Worldbuilding in first person narrative nonfiction

Hello! This weekly Substack is mostly about my fixation on how a piece of journalism can be made to feel as distinctive as a novel or a painting - how it can inhabit its own universe and, if it’s a book, be such a one-off bookstores won’t even know which section to put it in.

(That, I confess, is the downside: If your book doesn’t fit neatly into any genre, bookstores may get bewildered and place you somewhere horrific like Wellness. But I think that’s their problem and you shouldn’t let it hamstring you, although publishers may disagree with me on that. But it IS a frustration: I remember all those years when the Costa Book Awards only had one nonfiction category - Biography. Were the rest of us just ineligible?)

Anyway, lately I’ve been thinking about that term ‘worldbuilding’ - that technique from fantasy writing where the writer creates an entire universe with its own set of rules, its own flora and fauna and customs and history that will never be completely evident to the reader. They’ll only ever see the tip of the iceberg, like a unicorn galloping by, or whatever. As you can see I’m no fantasy writer and am impressed with myself for even thinking of a unicorn.

I want to talk about worldbuilding within the context of first person narrative nonfiction. Specifically it’s about worldbuilding as a way to introduce yourself as a character early in your own story.

Let me give you some examples.

I’m reading John Safran’s very engaging book Squat, about his adventure squatting Kanye West’s abandoned mansion in LA. I love John Safran. He does what Louis Theroux and I do but with a twist – he’s Australian!