I’ve been writing romance fiction for a while and this year, I got a revelation about world building. Chalk it up to naivety. I thought deep world building was reserved for paranormal or fantasy genres. Not contemporary fiction.

When I wrote my first couple of books, I used the city of New York as my backdrop. I included local landmarks as points of reference to make the stories more relatable. I stand by my decision to do so. To this day, when I include New York, I sometimes use my old building number, not the full address out of respect for privacy to the current residents. However, life and time moves forward and some places mentioned no longer exist which made my stories dated.

When I started writing, I reached out to a well-known author and asked for advice on how to better my writing. I was shocked at her answer, Don’t read any authors in your genre. I followed that advice for quite a while. Then I was at a conference and heard an author say the opposite. She reading other books in her genre greatly improved her writing. I started reading books in my genre, incorporating some of the craft I gleaned and she was right, I saw a vast difference and improvement in my storytelling.

Fast-forward. This year I decided to only read new-to-me black romance authors. I am embarrassed to admit I had not heard of any of these phenomenal authors. In reading their work, I have learned so much about storytelling and world building.

In my own writing, I have extracted characters into spinoffs, but I hadn’t included the characters and places across my other books. World building. I reviewed a couple of my books and realized I had dabbled in world building, but not like the women I had been reading. I noticed they had created schools, cities, brands and products, celebrities, media outlets, retail and other businesses that were used throughout their stories. They even crossed over characters. One author has a prominent celebrity who has ties to characters in some of her other books. In her book world, everyone knows him and is familiar with his work.

This clever world building got my creative juices flowing. I had a list of places mentioned in two of my series, but not like she did. I’m in the course of rewriting a book and I’m doing this world building. I’ve taken a magazine briefly mentioned in one book and carrying it over to another book. It’s going to be one of the media publications in my writing world. I’ve also taken one of the retail stores that belongs to a character and making it a shopping destination for my writing world. I’ve got a lawyer from one series who is the mentor and friend to a lawyer from another series.

World building like this has opened my eyes to deeper story telling. We’re supposed to be fiction writers, but how good are we at our craft, if we aren’t making full use of our creative muse. If you haven’t really committed to world building, I encourage you to do so. Get a notebook and start building your world.