How to Do SFF World-Building Without Destroying Your Novel's Pacing
Pacing is crucial to any story, and can be a challenge. When you have to explain and flesh out an entire universe at the same time, it’s easy to lose control of your story’s pacing as you find yourself writing lengthy explanatory passages or zooming through details of your universe that deserve more attention. You’ve got to keep the story moving, but you have to find room to flesh out the world that story takes place in. To get that balance right, you just need to keep four things in mind: 1. Make world-building feel natural. Don’t shoehorn world-building in, instead find organic moments to convey it; 2. Make it exciting. Don’t world-build via lecture and a fantasy version of a PowerPoint presentation—find ways to have your characters move through your world; 3. Make it a constant. World-building shouldn’t be a Very Special Scene you throw in every chapter or so. It should be embedded into the hustle and flow of your story; 4. Have a rhythm. World-building can be small or big, quiet or loud—mix it up with purpose and the constant alternation keeps each approach fresh.
About the Instructor:
Jeff Somers began writing by court order as an attempt to steer his creative impulses away from engineering genetic grotesqueries. He has published nine novels (including the Avery Cates cyberpunk series and The Ustari Cycle urban fantasy series) and over fifty short stories, including “Ringing the Changes,” which was selected for inclusion in Best American Mystery Stories 2006 and “The Little Birds,” published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in 2023. He writes about books for BookBub, the craft of writing for Writer’s Digest (which published his book Writing Without Rules), and everything else for Lifehacker. His tenth novel Five Funerals will be published by Ruadán Books in Fall, 2025. He lives in Hoboken with his wife, The Duchess, and their cats. He considers pants to always be optional.
