Consistency in Worldbuilding
/Contradictions; we all know them, and we all make them. It’s what breaks open a world in an instant and more importantly, breaks immersion. That’s what we call consistency.
This is one of the most important elements in worldbuilding, and something that is often overlooked by inexperienced writers.
Technological Mismatches
When starting out writing, it’s easy not to think much about what you’re adding, especially if you never had to create a world or write things in an existing historical setting. If you only wrote stories in the modern world, you could fall into the idea of adding modern technology to a time that realistically shouldn’t have it, particularly in realistic historical fiction.
Courtesy of Hansjörg Keller
Some questions to consider are:
Why are there modern cell phones in a medieval setting?
Why does glass exist if paper does not?
Usually, you’d think it would just be a minor plot hole readers gloss over, but… should you really be striving to have plot holes in the first place? Attentive readers will notice, which is more than likely guaranteed to take them out of the story.
So, if you plan on introducing modern technology into a medieval setting, a bit of research is necessary. If the cell phone is created in such a world, then multiple other inventions should have been created beforehand (in this case: anything that came before its invention). Or not. That’d be up to you to decide. If this fictional society prioritizes cell phones over other inventions, it would be an interesting concept to explore.
However, it needs to be consistent and acknowledged.
In other words, being deliberate doesn’t count as a plot hole. That’s why contradictions are combined with characters—it’s purposeful and makes it “complex” rather than “confusing.”
Worldly Constraints
Logistics, no matter how tiring, are also important to worldbuilding. They should be taken into consideration in order to make educated decisions about the world and how it's supposed to be shaped. An example would be if you make a certain species unique to one region, it’s good to think about why they can’t leave, and if they could, a logical explanation would be essential.
Otherwise, you end up with a story where animals just remain in one environment because of an invisible barrier preventing them from going elsewhere.
Another example could be a desert kingdom that relies on abundant freshwater lakes, without any explanation for how they exist in such an arid climate. Unless there’s a magical or geological reason, such as an underground aquifer or divine intervention, the imbalance feels artificial and breaks the sense of environmental realism.
Introduced and Unused
Imagine you introduced something… a powerful and accessible spell that allowed teleportation for Conflict A, and then you fail to use it again. If you’ve introduced it once, you can’t discard it right after.
While this principle is similar to Chekhov’s gun, it’s not exactly the same thing. It’s not introducing some object or person and not utilizing them in the story (though it could count). It’s mostly introducing something like a magic spell, for instance, that could get the main characters out of a troublesome situation, but either the author forgets or creates a contrived reason why they can’t use it to build on something else like character development.
Courtesy of quantum zeitgeist
Let’s say the teleportation spell the author forgot gets remembered in the final act. This tells the reader that the characters could have used it in the previous situation, but the author chose not to use what they introduced.
If the teleport spell wasn’t used in Conflict B because it would have resolved the situation too easily, yet it was used in Conflict A and C, then Conflict B wasn’t well-thought-out. It deliberately avoided the obvious use of the spell just to force tension or higher stakes for the characters, which ends up feeling cheap.
Final Thoughts
A simple solution for consistency is to build your world in a private document first. By fleshing out the details there, you ensure everything makes sense before you even begin writing. This approach allows you to decide what the reader truly needs to know and prevents you from cluttering the story itself with unnecessary information, which, as I argued in my post “A Guide to Worlds Without Clutter,” is one of the quickest ways to pull a reader out of your story.
Marion Landry studies at Algonquin College in the Professional Writing program. She began writing personal stories for about six years and has developed a critical sense of storytelling. Her favourite genre is fantasy, as are most of her stories-all filled with in-depth worldbuilding and richly explored narratives.