Worldbuilding for My Fantasy Novel (I Created a “Glossary”)

Welcome back to another blog! My name is Megan, and I’m a professional writer and editor, and a published author.

I recently published this video about my experience writing my first fantasy novel

… and I didn’t think it was going to do well. I was wrong. You guys loved this video, which is great because I loved recording it!

I mentioned in that video that I created what I’m calling a “glossary” for all of my worldbuilding—which, I learned, you have to do before you start writing a fantasy or sci-fi novel.

I think all books, to some degree, need “worldbuilding.” I think this is even more vital for fantasy novels because we’re often dealing with magic, lengthy histories, complex relationships, and sometimes entire universes that are completely fictitious. 

Everyone has their own process. I’m going to share my personal approach and how I went about creating this glossary. If you’d prefer the video version of this content, here you go:

How I split up my worldbuilding glossary

As it stands, I have divided my glossary into a few key sections.

1. The races

The first section details the various magical races that we’ll meet. I have nine, and I don’t think I’ll add more. I wrote little biographies for each of them, expanding on details like their histories, their reputations, where they live, who their rulers are, what their religions are (if they have one), their politics, how big their populations are, and on and on. Another big part of this? Their powers. What magic are they capable of? What are the boundaries of that magic?

Someone in the comments section of my original video left some awesome feedback about this. They said:

I also write fantasy, but I am a history teacher by trade. When I teach my students about different civilizations, I use the GRAPES acronym to highlight the important aspects (Geography, Religion, Achievements, Politics, Economics, and Society). I started using this with world-building and it made such a difference in making my settings really come alive and have a lot of depth.

I loved this idea and it helped me really fill out the details of some of my races—because religion, for example, was something I hadn’t considered. So, thank you to the person who left this comment!

2. The settings

The next section in my glossary is the various settings. I currently have six but I think I’ll probably add more to make this content a little more rounded out. I shared in my last video that I even sketched a map. A very rough map. But a map, nonetheless. It doesn’t only show the boundary lines between territories. I’ve also marked mountain ranges, forests, roads, and bodies of water. In addition, I jotted down who lives in each of those territories. 

3. The characters

Next up is a list of my main and supporting characters. I have 17 that I wrote biographies for. To be honest, I struggled a bit with some of the supporting characters because I didn’t know if they were important enough to expand on to this degree. But the ones that I selected, I think they’re important because even if they’re not present throughout the entire novel, they are all, in some way, important to the plot. 

This section was very eye-opening for me because this was where I really realized how much I was missing. In particular, I realized I hadn’t clearly enough defined different characters’ motivation. Every character wants something, even if it’s small, and even if we don’t see it a lot in the story. They’re still motivated by something.

There has to be a reason that every character does everything. I also have to be able to explain, even just to myself, why they didn’t already achieve whatever it is they’re motivated by.

I spent a lot more time getting to know my characters very closely, and what I learned is that in some cases, they wouldn’t do what I imagined them doing.

For example, I planned to have my female protagonist pretend to be human, even though she wasn’t, and she was simply hiding her powers.

But as I wrote her biography, her story, I realized…she would never hide her powers! That’s ridiculous. She’d be proud of her powers. So I scrapped that idea.

Instead of getting her personality to fit the plot that I had outlined early on, I established the character traits, and then looked at how they would behave and react.

That’s not to say taking the other approach, doing the opposite, wouldn’t work. It just didn’t work for me. I needed to understand what type of person she is, and then use that to build out the story.

4. The history

Armed with all of that information, I wrote another section on the history of this continent where my story takes place, which brings us up to the time that the novel opens. In other words, how did we get here? For example, I have my bad guy. We don’t meet him until toward the end of the novel when he finally attacks the benevolent races. I used this section of my glossary to flesh out why he’s evil, because he wasn’t always that way. What happened to him to make him so angry and vindictive? What nonsense was he up to before we met him? 

Now, some of these details might not even make it into my novel, but I realized I can’t write what’s going to happen to these magical races and how they react to things without knowing what they’ve already been through.

I had planned to stop there and then go back to my outline of the novel. I always do my outlines in bullet points and like to be very structured and organized.

However, when I was writing about the history, it was in paragraph form, and I just let myself write, like I was writing a story. Surprisingly, this worked well for me. This is a new genre for me, so I’m staying open-minded to approaches I haven’t tried before, and I started writing what I guess we could call a synopsis, in paragraph form.

I imagined it in my head like a movie and also like a game. Maybe a video game. If this creature does this, how does that creature respond?

This was challenging. There were certain plot points I already knew I wanted to include, but one of the reasons I knew fantasy would be challenging for me is that my stories, in the past, have tended to be very linear. That’s the word my husband uses and it’s perfect. Linear.

My books have never been super complicated or a lot to chew on.

I don’t think this is a bad thing. I’ve read books with simple plots and loved them. Sometimes, you don’t want to read something that’s going to melt your brain.

But that’s not the case here. For the first time, I want to write something that’s really complex and twisted.

What I’ve done in writing this synopsis is I’ve tried to weave in other stories and sub-plots, to make things deeper and richer.

In my book, the bad guy comes back because he wants this magical object. But, 500 years ago, he didn’t even know this thing existed. Instead, he was chasing a different object.

The presence of both objects combined is going to make it harder for him to achieve his goal.

If I look at fantasy movies and books that I’ve watched and read, they’re always like that. Very complex. Very twisty.

I just finished the ACOTAR series and loved it. If you don’t like it, that’s okay. I loved it. The smut. The men. My god. Good stuff.

Anyway, it was never as simple as, “We need to find the cauldron,” which, if you’ve read the books, you know what I mean. 

Rather, it was, “We need to find the cauldron which is going to be really hard because it’s located in this place which is full of these creatures who are awful because they did XYZ, and the location is also heavily protected by magic because hundreds of years ago, ABC happened and so-and-so did this, this, and that.” And on and on and on.

It wasn’t so complex that you couldn’t follow, but it also wasn’t, “We need to get the cauldron. Let’s go!”

Fantasy is like any genre. There has to be the thing the protagonist wants, and reasons why it’s so hard for them to obtain it. Conflict. Stakes. Tension.

The word count isn’t what dictated how much time I spent on this glossary, but for context, it ended up being about 20,000 words. I might keep adding to it. It’s my little encyclopedia, my reference guide. I will flip back to this while writing this entire novel.

There is some overlap. For instance, I talk about each race and its powers. Then, I’ll have a character where I again talk about their powers, which I already did when I talked about their race. There’s a bit of that but I liked it because that repetition just helped me become more familiar with all of these details. 

Here’s a recap of all the sections:

  1. Races
  2. Characters
  3. Settings
  4. History (how did we get here?)

What’s next?

Well, I’m going back to Save the Cat! I mentioned in my last video that I’m following this to a tee. I already referenced this loosely when I was writing my synopsis, and I’ve read some of this book so many times that it’s ingrained.

But I want to be really sure I’m hitting the 15 plot points that this book talks about. I think this approach to writing a novel is amazing. So next, I’m going back through the glossary and, in particular, the synopsis, and I’m going to do an outline in bullet points of the novel, calling out the different points that the Save the Cat! blueprint outlines to make sure I’ve covered all of them in detail.

I hope you found this helpful, and thank you for continuing to join me on this journey! See you next time. xo