Gillian Bronte Adams writes YA epic fantasy novels, including the award-winning Of Fire and Ash and The Songkeeper Chronicles. She loves strong coffee, desert hikes, and trying out new soup recipes on crisp fall nights. Her favorite books are the ones that make your heart ache and soar in turn. When she’s not creating vibrant new worlds or dreaming up stories that ring with the echoes of eternity, she can be found off chasing sunsets with her horse, or her dog, Took. Gillian loves to connect with readers online through her website and Instagram.

Have you ever read a book where the worldbuilding just seemed to come to life? Where it felt like a place you should be able to find on a map and road trip to visit because every detail felt so real, so true, that surely it couldn’t have just sprung up out of the author’s mind?

Whether you’re setting out to write fantasy, historical, sci-fi, or contemporary fiction, worldbuilding is an important skill to master. Because it’s not just creating magic systems or deciding how your superheroes got their powers, it’s also stage design. It’s building a set and dressing it with props to create a sense of atmosphere that helps your story come to life and feel real to your readers. Authentic.

But how do you do it? How do you build a fantasy world that feels grounded in reality? Or create a futuristic sci-fi setting that bleeds off the page? Or dream up an imaginary town for your contemporary novel that readers can’t help but want to move to?

If you look up the word “authentic” in the Merriam Webster online dictionary, you’ll find that it carries the connotation of being genuine, trustworthy, and true to itself. And that’s the definition I want you to hold in your head as we dive into a couple tips to help enhance the authenticity of your worldbuilding.

1. Ground your setting in time to make it feel lived in

I don’t just mean selecting a specific time period for your story (like how Stranger Things takes place in the 80s) but actually grounding your story in time so that readers feel its effect on your setting. The last thing you want is for your storyworld to feel like it sprang to life the first time it appeared on the page, so that everything is new and fresh and shiny and completely unstained.

Why? Because we’re used to experiencing the effects of time and aging on our world, and when that is missing, something doesn’t feel quite right. We know that things break down. We live in a world where you can visit the ruins of ancient cities, pick fossils up out of riverbeds, and wander through junkyards filled with rusted cars with trees growing up through them.

Over time, buildings weather, swords lose their edges, paint starts to chip, silver tarnishes, and clothes show wear and tear. In fact, one of my favorite facts that I learned from the behind the scenes of The Lord of the Rings films is that the costume designers went to great efforts to create beautiful garments for the actors to wear, and then, they intentionally aged them. They stained the costumes, spattered them with mud, stressed the seams, frayed the hems, all to make the clothes feel lived in.

You can do the same thing when you are building your storyworld, settings, and props.

Another way to think about it is adding a sense of history to your world and the relationships between your characters, because wear and tear inevitably comes with a story. Imagine the hole in the wall left when your brother tripped and accidentally punched his fist through the sheetrock, or the tea cup with a crack that you save because it was given to you by your grandmother, or the massive oak tree out in the yard that grew around an old fence post until the bark practically swallowed it.

Or the magical scorch mark left on the castle turrest from the spell your great great grandmother cast to overthrow the evil sorcerer who ruled the kingdom over a hundred years ago.

You see what I mean?

Grounding your story in time can add a unique flavor to your setting, enhances a sense of history and authenticity, and makes your world feel lived in.

2. Ground your story with limitations

We all know what it feels like to be exhausted after a long day, right? Or how you can feel your temper fraying when you skipped lunch and suddenly it’s three o’clock, and you’re hangry? We’re accustomed to living in a world with limitations. Cars eventually run out of gas, batteries need to be recharged, cell signals drop, we need to sleep, and if you don’t drink your coffee fast enough, it won’t be hot anymore. (Honestly, is there anything worse than room temperature coffee?)

When you’re establishing the rules for how your storyworld works, it’s important to build in limitations for the various elements you add, whether that’s resources, technology, knowledge, kills, magical powers, etc.

Otherwise, you run the risk of your story feeling like an action movie where the main character somehow never runs out of bullets.

After a while, it won’t feel realistic, because it doesn’t mesh with our experience of the world.

Over the years I spent working with horses, I learned that tack (saddles, bridles, etc.) needs cleaning and conditioning. Over time, leather dries out in the sun and rain and starts to crack. Eventually, it will weaken and can break or fail more easily. That’s a real world limitation. But when I wrote my epic fantasy series The Fireborn Epic where there are magical breeds of horses, I decided to add a magical element to that real world fact. Because my main female character rides a firebreathing horse, her gear experiences additional wear and tear and she has to treat it with a special oil to make it fire resistant.

If she runs out of oil, that fire resistance wears off, which could leave her exposed. Not only is that a fascinating worldbuilding element, but it can also up the stakes of my story if she winds up in a position where she can’t treat her gear and is suddenly at greater risk in a fight.

So, write archers who run out of arrows, space ships that need to refuel, wizards who do odd jobs to pay rent, and royal bakers who have to get creative when the temperamental queen requests a pie with fruit that’s out of season. Give us characters who don’t know everything about how the magic system works, technology that doesn’t do exactly what’s needed, and only so many hours in the day so your characters have to choose how they spend them.

Set limitations on the grand scale—“magic always comes with a price”—and on the small—put what your character needs just out of their reach.

Why? Because by establishing limitations in your worldbuilding itself, you can create organic conflict in your story in a way that will feel authentic to your readers.

3. Ground your story in the little details

People tend to assume that fantasy writers can just make up whatever they want. Once they say it, it can be fact for their fantasy world. And to some extent, that is true. But I have found that the more little threads of authentic detail that I can weave into a story, the more trust I build with my readers, and the more they are then willing to let their imaginations stretch along with mine.

The more I’m writing in a setting I’m unfamiliar with—whether that’s desert, mountains, oceans, big city, a specific time period, culture, way of life, etc.—the more important it is to go hunting for those little details that will help bring it to life. Not just sights and sounds but tastes, smells, flavors, and those intangible facts about a setting you just can’t dream up on your own.

Sometimes, that means thinking outside the box when it comes to research. Of Sea and Smoke takes place partially in a jungle setting, and I soon found myself reading reports on more modern jungle warfare. Not everything was applicable to my medieval-ish era story, but I did discover some interesting details, like how because the thickness of the jungle inhibits sightlines, chance encounters between enemies are a significant threat. Or how the smell of smoke from distant cookfires springing up across a mountainous jungle setting could reveal an enemy position.

Both of those details make a lot of sense, but I wouldn’t necessarily have thought them up on my own. Having the research enabled me to incorporate that touch of reality into my medieval fantasy setting, which adds another layer of authenticity to the story.

Now, whenever I research, I look for the broad strokes so I can paint a picture that will resonate from a distance, but also for the tiny unique details that will bring the setting to life when you look at it up close.

Grounding your story in time and giving your setting a sense of age, using limitations to make your story resonate and up the stakes, and hunting for those little details that can bridge the gap between reality and fiction, can all help you create a storyworld that feels authentic. A storyworld your readers will remember long after they step away from the page because it rings true.

How do you think about adding authenticity to your setting? What other tips would you add to this list?

Just getting started worldbuilding? Make sure to check out the rest of the fantastic articles and lists for worldbuilding here on Go Teen Writers.