You might think: I don’t write fantasy or sci-fi, so what do I need to know about worldbuilding? Maybe your story is set in the “real world.”  That means the world is already built for you, right?

Like so many things, once you concentrate the essence of it — as worldbuilding is so essential to speculative fiction — you realize the key role it plays even when it is a minor ingredient.  As David B. Coe explains over at the Magical Words blog, every writer builds a world.