Worldbuilding 101: Getting geographical

Mountains, rivers, forests, fields… geography may seem like one of the more straightforward elements of worldbuilding. And it is, but this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put some thought into it.

Just like any other part of your world, your geography can tickle the reader’s imagination, create an absorbing atmosphere and even enhance your plot.

In this blog post, I’ll cover some of the ways you can flesh out your geography and make purposeful decisions to enrich your world and bolster your plot.

As with other worldbuilding blog posts, it’s important to point out that it’s not necessary to have all the answers to the points mentioned below before you start drafting – they’re just prompts to help you build your world along the way.

The key elements

Before we dig any further into the meaning behind our geographical choices, linking them to plot or how our characters might interact with them, it’s best to set out the core elements that you might want to consider when fleshing out the geography of your world.

In the context of this article, geography relates to the naturally occurring physical features of a world, as well as the climate. For me, the main things you want to concentrate on – at least right at the beginning of your world exploration – are:

• Water

• Climate

• Natural features

• Boundaries

By being purposeful with your choices for these elements, you can create a believable and interesting world that supports your novel’s theme, plot and atmosphere.

Water

Rivers, lakes, oceans, canals, glaciers…whatever way water shows up in your world, it will most likely play an important role. After all, for most lifeforms, water means life. And for sentient life, it can also mean trade, travel and agriculture.

Looking at our own world, there’s a reason so many of the world’s oldest and biggest cities are based near large water sources like rivers or on the coast. This is because having access to easy trading routes, or living on fertile land creates a perfect environment for humans to thrive. With increased trade, better travel and the means to sustain a large population, settlements can grow into large centres of wealth and culture.

Water, or lack thereof, can really shape a culture. A region strewn with rivers might create a culture of boat-faring people who are more comfortable on the water than they are land. On the other hand, a world where water is sparse might create a culture like the Fremen – a people who inhabit the desert planet of Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s Dune – for whom water is the most precious of commodities. For these people, spitting at someone is showing them great respect, because you are wasting bodily fluid for them.

In short, water can affect the various cultures of your world, the placement of settlements, the way your characters travel, and even what foods they eat!

Climate

Climate, like water, is one of the most important elements of your geographical worldbuilding. Temperatures, humidity, weather phenomena…they all play their part in forming geographical features that your characters interact with.

In a typical world, what hemisphere your action is taking place will dictate temperatures. In the Northern – the further north you go, the colder it’ll get, and the opposite is true in the Southern hemisphere. Altitude will also affect temperatures, and mountain ranges are great way to bring a range of temperatures to a warmer region. Temperatures can also be affected by being close to the coast, or even a river, with water and a sea breeze cooling the immediate area around it.

Levels of precipitation will affect your region in a huge number of ways, from whether the region can support life, to the local cuisine. A region that is prone to seasonal droughts could birth a nomadic culture, where the people are forced to move from area to area to ensure their livestock can feed or to avoid starvation themselves. Although the drawbacks of a lack of precipitation might be obvious, an abundance of rain or snow can bring its own challenges – floods or snow-ins can cut off settlements and trading routes, landslides or avalanches can be a threat to life and crops can be ruined, especially if the flood or snow is out of season.

The creatures and plant life – whether taken from our world or unique to yours – will have all adapted to suit the climate of your world. Huge, furry buffalo would not fare well in a desert, where water and vegetation is sparse and the temperatures soar. Likewise a lizard, who cannot warm its own body, might not do well in cooler climes.

Your people, too, will have adapted to the climate they originate from. Clothing, diet, religion, festivals, even the way days are scheduled can all be affected by the climate. Even in a technologically advanced world, these adaptations might still persist in the form of habit or tradition. Take the Mediterranean siesta, the tradition of taking a long rest over lunchtime, when the temperatures peak. These days you can still find office workers in modern workplaces with air conditioning persisting with their long lunch break - the idea is now entrenched in culture.

Overseeing all this, are the seasons. It could be four equal, temperate seasons, or it could be broken into dry and rainy seasons. Or you might have something like from George R R Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series where the world goes through years-long summers. These years of plenty, however, always give way to hard and harsh winters, that can also last for years. This affects how people live, with those in the north – who are hit worse by winter – living frugally during the summers, the threat of starvation and freezing temperatures always hanging over their heads.

Aside from choosing the logical aspects of your climate, think about how your choice of climate might reflect upon the atmosphere of the novel. Hot temperatures can create a stifling atmosphere and rain can bring a moody or morose feel. Big weather formations like storms, hurricanes, tornadoes and the like can really disrupt your plot, or add to the tension in the form of a ticking time bomb (a big, unavoidable event that the characters are being pulled towards). Likewise, a flood or snow-in can create tension by isolating a community and forcing characters together – a very popular device in horror and crime novels.

As we’re talking about fantasy or sci-fi novels, bear in mind any magic or technology that might affect the climate, for example, terraforming in Pierce Brown’s Red Rising series, which has made inhospitable planets fit for human habitation.

Natural features

These are elements that have developed naturally over the course of the millennia. We’re talking about mountains, forests, canyons, deserts, volcanoes, savannahs.... They can create variety and interest in your world, but they also have far more impact than this.

These features come about for many reasons and often interlink with climate and each other – the movement of tectonic plates might form a mountain range which might block the movement of rain clouds, meaning that the flat plains to the north of the range rarely receive rainfall, thus creating a desert. Therefore, when making decisions about what features to include in your world, remember to look them holistically, instead of in isolation.

Another thing to bear in mind when choosing natural features is how they might support the overall atmosphere or theme of your novel. For example, a desert might support a theme of loneliness, an open savannah one of freedom. Forests can be brilliant in creating a claustrophobic atmosphere, and mountains might add to a sense of wonder and magic.

The features of your world can also affect your plot, giving your characters advantages over the antagonist or setting obstacles in their way. For example, mountain ranges will affect travel – are some routes only passable on foot? – and large of bodies of water might provide protection or impede progress depending on the circumstances. In Jay Kristoff’s Empire of the Vampire, vampires can’t cross moving bodies of water, and so rivers take on extra significance, with characters racing to get over them to protect themselves from the vampire armies. By choosing geographical features that support your plot, you’re giving them more purpose and helping your future drafting self!

Natural features can also become cultural focal points. Mountains might be seen as the home of gods, springs could be revered as places of health and cleansing. Cultures that revere nature might protect forests, and sea-faring cultures might have a variety of traditions relating to the oceans and ocean-life.

Boundaries

Boundaries can be man-made lines between territories, or natural geographical features that mark changes in climate or landscape. Often the two will go hand in hand, with rivers, mountain ranges and forests often separating territories.

These are important in your world, especially if you are writing a novel where your characters must travel or the novel is more epic in scope. Boundaries mark change in some way, and together with the practical aspects of this (making sure changes in climate, landscape and cultures are reflected), you might want to think about how stepping over that boundary reflects your character’s inner journey. Think Samwise Gamgee from The Lord of the Rings, stepping out of the Shire for the first time – that one step is made bigger by going over the barrier from what he knows, to what he doesn’t, all made even more riveting because he is driven not by his own desire but by loyalty and friendship to Frodo.

Boundaries, therefore, can take on greater significance than simple lines on a map. They might invoke fear (a forbidden forest, for example, or the boundary to an enemy land) or awe, or perhaps represent freedom and a sense of adventure.

You’ll find that the worldbuilding you do around society and politics might play a bigger part in setting out your boundaries. The backstory as to why territories are laid out like they are (united tribes, warfare?) and how these have changed over time can be hugely useful in giving the boundaries meaning.

Logic

You might have picked out a key theme from all this: logic. Boring but sadly necessary, your geography needs to make sense. There needs to be rules, and those rules need to be consistent and unbreakable. By all means, turn our world’s rules on their heads – rivers run uphill! – but make sure that the rules remain on their heads – rivers don’t suddenly start running downhill!

Resources

If you’re stuck knowing where to put forests and river and mountains in your world, work backwards: what resources do your characters need? And what obstacles do you want to put in their way?

You might know that at some point your characters are going to have to journey on a river, then they’re going to need wood to build a raft or boat. That means you’re going to need some decent sized trees nearby. If you have a gun-slinging main character, where does he get is gunpowder from? Are your characters camping, and if so, what do they eat and how do they cook it?

If you have a strong idea of your setting, then you can work in the other direction: what natural resources are readily available to your characters? For example, if your story is set near a large forest then it follows that your people might be building their settlements out of the wood they take from this natural resource.

Make sure you don’t end up writing something you don’t want to! A world threaded with rivers might sound magical and wondrous, but it could mean your characters spend an inordinate amount of time on boats. If you don’t want to spend your time researching boats, then you might want to remove a few of those rivers and replace them with roads!

The types of resource nearby will dictate how your people live in a multitude of ways. Some examples are:

• A lack of wood and coal for fuel means that people burn animal dung to heat their homes

• A damp climate lends itself to large paddy fields, fuelling the population with rice

• A dormant volcanic region creates rich soil, perfect for farming. Over the centuries this has pulled in more and more people, so that the sides of the volcano are now covered by a sprawling city

• A rocky, mountainous region is impassable to vehicles, meaning the only way to get through them is on foot

• The rock is full of precious metal, so the general population of the area works in the mining industry

• Rivers have provided the perfect waterways to trade, meaning that the region has industrialised far quicker than its neighbours through shared resources and knowledge.

• Only certain trees produce the wood needed for magic wands. This means that there are huge forests of the trees, protected against deforestation.

Interference

Worlds will always bear the marks of the creatures that inhabit them. From the trails that animals carve through forests, to the burrows dug by desert mice, and insects that pollinate meadows, no world remains untouched. Sentient creatures, like humans, will make a bigger impact with settlements, farming and technology.

Forests may be cut down or cultivated to suit the needs of the population, meadows may be managed with livestock, transport routes can cut through the landscape, and refuse might clog rivers or build up in man-made pits. Even a population that is consciously trying to control their environmental impact will leave a trace – it’s unavoidable.

It’s worth taking how creatures – sentient and otherwise – have left their mark on the world, and how this might change the way your characters use the world. Simple examples of this are characters using animal trails to find their way out of a tangled forest, or travelling to a town they haven’t seen in years to find that the meadows surrounding it are now ploughed fields.

Taking your geography to the next level

I’ve already touched on ways that geography can affect the plot and build atmosphere, but I think this needs more emphasis. From the time it takes to travel between key locations, to ways it might help or thwart your protagonists, and touch on theme, try to be intentional with those geographic decisions. Like any narrative device, really make geography earn its keep.

It's all well and good to create a detailed world with interesting features, intriguing weather systems and unique microclimates, but try to look at your geography as you would any side character.

Say you have side character called Bertie. You absolutely love that Bertie’s first pet was a rat named Tassles, but does the reader need to know this? Does this fact build a rounder picture of Bertie; does it help us better understand his reasoning and motivations; does it contribute to the plot or his character arc? If the answer is 'no', then you probably don't need to include this fact, however fun.

Look at your geography in the same way. How is it helping this particular story? Is it contributing to the bigger picture about what you’re trying to say (the theme)? Is it playing an active part in the story? Are those weather systems adding to the tension and stakes?

I’m not saying that your geography needs to be front and centre stage, taking on the full burden of your plot, theme and character arcs, but by making choices that subtly support these elements, you’re creating a much stronger story.

Concentrating your efforts on the areas of geography that most closely affect your plot, characters and theme also helps you to prioritise your worldbuilding. There is little point working to nail down the specifics of a weather system that has no bearing on your story, for example. This saves you a lot of unnecessary effort, that could be better spent in drafting.

Final word

Geography can be one of the most fun and satisfying parts of worldbuilding. Especially if you're creating a map that goes along with it, it can really bring your imagined world to life. Although there might seem a lot of logic and more run-of-mill aspects to it, the important thing is to have fun and let your creativity loose!