with technology – just like you would weave all those details into a novel set in 1920, to establish the era and setting.

Show Us Your World!

I don’t know why writers rush through or skip this step because honestly, it’s the funnest. Imagine the world. Manipulate the reader. Describe it. Staging each scene. Vladimir Nabokov, problematic queen, suggested drawing maps as you go.

Process-wise, keep in mind that this doesn’t all have to happen in the first draft. When I’m drafting a new work of fiction, I’ll sometimes leave myself a little “TK GREAT LUSH DESCRIPTION HERE” note, to deal with later. But it will help you to fully understand your story, your characters, and your plot, if you can immerse yourself in the world you want to immerse your readers into.

Exercise: Set the Scene

Prompt #1: Draw a picture or a map of the world in which your story is set. It doesn’t matter if it’s a “good” drawing, but include as much detail as you can.
Prompt #2: Write a letter, from the point-of-view of your protagonist, to someone who has never seen where the protagonist lives. Have your protagonist describe their home in as much detail as possible. Make sure to keep it all from within their POV.

✍️ Share your setting descriptions below ✍️

And/or tell us about your favorite fictional world (whether it’s realistic, fantastical, or anywhere in between)!