How to Create a Believable World in Your Fiction

No matter what genre you choose to write in, the most important thing to do is to create a world that is relatable and realistic. I know this can sound quite impossible, especially if you are writing in a genre that is very outside of reality, like fantasy or even sci-fi. I promise you, though, it is something you can do if you put your mind to it.

My bestselling book, Birthright: Acquisition, is the first book in a series of books that take place in a very different reality than our own. The story is set 100 years in the future. Not just any future, an alternate timeline. One where there was a nuclear war, most of America is uninhabitable, and a dictatorship took over. Creating this world and navigating it took a lot of work. It took even more effort to make it believable.

It is important that you establish ground rules for your world, whatever world you are writing in. Once you do that you need to keep those rules consistent at all costs unless you have a plot that demands those rules change and if that’s the case you can’t do it abruptly.

For example:

In my book, women are sold as property to very wealthy men in order to have children for them when their wives are infertile.

The women are sold at auction and are chosen based on their rare genetic traits.

There is a dictatorship in place and the country is essentially an oligarchy. Only the upper 1% of people are the ruling class. Every other person is considered to be slaves (or more often) slave labor.

No one outside of the 1% is educated, able to read, write, do math, etc. Most of them are brainwashed into believing the dictator is some sort of God or just terrified not to follow the rules under threat of public execution.

The protagonist, Cordelia, is able to read and write, despite the fact that she comes from a slave labor camp and was bought at an auction by the love interest, Avery Ellington.

In a situation like this, when you have your protagonist able to read and write even though that’s not something they are supposed to be able to do you also have to fit in a believable reason why. Something which is eventually explained in the plot of the book when the reader finds out that Cordelia was not always part of the labor camps. She was born into one of the elite families and raised there long enough to be educated before being sent away.

Now, if we are talking about creating a believable atmosphere and environment, research is key. For my world, as previously stated, most of the country is uninhabited due to nuclear fallout. The best thing in my situation was to research what effects nuclear waste may have on the ecosystem, how long people can be within these conditions without permanent damage or death, and also how much of the country was covered by the nuclear fallout.

To keep it as realistic as possible I wrote that all of the major cities across the U.S were hit with nuclear missiles because that is the most likely thing to happen in a nuclear war. I was able to paint a bleak picture of the worst areas that are also inhabitable by people by gaining and understanding of what those areas would be like after an apocalyptic scenario.

I know that it may seem like telling someone to research it could be unhelpful if you’re writing a story on a planet that has nothing to do with earth but it does. You have to consider what the ecosystem is like and what creates an environment for sustainable life. Once you understand that you will be able to realistically create your own world, with your own rules, that are still relatable to your readers.

The last bit of advice I have when it comes to creating believable worlds is to read. A lot. Whatever genre you’re writing in, read a lot of books in that genre first. See what the author does in order to immerse you into that world and those settings. This isn’t giving permission to steal anything, but to take inspiration from those works and make it into your own story.

With plenty of time practicing, researching, and establishing the rules for your own story you should be creating vast, colorful new universes in no time.