7 Books to Read about World Building

Hey you! I hope you are doing great. As we continue through World Building Wednesdays, I decided to compile a list of books to help writers and author become better world builders. You can read more about world building here. All of these books can be found on Amazon.

1. Creating Life (The Art of World Building Book 1) 

CREATING LIFE (THE ART OF WORLD BUILDING, #1) is a detailed how-to guide on inventing the heart of every imaginary world – life. With chapters on creating gods, species/races, plants, animals, monsters, heroes, villains, and even undead, it draws on the author’s quarter century of world building experience. Pointed questions, and an examination of answers and their repercussions, will help readers decide on goals, how to reach them, and whether they are even worth pursuing. Always practical, Creating Life will quickly improve the skills of beginners and experts alike, making a time consuming project more fun, easier, faster, and skillfully done.

Unlike other world building guides, the series discusses how to use your inventions in stories while balancing narrative flow with the need for explaining your world. Tailored examples illustrate this. Extensive, culled research on life forms is provided to classify and understand options without overwhelming world builders with extraneous details.

Storytellers, game designers, gamers, and hobbyists will benefit from seven free templates that can be downloaded and reused. CREATING LIFE will help your setting stand out from the multitude of fantasy and science fiction worlds audiences see. THE ART OF WORLD BUILDING is the only multi-volume series of its kind and is three times the length, depth, and breadth of other guides.

2. Characters And Worldbuilding: 50 Questions For Creatives (The Way With Worlds Series) 

Characters are the way people experience your stories, games, and more – and they’re unique expressions of your world. Making sure characters are part of your setting, bring people into their setting, and act believably is critical to good writing and worldbuilding.

This book is a helpful series of 50 questions, as well as follow-up exercises and more, to help you think about characters and setting. From goals and motivations to agency and history, this guide is here to help you think and explore!

Time to take a look at characters.

3. Worldbuilding For Fantasy Fans And Authors (Forging Fantasy Realms Book 1) 

Be you an established planner, pantser, or unsure new author, this comprehensive guide has you covered. Adopting a tools not rules approach, you’ll discover dozens of definitive worldbuilding tricks and strategies, including:

• Surveys showing what audiences want.
• Identifying ineffective, effective, and inspired worldbuilding.
• The ins and outs of immersion.
• Enhancing audience experience with fantasy conceits.
• The four Cs of worldbuilding.

“Quite simply, it’s brilliant. It’s got the depth of research of a PhD dissertation, with the scale and readability of an epic fantasy novel. This will appeal as much to readers of fantasy as it will to authors who are either just getting into fantasy writing or who’d like to sharpen and expand their skill set.”  –Dyrk Ashton, The Paternus Trilogy 

4. Complete Worldbuilding: An Author’s Step-by-Step Guide to Building Fictional Worlds

Overwhelmed by creating fantasy worlds?Lost in your world? Unsure where to go next?This box set of worldbuilding guides breaks the task into manageable chunks. By following a series of creative prompts, these books will guide you from idea, to full world.These guidebooks will help you to:

• Break the epic task of worldbuilding into easy steps
• Build a full and complete world with prompts you may not have thought of
• Tie your worldbuilding into your story to increase tension and conflict
• Bring your worldbuilding back to your characters to get your readers hooked

This set includes:30 Days of Worldbuilding: An Author’s Step-by-Step Guide to Building Fictional WorldsHow to Destroy the World: An Author’s Guide to Writing Dystopia and Post-ApocalypseFrom Sanctity to Sorcery: An Author’s Guide to Building Belief Structures and Magic SystemsGet Complete Worldbuilding today, and stop getting lost in your world.

5. The Art of Language Invention: From Horse-Lords to Dark Elves to Sand Worms, the Words Behind World-Building

An insider’s tour through the construction of invented languages from the bestselling author and creator of languages for Legendary’s Dune, the HBO series Game of Thrones and the Syfy series Defiance

From master language creator David J. Peterson comes a creative guide to language construction for sci-fi and fantasy fans, writers, game creators, and language lovers. Peterson offers a captivating overview of language creation, covering its history from Tolkien’s creations and Klingon to today’s thriving global community of conlangers. He provides the essential tools necessary for inventing and evolving new languages, using examples from a variety of languages including his own creations, punctuated with references to everything from Star Wars to Janelle Monáe.

Along the way, behind-the-scenes stories lift the curtain on how he built languages like Dothraki for HBO’s Game of Thrones and Shiväisith for Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World, and an included phrasebook will start fans speaking Peterson’s constructed languages. The Art of Language Invention is an inside look at a fascinating culture and an engaging entry into a flourishing art form—and it might be the most fun you’ll ever have with linguistics.

The Art of Language Invention includes a new chapter on phrases, specifically, word order, negation, question formation, pragmatic concerns, relativization, and subordination, providing a complete introduction to language creation and linguistics. Invented languages featured in the book now include Chakobsa from Legendary’s Dune, Trigedasleng (or Grounder) from The 100, Méníshè language from Motherland: Fort Salem and Ravkan from the Netflix series Shadow and Bone.  

6. Way With Worlds Book 1: Crafting Great Fictional Settings (The Way With Worlds Series) 

Creating fictional worlds is fun – but making memorable, effective ones is often challenging. How do you make something that doesn’t exist, make it real enough people enjoy it, and make sure it endures, grows, and keeps making sense to your expanding audience?

Way With Worlds offers you a helpful guide to being a better worldbuilder. From basic theories and principles to guide you, to intense discussions of sex, ecology, and culture, you’ll take a tour of the best ways to make places that never were. When you’re done, you’ll have a grasp of worldbuilding that will make sure your fiction is as memorable as fact.

In this book you’ll explore:

• Basic Philosophies Of Worldbuilding – Get the basics and gain a new viewpoint on worldbuilding.
• World Creation Essentials – What you have to think of to build your setting.
• Magic And Technology – Understand the differences, the similarities, and what they mean. Clarke’s law ahoy . . .
• Religion – Building religion presents challenges and opportunities – learn to face them and take them!
• Sex – Sex in the world’s you build is going to involve more than you think, because more than you may think is about sex . . .
• Species And Races – Creating species and races opens us up to traps of words and ideas we may not see – avoid them!
• Characters – Who are the people in your world? More than you may think . . .

7. On Writing and Worldbuilding: Volume I 

Writing advice tends to be full of ‘rules’ and ‘tips’ which are either too broad to be helpful or outright wrong. In On Writing and Worldbuilding, we will discuss specific and applicable ideas to consider, from effective methods of delivering exposition and foreshadowing, to how communication, commerce, and control play into the fall of an empire.

Thanks for reading I hope this list helps! Stay safe and remember:

Live. Love. Laugh.