Fractal World Building
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Sanderson's named model for building depth that serves two audiences at once. A fractal gets more detailed the closer you look, and he designs his worlds the same way: the casual reader sees a big picture that is easy to grasp, while the reader who zooms in keeps finding more interesting things to explore and argue about. The corollary is his stance on surprise — if you do your job, twists are foreshadowed, so devoted readers will solve them ahead of time and that is the intended outcome, not a failure. He therefore refuses to alter plans in response to fan theories, treating a cheap gotcha as trading long-term series satisfaction for a momentary punch in the face.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Design the big picture to be immediately legible
Someone who reads casually should be able to see and understand the shape of the world without study. If the top layer requires homework, you have lost the larger audience before the depth can pay off.
Pro tip Very easy to understand on the large scale, very complex under the hood, is the target.
- 2
Layer detail that rewards zooming in
Build so that the more closely someone inspects the world, the more interesting things they find to explore and discuss. Depth exists specifically for the reader who wants to dig, and should be genuinely there rather than implied.
Watch out A world that is simple and surface-level all the way down leaves the entrenched audience nowhere to go.
- 3
Foreshadow every structural twist
Doing the job well means upcoming twists and turns are laid in beforehand and nothing arrives out of nowhere except to you. Big world-building surprises may still land for the casual reader, but they will not surprise the entrenched one.
Pro tip Lay foundation early enough that the reveal reads as inevitable on a reread.
- 4
Reserve genuine surprise for character-level events
The exception is what is meant to surprise the characters too — an unexpected illness or a death can happen in any book without prior signalling. Structural plot and world revelations get foreshadowed; life events do not have to be.
- 5
Keep a continuity system for the deep layer
Sanderson maintains an inward-facing personal wiki, hosted locally for him and his team, to track continuity across the Cosmere books. The wiki way of thinking makes looking things up easier than encyclopedia-style entries.
Pro tip Keep it private — this is working infrastructure, not fan-facing canon.
- 6
Don't rewrite in response to theorising
He reads fan communities' theories with appreciation but recommends against changing plans because people are guessing in the right or wrong direction. Wanting the devoted audience to figure it out is the point of the design, so trying to outwit them is self-defeating.
Watch out Trading long-term series satisfaction for a short-term unexpected punch will not produce a satisfying series.
In the wild
To hold a world detailed enough to reward deep zooming, Sanderson runs an open-source personal wiki called WikidPad, hosted locally and not on the internet, purely for him and his team to track continuity across the Cosmere books. Fans cannot access it. He finds the wiki way of thinking easier than encyclopedia entries when looking things up, and it is the only tool in his stack that most writers don't use — he otherwise writes in Microsoft Word from the start of chapter one.
→ A depth layer that stays internally consistent across many interconnected books.
Asked how much he watches fan theory communities like 17th Shard, Sanderson says he understands the impulse — he was in the Wheel of Time fandom long before he was involved with it — and is glad those readers exist, but he doesn't spend much time there and won't change course because of them. Having seen what other authors have done, his position is that big world-building surprises simply will not surprise the entrenched reader, and that is by design.
→ Foreshadowing stays intact and the deep-reading audience is rewarded rather than tricked.
Common mistakes
Tricking readers for the sake of it
Sanderson calls it madness to try to trick devoted readers just for the 'haha, you didn't expect that' moment. It trades the long-term satisfaction of a series for the short-term pleasure of an unseen punch, and won't produce a satisfying whole.
Making the top layer obtuse
If the casual fan is lost in the big picture, the fractal never gets a chance to reward anyone. Both prongs have to work at once: legible at scale, complex underneath.
Rewriting because fans guessed right
Changing planned events because a community predicted them punishes exactly the readers the depth was built for, and undoes foreshadowing already laid down in earlier books.
From the transcript
“i have this thing i i call fractal world building”
“don't make it so obtuse that the casual fan is lost but don't make it so uh simple and surface level that there's nowhere to…”
“i recommend against changing what you're going to do because people are theorizing in the right or wrong direction either way”
From the episode
Bonus Episode: Originality, Writing and Career Fulfilment with Brandon Sanderson
Brandon Sanderson