Worldbuilding for Masochists

Nov 20 2024 143 ep. 64 mins 594

Worldbuilding for Masochists Podcast artwork

A podcast by three fantasy authors who love to overcomplicate their writing lives and want to help you do the same.

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Episode 142: Law & Order (DUN DUN)

Nov 20 2024 80 mins

So once you've got a government, what can that government do? What does it regulate, and how is it, itself, regulated? Laws can be created for a lot of reasons, some good and some bad. Sometimes they protect a citizen's opportunity to do certain things, sometimes they present a block to those opportunities, and very often, they aren't applied equally and equitably across all of soc

Episode 141: More Perfect Unions

Nov 06 2024 84 mins

Government is a set of rules agreed upon, and politics is how a society determines those rules. So how do you create the systems by which civilizations negotiate those levers of power in your fantasy or sci-fi world? On the sliding scale of representation to authoritarianism, where do the civilizations in your world fall -- and why? What pressures have shaped society to behave in t

Episode 140: Practical Magic, ft. ROWENNA MILLER

Oct 23 2024 67 mins

As with the last two “back to basics” episodes, we thought we’d spend some time looking the thing that (usually, though there are exceptions) makes fantasy fantastical – the magic! How do we build magical systems, and what questions do we ask ourselves while doing so? Guest and former WFM co-host Rowenna Miller joins us to discuss how, exactly, we make magic! With magic bei

Episode 139: 2 Crunchy, 2 Curious

Oct 09 2024 77 mins

We’re spending a couple of episodes going back to the basics of worldbuilding, talking about the questions that it’s often fruitful to ask oneself when you’re doing this wild thing. Last time we did the physical world, so now it’s time for the world of people! What are the building blocks of a human life? (Or an alien one, or draconic, or elven, or whatever you've got?) Fro

Episode 138: Crunchy Questions

Sep 25 2024 71 mins

Every once in a while, it's good to go back to the basics. And for us, that means the basics of worldbuilding! When you're getting started out with a new project, building a world from the ground up, there are a lot of things you can take into consideration! This episode is not so much about finding the answers as figuring out how to ask the questions and what kinds of questions yo

Episode 137: Smile and Be a Villain, ft. CHLOE GONG

Sep 11 2024 67 mins

A villain may not have excuses for their behavior -- but they probably have reasons. How can worldbuilding feed those reasons? Antagonists are often those characters who are both the most willing and the most able to seize control of power structures and take advantage of their privileges. So what pressures in your world have created those structures, and how does your Big Bad mani

Episode 136: Live from WorldCon in Glasgow!

Aug 28 2024 62 mins

We were all in the same room! And that room was in Scotland! In this episode, your WFM co-hosts were able to record a special episode at WorldCon. We chat about ourselves, our works, the Traveling Light anthology, and our favorite components of a world to build. And then, we take some audience questions! (We apologize that some of them are a little hard to hear; they had a mic, but

Episode 135: Philosophical Acts of Translation, ft. KEN LIU

Aug 14 2024 72 mins

What can translation and transmission of ideas and stories over time teach us about a society -- and about storytelling? Guest Ken Liu joins us to talk about the intertwining of philosophy, imagination, and translation. As writers, we can never fully translate the story that plays out in our heads onto the page, because every reader will imagine something a little different. How do

Episode 134: Print The Legend: Weaving Myth and History into One, ft. NALO HOPKINSON

Jul 31 2024 78 mins

Where does mythology come from? How does it tie us together? What does one world's mythology tell us about its people, how they view themselves, and their interactions with the divine? We speak to Nalo Hopkinson about myths, mythologies, folklore, and the stories that we tell each other as well as the stories we invent. [Transcript TK] Our Guest: Nalo Hopkinson is the award-winning

Episode 133: The Devil in the Details, ft. M.J. KUHN

Jul 17 2024 62 mins

A perennial question that our listeners often have is: How do you organize your worldbuilding? Do you have templates to use? Charts to fill out? Once you start imagining all your fantastic choices, how do you keep track of them all and then weave them along with your plot? Well, the answer to all of this, as with so many writing questions, is "do what works for you" -- but how do y