Worldbuilding for Writing, D&D, and the World

I'm gonna give advice here on worldbuilding for writing. You can apply what I'm saying here to D&D and the world. It sounds like a lot, but it's a step-by-step journey. The first step is to learn how to imagine your world and its various details.<br><br>#1 Learn to Imagine<br><br>&#x200B;<br><br>*Learn to Imagine (Brainstorming)*<br><br>&#x200B;<br><br>The first step in worldbuilding is to sit down and imagine your world. It's what you're here to learn about. It's a good idea to brainstorm and get down as much information as you can about it. In this stage at first, anything goes and you can always go back and change things once you get to a certain point. This can be the most fun part of worldbuilding, but it should be quick. You want to have some good ideas to work with, but you don't want to spend forever brainstorming.<br><br>Why is this important? Because you're imagining your world and its people.<br><br>#2 Learn to See<br><br>&#x200B;<br><br>*Learn to See (Research and Planning)*<br><br>&#x200B;<br><br>Right now, your world isn't visible. Let's be honest, it's shadowy, mysterious, and hard to understand. It's like something you can't see, some dream. So the next step is to see your world, to make it visible and real. This is the planning stage. If you didn't do it in the brainstorming stage, be sure to do it now: divide your world up into regions and create a map for each region. Write down the people and their customs. This is the stage where you're starting to see your world and how it works.<br><br>#3 Learn to Look<br><br>&#x200B;<br><br>*Learn to Look (Mental Pictures and Visualization)*<br><br>&#x200B;<br><br>Usually the biggest problem is that you can't really visualize your world. You can't see it, and neither can your readers. The next stage is that you can see it, but you're not spending time there. Let's be honest, you can't live your life somewhere you can't see. So the next stage is learning to see your world. The goal here is to create mental pictures and to really see your world and its people. This is the stage where you're blending your imagination with visualization to shape your world into a real place. While you want to focus on creating a visual for your readers with this, you also want to make sure that you're seeing your world on your own and living in it.<br><br>#4 Learn to Live<br><br>&#x200B;<br><br>*Learn to Live (Life Experience and Inspiration)*<br><br>&#x200B;<br><br>The next step is living in your world. Life is a journey, not just a trip that you take to get at something; it's an ongoing trip, and you're walking through your world every day. You're going to have to figure out how to live in your world. How do your people live? How do they get food? What do they eat? How do they sleep? What are they afraid of? Basically, you want to understand how life works in your world and then live it. Try to live life like a person in your world. This is where your world shifts from this amazing place in your mind to a real place.<br><br>#5 Learn to Love<br><br>&#x200B;<br><br>*Learn to Love (Love Yourself, Your World, and Its People)*<br><br>&#x200B;<br><br>The final step is to learn to love your world and its people. If you're in love with something you want to protect it, you want to preserve it, you want to make it a better place, and you want to live there forever. You want to be constantly growing in that love and protecting it and fostering it and visiting it and living there and enhancing it. The final stage of worldbuilding is to love your world, not just because of how it looks but because of what it is, what it means, and what it's worth. When you get to this point, you'll stop worldbuilding and start storytelling because you're going to be living in your world and telling about your experiences.<br><br>Again, this is the journey of your life. It's your journey of living in your world, and it's your journey as you bring your world into existence. It's not something that you do one time and then you're done. It's something that you do over and over every day as you live in your world. You're going to see your world, you're going to live in it, and you're going to love it. And that's what brings it into existence. When you stop doing that, then it's not real anymore. When you're finished, you've created a real place to be. A world is a real place to be, a world is not a hypothetical place to be; it's a real place. It's a real place to be where you can live and walk and grow with other people you love.<br><br>&#x200B;<br><br>And that's it.