A random bitchy non-fiction thought I had today…

sbiworldbuilding-park-bench-method-wendy-c-allen-author-eelkat

Worldbuilding Without Worldbuilding

Or, Why Park Benches Don't Need No Fucking Map



By Wendy C Allen

We need to talk about your worldbuilding addiction.

Yeah, I said addiction.

No, don’t look away. Sit down. We’re doing this.

You think you’re writing a novel, but what you’re actually doing is wasting six years building a tax code for your fictional empire’s turnip farmers.

You’ve got spreadsheets of bloodlines, calendars more accurate than NASA, and a twelve-page document explaining the mating rituals of your world’s mole-people.

And yet… you’ve got zero chapters finished. Why?

Because worldbuilding is procrastination in cosplay.

Here’s the cold truth, ice pick between the ribs style: your readers don’t care about your world. They care about your characters in the world.

You want readers to care about your ice-age dystopia ruled by feral librarians who wield barcode scanners like nun-chucks? Awesome. But you don’t need to tell them how the oxygen filtration systems work. You need to show them a character coughing blood because it’s broken.

Readers want to feel the world. Not read the blueprints.

That’s where the Park Bench Method slaps harder than a seagull stealing your fries. You don’t start with a goddamn lecture. You start with a moment.

A dude. On a bench. Maybe he’s eating something glowing. Maybe he’s covered in blood. Maybe he’s talking to a severed head in a plastic shopping bag. Doesn’t matter. That’s your world. Right there. One sentence in.

Your setting is what the character sees, smells, tastes, and mutters under their breath. That’s it. If it doesn’t hit the senses, it’s a Wikipedia article, not a story.

World-building should be felt, not explained.

You don’t need to tell us how your society functions. You show us a character bribe a border guard with a rusty can of peaches and a pack of fingernail clippings. That tells us everything.

Culture? Boom, shown.

Economy? Boom, implied.

Morality? Boom, twisted as hell.

Done and done. No charts needed.

And don’t come at me with that “But Tolkien spent years making languages!” nonsense. You are not Tolkien. Tolkien wrote those languages for fun on the side. His actual stories? Full of characters who moved. Who acted. Who got into deep shit in the woods. He wasn’t standing in front of you with a slideshow presentation about Elvish syntax before Frodo left the Shire.

If you’re using your world-building as a reason not to write chapters, guess what?

You’re building a prison, not a world.

You are writing yourself into a corner. A corner no reader will ever read, because you’ll never have anything to publish, because you were too busy writing the world, to write the story.

And every day you spend fiddling with background lore that never hits the page is another day your characters are sitting on the bench waiting for you to get your ass in gear.

You know what good worldbuilding looks like?

“He sat on the bench outside the ruined library, trying not to make eye contact with the crow in the business suit. The crow hissed at him in corporate legalese and shuffled closer. He held up his sandwich in surrender.”

That’s it. No map. No preamble. But the reader knows:

  • The world’s gone to hell.
  • Crows are lawyers now.
  • This guy’s about to get sued by a bird.

THAT is effective worldbuilding.

No explanation. Just action + flavour = immersion.

So next time you sit down to write and you feel the urge to sketch out your intergalactic shipping routes or your underwater coffee bean cultivation rituals, STOP.

Just stop.

put the fucking map away.

Sit your character down on a fucking bench and ask them:

  • “What are you seeing right now?”
  • “What do you smell?”
  • “What do you hear?”
  • “What’s the weirdest thing in your line of sight?”
  • “How uncomfortable is your ass right now and why?”

Answer those and congratulations, you’ve just created a world without spending ten hours naming all the moons.

Your story lives in the now. Not in the encyclopedia.

World-building isn’t lore dumps. World-building is flavour. It’s the trash in the gutter. The smell of ash and ozone. The way the vending machine growls at you when you walk by.

  • Sensory.
  • Specific.
  • Stupid.
  • That’s the golden trio.

Give us a world that feels like it might bite. Give us weird. Give us messy. Give us the sense that you, too, are just barely surviving in this chaos you’ve unleashed.

And when in doubt? Stick a park bench somewhere weird and drop a character on it.

Everything else (culture, history, religion, politics, whatever) can be hinted at through a single broken-down vending machine that dispenses expired pop rocks and boots you in the shin.

Done right, your world leaks out the corners. It oozes between the sentences.

Readers don’t even notice you built it. They just live it.

Now get off your world-building ass, and write the damned story.

| ©2025 Wendy Christine Allen | All Rights Reserved |

The Park Bench Method To Writing (and the series of articles and rants that go with it)

I've Written An Entire Series on The Park Bench Method of Writing. Here are more of the articles in this set: 

The Park Bench Method To Writing (Just the article - no prompt lists)

The Park Bench Method of Writing (the really old long, rambly post from years ago; the long page with over 10k writing prompts and lots of lists)

More like this:

Self Publishing- My Self-Publishing Methods | Things I Have Personally Done





While there are around 20k pages on this website, most of them are blocked from search engines, with only around 800 of them available for appearing in Google/Bing/etc search results. The remainder can only be accessed via the various links found throughout this site. This was done deliberately on my part, and I did it because the bulk of the pages on this website are chapters from 138 novels and 423 novellas, so only the first page of each novel and novella indexed by search engines, and the remainder are linked in order, one page at a time, via clicking "next page" at the end of each. So if you are looking for a specific page from a specific novel, Google can't help you.



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Wendy Christine Allen 🌸💖🦄 aka EelKat 🧿💛🔮👻
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