Worldbuilding in Fiction, Disney Style

I took Disney’s free “Imagineering in a Box” class last month on Khan Academy. Worldbuilding is one of my favorite elements of storytelling, and I couldn’t wait to get a glimpse at how Disney does it in its theme parks. If you’re at all a fan of Disney (me!) or building fictional worlds (also me!), I highly recommend you check it out. But in the meantime, I wanted to share a few takeaways I learned that translate really well from designing and building physical worlds to designing and writing literary worlds.

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Theme Is Everything

Building a world starts with clearly identifying what the story is about. Not the plot, not what happens, but the theme: the intangible ideas, lessons, or values at the foundation of the story. The Imagineering course used, obviously, some Disney movies and their theme park counterparts as examples: 

  • Cars: Life is about the journey, not the destination.

  • Avatar: Our obligation to respect the living world

Once you’ve established the theme, said the imagineers, then everything you choose for your world should support that theme. In building parks, this includes materials, textures, colors, lines — everything. The Cars world is built with meandering lines and soft angles, creating a sense of movement and expanse to keep the emphasis on the journey. Long, windy roads fit beautifully, while hard angles would feel out of place. The Avatar world is built with organic (or organic-feeling) materials, textures, and colors to make visitors feel immersed in the natural world. Mechanical sounds or metallic textures would stand out like a sore thumb here.

While the imagineers are talking about building theme parks — physical worlds — this principle applies really well to writing, too. What is your novel about, and what kind of world emerges naturally from that theme? If you’re writing about corporate greed, a metropolitan world might be more effective than a rural one. If you’re writing about nature-based magic, forests and lakes and meadows are likely to make more sense than ancient, spell-soaked castles. 

The Disney course suggests creating mood boards to assemble the textures, colors, smells, sounds, and materials that will guide your worldbuilding. This exercise will help you determine what your world should look and feel like — visually, physically, emotionally, and intellectually.

A mood board is a great idea, but I also want to share another exercise I learned in a college playwriting course: create the palette of your world. When a visual artist sets out to begin a painting, she starts by choosing her colors and adding them to her palette. The colors on the palette are fair game for the canvas — anything without a space on the palette doesn’t belong in the painting. And you can do the same with your fictional world. What belongs on your palette, and what doesn’t? Think about language, technology, physics, government, magic, clothing, materials, smells, colors — all of it. As you write, your palette is your mood board, guiding your choices about what to include in your fictional world.

 

Don’t Show Guests How Hard You Worked to Build the Space

Of course, everything in every Disney theme park is manmade, and if you peel back the facades, you can see the cardboard and plywood and mechanical underpinnings. If guests can see how hard the imagineers worked to build the spaces they’re in, then the magic is gone.

And this translates to writing in two ways, I think. 

The first is a common pitfall in research-based writing, and I’ve been so, so guilty of it, myself. As authors, when we’ve done a lot of research — whether on a historical time period or on a fantasy world or anything else — we want our readers to know exactly how smart we’ve gotten on the subject, so we try to shove all of that research into our stories. Took a deep dive into different magic traditions in literature in order to decide which one best corresponds with your story? Great, but there’s no need to edge in a compare-and-contrast from an elder wizard in order to show off all that knowledge. Decided technology isn’t part of your fictional world? Cool! No need for characters to actively eschew tech (unless that’s part of the conflict) — just don’t write it in. The more you’re shoehorning in all that research, the more readers start to feel like maybe they’re seeing too much behind-the-scenes, and the less fully they’re able to immerse themselves in your world.

The second has to do with showing versus telling. I’ve shared my take on that standard writing advice in a different blog post, so I won’t go into detail here. But when we tell readers what a world looks and feels and sounds like, we’re showing them the cardboard and plywood. When we show them by letting them watch characters move through the world and interact with their surroundings, then we’re immersing them in the magic of it all.

Have you checked out the Imagineering course? What were your favorite takeaways? If not, I’d love to learn about your favorite worldbuilding rules and techniques. Feel free to share in the comments below!