From THE PLOT PANTRY: The difference between a setting and a world.

One is a backdrop and the other has and memory that predate your characters.

When you think about the books that have never left you, even if you can’t remember the exact storyline, what is it you actually remember about those stories?

Yea, the story may have resonated. The characters may have been compelling, cool. But what stayed was a feeling. That was the author pulling you all the way in. You wanted to be where the characters were. You were so pulled in that you didn’t just want to open the book and read the pages, you wanted to crawl into the skin of those characters so you could live there. You wanted to be in that world.

It’s also why you’re here at The Westonberry Times. There’s something you get from each of my stories, a throughline that makes you want to not only live in Roena County but keep coming back for more. Roena County and all the towns in it, they’re not just places where my characters live.

It’s not just here’s an ice cream shop, a bookstore, the weather is this or that. That’s a setting.

This is something else.

Building a place, and one that folks salivate for, that’s worldbuilding.

OK, soooooo…what’s the difference?

A setting answers the question where. It is geography, time period, sensory texture. The magnolia trees, the August heat, the way the diner smells at six in the morning. Setting is necessary. It is not sufficient if you want to make a lasting impact.

A world answers a different question entirely: why does this place feel the way it feels?

A world has a gossip economy — who controls information in this town, who gets believed, who has been talking about whom since before your protagonist was born. It has unspoken rules, the kind no character would ever explain because they simply know. It has family grudges that predate the story by two generations. It has a relationship with weather, with Sundays, with who gets to sit at which table. It knows what happened before chapter one. It knows what nobody will say out loud.

A setting is what your reader sees. A world is what your reader feels in the pauses between scenes.

Think of it like branding a story the way you’d brand a business, because worldbuilding isn’t simply for books. I’ve used it across a variety of industries.

Take my former astrology-centered coaching practice. I built a world so distinct, with such clear pillars, purpose and emotion that people craved to be part of it. The throughline of healing, of community, a safe space for belonging was woven into everything I created, from the private sessions to the masterminds to the retreats I hosted. There was a feeling in that brand that you could sense before you even fully understood what it was. That secret sauce is what made people want to be part of it, what kept them coming back, what made leaving feel like leaving somewhere real.

And so much of it spilled over into my writing. Because it was never really about the business. It was about who I am. The world I build on the page is the same world I carry inside me, and readers feel that. You can’t fake that kind of throughline. It either lives in you or it doesn’t, and the work is learning how to get it out of you and onto the page in a way that other people can finally feel it too.

When you think about my books and this Substack, certain things come to mind automatically. A very distinct feeling, even though the stories are different. Even though the topics shift. Something carries through all of it, and that something is the world underneath it.

Just like Harry Potter. I know we don’t mess with her like that, but JK Rowling is a masterclass in worldbuilding. What she created pulled us in as kids and has since jumped off the page entirely, becoming a place we can literally experience at Universal Studios. That’s what a world does. It outgrows the book.

Fantasy and romantasy writers are honestly the coldest at this.

To build something from scratch, entirely from your imagination, is an incredible skill. And once you learn how to do it, it gives your stories a feeling that cannot be duplicated because it came from you originally.

And you can still worldbuild in a real location. Insecure did a fantastic job of this. Los Angeles was a character. Manhattan was a character in Sex and the City. But there’s a way to do it, and it doesn’t happen by accident.

I have been building Roena County in my head for years. Long before the first book, long before the first reader, I was writing down the way the light fell on Honeysuckle Avenue in late October. I was building the social architecture of Branston Bay, who owned what, who owed whom, what the Hargrove family did that nobody forgave them for. I was deciding what kind of music played at the fish fry and why the old church on the hill had been empty since 1987.

None of that appears on the page in a tidy paragraph of exposition. But it shows up everywhere. It lives in the way my characters move through space, in what they assume and what surprises them, in the specific texture of their embarrassments and their longings. Readers write to me — regularly — asking if Westonberry and the rest of Roena County is real because they want to visit. They want to know where it’s based. They want to be where Smoke and Sugar are.

Roena County is not a real place on the map, but it is a real world.

That’s exactly what I want to help you with. Whether your world lives in one book or spans a series that needs continuity across every page, I want to walk with you through this process. Because your stories shouldn’t just be something people consume. They should be something people want to be part of. Something they come back to. Something they can’t quite leave.

This is why I created Plot Pantry, and why I built it with different levels of support depending on where you are in your process and how involved you’d like me to be.

Maybe you just need a template to walk you through it on your own. You can grab that right here.

Maybe you have some things loosely thrown together but you’re not quite sure if it’s hitting the way it needs to. We can talk through it together, and there’s one spot left for this service in May.

Maybe you want me to do the work entirely, build the world so that you can simply drop your characters inside it. And no, this is not just a map of your town. This is on average 95 to 100 pages of living, breathing worldbuilding. I have two spots left for this in May.

Or maybe you want to spend a full day together, me holding your hand through the process of crafting your world from scratch, walking through the technique, building it brick by brick. I have one spot for this in May.

Wherever you are in the process, I would love to help you get there. You have a story worth telling. But more than that, you have a world worth building, and the readers who are meant to find you are waiting for something they can feel, not just something they can finish.

A world this good doesn’t happen by accident. It simmers. It rises. It fills the whole room before anyone even takes a bite. Come build it with me. The pantry is open…