1. Introduction
2. Engage the Senses
3. Populate with Everyday Life
4. Consistent Immersion
5. Writing Exercise: Finding Sensations
6. Conclusion

Introduction

Welcome back to another conversation on world-building! I know this is a big topic of study for fantasy and science fiction writers, so I want to make the most of each of these posts. In the last post, World-building 101: Crafting Immersive Fictional Worlds, we talked about key elements of world-building, how to research and find inspiration for your world-building, and the way languages and cultures impact your world-building. Overall, it was an overview of the basic components your readers might expect to see in your world-building efforts.

Building a strong foundation with consistent rules and cultures is important, but truly immersive world-building is all about adding vivid sensory details.

Engage the Senses

The world as we know it may seem like such a static thing, but the way we describe our experience with it drives the interest of others. Engaging the senses is a powerful way to pull your readers into your story. The challenge comes because your readers want you to use these details without making it feel like 20 pages of setting description. There are a couple of easier ways to make the exploration of these senses seem more natural for the character.

First, you can take a character from an old place and set them somewhere entirely new. This drives the validity in the reader’s mind that your character will experience everything for the first time. A full exploration of the senses in a new place is common, but can also act as an obstacle for your character. It creates possible new threats that your reader may be the first to realize as your character becomes lost in the world you’ve built. This is often used in portal fantasy novels, like The Pendragon Series by D. J. MacHale. Bobby Pendragon goes on an adventure through time and space to protect the ten territories that keep his universe intact.

I wasn’t able to find the exact sub-genre of Sci-Fi that addresses the similar set-up, but one book series that comes to mind for this is the Bobiverse Series by Dennis E. Taylor, where Bob is uploaded into a sentient spaceship and sent out to explore the galaxy. We Are Legion, We are Bob also represents the concept of removing one, or many, sensory inputs and how they affect the details noticed.

(Ironically, both of the protagonists in those stories were named some variation of Bob, which was not intentional. So if there’s a Bob out there reading this, you’re meant to go on a grand adventure to different worlds. Good luck!)

The other method is to take away one of your character’s senses so that the other senses are more noticeable for a reason. A character without sight will heavily rely on sound, touch, smell, and taste as they move through and experience the world. If you want a great example of this, check out All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. I know this isn’t quite a sci-fi/fantasy book, but it is well worth reading to experience the world through a character, Marie-Laure LeBlanc’s, mind.

So with all that talk, and based on the different examples, let’s focus on the deployment of each of these senses:

• Sight:
  • Thought to be one of the most powerful insights in a situation, it’s no surprise that sight is one of the first mentioned things in a story. The way your character interprets what they see tells the reader so much about the world. Setting elements like architecture, clothing, and terrain offers the chance for the author to build the character’s voice. The details they notice can enrich the story, but also make them miss key aspects they’ll regret not having paid attention to in the future. What your character notices and doesn’t notice shows what’s normal and what’s not in the world. These details in the changes of the look of something are key when you have a character existing in a world they’re used to. How do you like to use sight in your world-building?
• Sound:
  • Sound could seem to be an easy part to incorporate into your story with ambient noises, music, and dialogue patterns, but it is one of the hardest. The reason for this is that our brains are hard-wired to work as fast as possible to associate a new sound to one we know. This is a good old survival technique in our genetics that also helps regulate our fight or flight. But sound is so subjective because we’ve all experienced different sounds. The first that comes to mind for one person might not match another. How do you use this in your writing then?
  • Once again, it comes down to character perspective, find things to compare the sounds to in their world and find a way for it to make sense. Say your magic makes a sound every time it’s used. In our world, it might sound like a lawn mower, but in their world, it might be described as a horde of angry bees. (Or whatever their magical world variant is.) When using sounds to immerse in strange new worlds, it’s best to rely on simile and metaphor to help convey this to the strangers visiting your world. So what sounds are natural to your world? How can you use them to convey more than just what the character is hearing?
• Smell & Taste:
  • Writers can use food, incense, nature, and even garbage to convey the culture of a world. It may not be at the forefront of your mind, but think about a few different story types with me. The post-apocalyptic food is often described in hues of gray, bland, and only meant for sustenance. The food in a Young Adult Portal Fantasy is described with vibrant colors, powerful taste, and full of enjoyment. Each world brings its own standard tastes and smells along with it. In my first attempt at a book, I had the inhabitants eating food cubes, which to the earth kids tasted like a morning breakfast of orange juice and toast. Meanwhile, the Extorians just knew that they tasted like the morning food cubes because they didn’t have the variety of foods to compare it to. And maybe that’s true for your world. Another example I always like to use is that one of my professors hated bad smells in stories because his brain was a little too good at imagining them. I, of course, had to test this out. I wrote the following line to open the story. “The morning after smelled of over processed scrambled eggs, heated dank forests of Copenhagen wintergreen, and alcohol as it burned the bacteria outside the soldiers’ sweat glands.” Now, it’s not the most well-written sentence, but I bet he wrinkles his nose whenever that sentence comes to mind. Smell and taste are powerful because they can create an association that will last a lifetime.
  • So consider how smell and taste play a role in your world and your character’s world. How do you hope to use smell and taste in your writing?
• Touch:
  • Touch touches on such a wide range of experiences that we often throw this into our works without fully realizing it. The texture of objects, weather, and physical affection norms can draw readers into your story. Touch is another sense that you can rely heavily on simile and metaphor to bring more depth into the world. The comparisons create a dual effect of telling your reader how the character interprets the thing their feeling, e.g. his skin felt as dry and rough as concrete, and thus telling your reader that concrete is a normal occurrence in this world you’re building. Now if you use something that the reader isn’t familiar with, e.g. As he ran his fingers through her hair, it felt like the soft brush of a tilliwad husk. Your readers will expect to figure out what a tilliwad husk is in the future. (I also do not know what a tilliwad husk is, but maybe I’ll find out in one of my stories.)
  • How do you plan to use touch in your stories?

Populate with Everyday Life

You make your worlds feel more real when you fill them out with everyday people and activities. I’ll admit right away that this is sometimes stuff I don’t add until after my first draft. Remember that your story is about your protagonist, antagonist, and whatever other forces inhibit/help your protagonist through the story, but the rest of the world still exists around them. One way to build a more immersive world is to include reactions of bystanders. If your character pulls out a device that allows them to cut through space and time in the middle of the street, how would that bystander react? Are they terrified by the devil magic that was just performed? Or do they say, there goes Tony, using his trans-dimensional shifter again. Think of how you react in familiar and unfamiliar situations and how you can bring that into your stories.

Admit it, you probably don’t know the name of the person who delivers your mail, collects your trash, or services the water main, but those people are critical to our standard of living. When you create non-plot essential characters to complete mundane tasks, you’re adding another layer to pull your readers in. Utah, at least the areas I’ve lived in, only uses the trash trucks with mechanical arms that pick up the cans and dump it into the top of their compacter. Though, there are plenty of movies that still show guys holding onto the back of the dump truck as it drives along, and the people dump it into the back. This usually happens in shows with New York City. I don’t know if that’s true anymore, but it adds a different detail to the story showing whether the people are connected to or disconnected from their trash. Simple things like that can go a far way to making your reader see this world in a familiar or unfamiliar way.

Sometimes the things we don’t think about in our day-to-day life are the things missing from taking our stories from good to great. That’s why I encourage you to develop rituals for your world around their eating, schooling, commerce, recreation, and other things. Let’s start with one of the simplest examples, food. What is the standard approach to meals in the world you’ve created? Do they recommend three square meals a day? What’s the most common foods they eat? Are there regional food differences? Even the order the food is eaten can tell you about the world. Dive into these aspects outside of your story through short stories, research, and notes. Once you’ve figured these out you’ll know what information is native to your character, and what key differences they’ll notice as they move through the story.

Consistent Immersion

I will probably say this multiple times throughout my posts, but consistency is key. It’s no different when it comes to sensory details. You want to make sure that you’re always using the same sensory details consistent with the rules of your world. If your character describes the feel of a tillawad husk as soft strands of fine fibers, then don’t later describe them as coarse and thick fibers. It may sound silly right now, but there are plenty of moments where you will forget how you described something and then need it to be something different. By keeping your sensory details consistent you won’t fall into the common pitfall of describing the sensation like something outside of that world.

When you’re writing fantasy you’ll want to avoid modern phrases/technology that will break your reader’s immersion. A fantasy set in medieval England will probably not have any references to engines, brakes screeching, or a toilet flushing. Those are some obvious examples, but they should give you the idea of what to look for in your editing process. I like to write out whatever makes the most sense to me at the time, especially if I’m getting hung up on a detail, and then coming back later to make it fit the time frame. Another method you can use for this part is to do a search for modern words that you think you might have used in the story based on technology level and such. The final way is to trust in your Beta readers to point out a strange word used. This will help keep your writing consistent and allow for your readers to draw a true understanding of the world you’re building without bogging them down.

As we’ve talked about in other posts, the days of heavy exposition have waned into near non-existence. There might be a few Epic genres that you can get away with pages of setting description. Instead, writers are expected to let the readers infer elements, story details, and settings from context instead of thick brick walls of exposition. It’s almost more fun that way, true, but it also does one more thing. The openness makes your reader think and really focus on the story details as they work to build their story in their mind. It’s often those stories that readers are left saying, “The book was way better than the movie.” Readers build so much of the world in their mind, and when it conflicts with what they’ve built, it makes it harder for them to remain immersed. That’s why casting in movies is so controversial because people will naturally imagine the characters from their own perspective. Even just based off the names.

Writing Exercise: Finding Sensations

For this week’s writing exercise, I want you to:

• Choose a scene or chapter from your story in its current state and highlight all the sensory details. You can highlight in whatever way makes sense for you.
• On a sticky note, or note app, write how many times each sensory detail appears in your chosen text.
• From there, identify any sections where you might add some everyday life characters and setting details. Add that to your note.
• Identify established or rituals for your characters and the world you’ve created. Add those to your note.
• Before you finish, check for any inconsistencies between the sensory details you highlighted and your established rituals.
• In a separate document, rewrite the scene with a focus on sensory details and see what you get.

You may not keep the exact scene you write, but by using this focused practice, you will make it more natural to include sensory details in the stories you write.

Conclusion

Immersing readers in your fictional world through vivid sensory details is one of the most powerful tools in a writer’s arsenal. By engaging all five senses – sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch – you can transport your audience to a fully realized, living, breathing world that feels utterly real. But it’s not just about piling on descriptions; it’s about choosing resonant details that are grounded in the unique rituals, cultures, and everyday experiences of your world. With consistent sensory cues woven naturally into your narrative, your readers will be so invested in the world you’ve crafted that they’ll be loath to leave it when the book ends. So get out there and build worlds worth getting lost in!

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