Creative Lab: Tiff Liao on Worldbuilding

The official title of this creative lab: I Can Show You the World: Making Your Worldbuilding Come Alive with Editor Tiff Liao.

Tiff's bio: Tiff Liao is Executive Editor at Random House Books for Young Readers. She's had the honor and joy of editing award-winning and bestselling authors including Tomi Adeyemi, Angeline Boulley, Dhonielle Clayton, Maurene Goo, Goldy Moldavsky, Tochi Onyebuchi, Margaret Owen, Jenn Reese, and "Queer Eye" star Karamo Brown. Previously, she was at Zando, where she launched the young readers program, and at Macmillan. Born and raised in California, she now lives in Nyack, NY, with her husband and puppy-cat. She's newly on Bluesky: @tiffliao.bsky.social

Tiff Liao

Tiff starts with this wisdom: 

"All stories require world-building, even if they're set in our real world."

It's not just setting, Tiff explains. World building includes:

Macro level - politics, history

Micro level - food, details that bring a place/society to life

Tone - epic and brutal or cozy and sweet? 

Whatever it is, we want it to feel real.

To start us off, Tiff asks for folks to share worlds we love from books we've read...

Your job: "make us homesick for a place we've never been."

World is shaped by our perspective. So we view and experience the same thing in different ways. The same is true of your characters. Their perspectives shape the world of your story.

The character has to interact with the world - world building serves the story, and supports the story you want to tell.

Start with a want. What drives story? Main character's motivation. This is a key world-building tool. 

Three questions to explore:

1. What does your protagonist want?

2. How does your world present a conflict?

3. How does your world challenge your character to solve it?

Tiff walks us through the answers to these three questions from some mentor texts, including The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and To All The Boys I've Loved Before by Jenny Han.

And then we get hands-on, applying these questions to our own works-in-progress.

There's lots more... this creative lab is off to a great start!