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How to Worldbuild Without Knowing Everything
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Worldbuilding can be one of the most daunting tasks that a writer can embark on, but fear not! Siera Schubach, an awarding-winning author, is here to save the day and give you a great guide to building your fantasy world without knowing every detail.
Have you ever wanted to write a fantasy story but felt overwhelmed by the concept of worldbuilding?
As a fantasy writer myself, I’m going to tell you a little secret: Worldbuilding isn’t as complicated as it is made out to be. 
Here are a few steps you can take to build a strong, layered, and interesting fantasy world without any prep. 
The Plot is the Point
Do you know every single language on Earth? Do you know the customs and cultures of every person on the planet? I expect the answer is “no” (unless you’re an all knowing oracle in which case, I have some questions). We don’t know every detail of the world we live in now, and you don’t need to know all the details of the world you are creating either. 
There are over seven different species (that I know of) in my fantasy world, but the only ones I know much about are those that factor heavily into the story. You don’t need to know the vast history of a character who is only mentioned in passing.
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A painting I did for an astronomy project(there’s three more to come), where I’m taking different nebulae or galaxies and drawing them looking like sea creatures. This is the Orion Nebula resembling a manta ray :D
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“There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.”
— Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
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“Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I’d always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily.”
— Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (via quotespile)
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“Everything you see will soon alter and cease to exist. Think of how many changes you’ve already seen. ‘The world is nothing but change. Our life is only perception.’”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (4.3)
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"The Forest of Dreams" 🍂 | calibreus
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Our Galaxy is Caught Up in a Giant Cosmic Cobweb! 🕸️
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If we could zoom waaaay out, we would see that galaxies and galaxy clusters make up large, fuzzy threads, like the strands of a giant cobweb. But we'll work our way out to that. First let's start at home and look at our planet's different cosmic communities.
Our home star system
Earth is one of eight planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — that orbit the Sun. But our solar system is more than just planets; it also has a lot of smaller objects.
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An asteroid belt circles the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. Beyond Neptune is a doughnut-shaped region of icy objects called the Kuiper Belt. This is where dwarf planets like Pluto and Makemake are found and is likely the source of short-period comets (like Haley’s comet), which orbit the Sun in less than 200 years.
Scientists think that even farther out lies the Oort Cloud, also a likely source of comets. This most distant region of our solar system is a giant spherical shell storing additional icy space debris the size of mountains, or larger! The outer edge of the Oort Cloud extends to about 1.5 light-years from the Sun — that’s the distance light travels in a year and a half (over 9 trillion miles).
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Sometimes asteroids or comets get ejected from these regions and end up sharing an orbit with planets like Jupiter or even crossing Earth’s orbit. There are even interstellar objects that have entered the inner solar system from even farther than the Oort Cloud, perhaps coming all the way from another star!
Our home galaxy
Let's zoom out to look at the whole Milky Way galaxy, which contains more than 100 billion stars. Many are found in the galaxy’s disk — the pancake-shaped part of a spiral galaxy where the spiral arms lie. The brightest and most massive stars are found in the spiral arms, close to their birth places. Dimmer, less massive stars can be found sprinkled throughout the disk. Also found throughout the spiral arms are dense clouds of gas and dust called nebulae. The Sun lies in a small spiral arm called the Orion Spur.
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The Milky Way’s disk is embedded in a spherical “halo” about 120,000 light-years across. The halo is dotted with globular clusters of old stars and filled with dark matter. Dark matter doesn’t emit enough light for us to directly detect it, but we know it’s there because without its mass our galaxy doesn’t have enough gravity to hold together!
Our galaxy also has several orbiting companion galaxies ranging from about 25,000 to 1.4 million light-years away. The best known of these are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, which are visible to the unaided eye from Earth’s Southern Hemisphere.
Our galactic neighborhood
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The Milky Way and Andromeda, our nearest neighboring spiral galaxy, are just two members of a small group of galaxies called the Local Group. They and the other members of the group, 50 to 80 smaller galaxies, spread across about 10 million light-years.
The Local Group lies at the outskirts of an even larger structure. It is just one of at least 100 groups and clusters of galaxies that make up the Virgo Supercluster. This cluster of clusters spans about 110 million light-years!
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Galaxies aren’t the only thing found in a galaxy cluster, though. We also find hot gas, as shown above in the bright X-ray light (in pink) that surrounds the galaxies (in optical light) of cluster Abell 1413, which is a picturesque member of a different supercluster. Plus, there is dark matter throughout the cluster that is only detectable through its gravitational interactions with other objects.
The Cosmic Web
The Virgo Supercluster is just one of many, many other groups of galaxies. But the universe’s structure is more than just galaxies, clusters, and the stuff contained within them.
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For more than two decades, astronomers have been mapping out the locations of galaxies, revealing a filamentary, web-like structure. This large-scale backbone of the cosmos consists of dark matter laced with gas. Galaxies and clusters form along this structure, and there are large voids in between.
The scientific visualizations of this “cosmic web” look a little like a spider web, but that would be one colossal spider! <shudder>
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And there you have the different communities that define Earth’s place in the universe. Our tiny planet is a small speck on a crumb of that giant cosmic web!
Want to learn even more about the structures in the universe? Check out our Cosmic Distance Scale!
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space.
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“People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.”
— Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
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The stunning Veil Nebula was created after a star about 20 times the mass of the Sun lived fast and died young – exploding in a cataclysmic release of energy known as a supernova.
In a violent stellar explosion roughly 10,000 years ago, shockwaves and debris created this staggeringly beautiful trail through space. The picture above shows a mosaic of six Hubble Space Telescope pictures, a small area roughly two light-years across, and only a tiny fraction of the nebula's vast 110 light-year structure.
To learn more about Hubble’s celebration of nebula November and see new nebula images, visit our space telescope's nebula page.
You can also keep up with Hubble on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Flickr!
Image credits: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
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“Untitled“ by | Dani Guindo
Geldingadalur valley, Reykjanes, Iceland
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Untitled | Zoltan Tasi
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“Frequently knowledge is treated as an end in itself, and then the goal becomes to heap it up and display it when called for. This static, cold-storage ideal of knowledge is inimical to educative development. It not only lets occasions for thinking go unused, but it swamps thinking. No one could construct a house on ground cluttered with miscellaneous junk.”
— John Dewey, Democracy and Education
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Affirm
The trouble is I’ve faced my fears, and they still cling
To my fragile frame. Not my body, but my soul,
Has been weakened by wretched, wretched deeds.
Those of others and of my own, and of others, that I own.
Which sparked suffering on many planes, relentlessly.
But I can see it, that brilliant plane, where you have lain.
I feel the terrors stripping from me, their grip less fearsome.
Owing to your blazing love, which evil cannot withstand.
Now I know what I must do, yet not the details of the deed,
A choice must be made, to affirm or deny life before my eyes.
To deny would give me freedom from the task to live just.
Yet doom me to endless anger, anxiety, and anguish.
To affirm will thrust me into endless strife and struggle.
Yet guarantee a life well lived, ending exploding with love.
I shall strive to affirm this life, leaving now only love in my wake.
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What Else?
What else can I do? But race my fingers across these keys?
My thoughts are incomplete, and feelings back and forth.
Not knowing which way is north, no compass to guide a mind.
Searching for meaning on digital displays, lying still.
Still. Still. Indecision freezes me, work or play? Neither.
What else can I do? As I watch my life waste away.
My thoughts are morbid, and feelings bleak in streaks.
Not knowing where to start, no objectives on my map.
Clinging to good feeling where it lay. Never-mind the dirt.
What else can I do? To put this restless mind at ease.
To find my purpose and my passion before I decay.
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“To be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.”
— Toni Morrison, A Mercy (via quotespile)
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