When you talk about worldbuilding, the invented worlds of science fiction or fantasy usually come to mind. The need for worldbuilding is obvious when your story is set in an entirely fictitious world, because you have a blank canvas and you need to fill it with enough detail for the story to play out in.
On the other hand, if you’re writing about a familiar everyday setting it’s tempting to think that there’s no work to do. But I argue that familiarity is a trap and worldbuilding is just as important. To help you understand why, it helps to understand the purpose of worldbuilding. In my opinion, of course.
The purpose of worldbuilding is not, as many people assume, simply to create an imaginary world.
The real purpose of worldbuilding is to understand your story world in enough depth, with enough intentional clarity, to bring it alive to the reader. The emphasis here is on intentional. Not innate. Not automatic or ingrained or accidental, but making your knowledge of the story world explicit, and then using that knowledge to enrich your story.
When you think of it this way, the relevance to stories set in the real world suddenly comes into focus.
An entirely fictitious world has to be built from scratch, and your tools are imagination and invention. For real world settings the trick is to bring out relevant detail, which means observation, research, and documentation.
The trouble with real world familiarity is that your mind’s eye glosses over familiar scenes, and won’t translate onto the page the details that will bring the scene alive to a reader who doesn’t share your experience. To convey the scene to a reader you have to make yourself consciously aware of the details that you take for granted. You need to awaken your powers of observation. You have to make all that implicit knowledge explicit.
And if your setting is real or historical but not familiar to you, you’d better get the details right because some of your readers may know it far better. They will be distracted from the story if you don’t present a convincing understanding of their knowledge.
Many of the collection of notes on this site can be used as a guide just as much for real familiar settings as for any figment of your imagination.
Ian S. Bott, Writer and artist 