Thomas: Setting, when done well, can supercharge your book sales. Some readers read a book just for its setting. A good setting can lead to spin-off products like board games, art books, coloring books, calendars, comic books, and even movies.
Speaking of movies, Seven Samurai, The Magnificent Seven, and A Bug’s Life all have the same characters, the same story, and the same plot. The only difference is the setting. You probably enjoyed at least one of those movies, but you probably haven’t seen all three. Setting not only turns people on to a story, but it also turns people off. The setting of at least one of those films probably turned you off from the story altogether.
Every author must answer the question, “How can I place my story in a setting that readers want to spend time in?” And the answer to that question is an art and practice called worldbuilding.
To discuss worldbuilding, I talked with Seth Ring, who is an expert worldbuilder. He’s the author of multiple bestselling fantasy series, from adventure to Western to suspense. He co-hosts the WorldCraft Club podcast and community and teaches people how to build the worlds for their stories.
What is worldbuilding from your perspective?
Seth: I think you nailed it. Worldbuilding is the magic sauce that keeps readers engaged with the world. We talk about worldbuilding as three distinct things: wonder, immersion, and participation. Worldbuilding is all the bricks you lay to create a road that brings somebody into your world. It’s the set pieces that allow somebody to imagine themselves truly in your setting.
Every writer builds a world whether they know it or not. It’s a core piece of participation between the reader or “the visitant” and the story they are enjoying.
Thomas: The three movies I mentioned above help underline that sense of wonder. Seven Samurai is an ancient story of nomadic peoples versus settled villagers. The nomadic people steal from the settled villagers and the peasants are starving. To protect themselves, the peasants hire other nomadic warriors to guard them. They hire the seven samurai to protect the village so that they don’t have to starve. All our ancestors faced this challenge at some point in the misty dawn of history.
The Magnificent Seven is the exact same story, but it’s cowboys and Mexican peasants in Mexico who reach out to a bunch of Texas cowboys to protect them from bandits.
A Bug’s Life is the exact same story. The ants are working hard, and the grasshoppers steal from the ants.
The sense of wonder differs for each viewer. A Bug’s Life was a wonderful world of talking insects. Some people thought it was stupid or just a kids’ movie. Other people had a great sense of wonder for the Western version, and still others enjoyed the samurai version.
How do you choose what world to build?
Thomas: How do you even pick? Should this be a sci-fi? Are these wizards in space with lightsabers and force powers or wizards in Middle-earth?
Seth: That’s a great question and cuts to the heart of the creative struggle: What do I want to create, and how do I want to communicate it to my readers?
This may be controversial, but I don’t think it matters particularly. You’ve just illustrated that you can take the same story and set it wherever you want, so long as that setting conveys the feeling that you want your visitant to have. Choose the setting that facilitates the feeling you want your reader to experience.
Obviously, the people who wrote A Bug’s Life wanted their visitants to have a particular experience, which is why they used bugs instead of samurai. The creators of The Magnificent Seven had a particular feeling they wanted to emphasize, so they chose the Old West as their setting.
Developing The Core Concept
The crux of this question is, what do you want your visitant to feel as they engage with your story and participate in creating this world with you? A visitant or a reader or a viewer participates in the worldbuilding as they read.
- What do you want them to understand about your world?
- What do you want them to understand about your story?
- What do you want them to feel?
At the WorldCraft Club, we call the answers to those questions the core concept. It’s the driving thread that guides the visitant through the story, and it acts as the anchor. It is the point from which everything else is extrapolated. Once you identify that particular feeling you want your visitant to have, the setting will start to fall into place naturally.
To highlight the honor of the story, I choose samurai. They sacrificed themselves for the people they were serving. On the other hand, if I want to highlight the outside-versus-inside feeling, the Western setting of the mysterious stranger versus the townsfolk is perfect. To highlight the hard work and cooperation element of the story, the bugs make perfect sense.
When you identify what you want to communicate to your readers, how you want them to feel as they’re reading, and when they finish, that core concept will drive your setting.
Considering Your Target Reader
Thomas: You also need to consider your target reader. What settings would they like? Some people will not read fantasy. They have a moral objection to any kind of magic or fantasy setting whatsoever. They might think fantasy is stupid, but they’re fine with science fiction.
I know a reader who cannot suspend disbelief at all for any magic or weird science that she doesn’t find believable. From her perspective, it’s a sign of sophistication that she knows it’s not real. If you wanted to tell a story for her, a historical setting would be much more appealing.
It’s interesting how much the setting changes the story for the audience.
As authors, we can see the beats and structure and see that A Bug’s Life is The Seven Samurai. It’s very clear. But most people who saw both films didn’t realize it was the same story.
The setting is such a big part of the experience. People judge a book by its cover, and for many people, the only difference between sci-fi and fantasy is the cover art. The story on the inside can be very similar, but if there are spaceships on the cover, it’s sci-fi, and if there are dragons and men on horses, it’s fantasy.
If you’re writing a novel and have already picked your setting, you may want to pause and consider how a shift in setting could transform your book and make it more appealing to your audience.
If your setting is locked in, consider how it accomplishes the three goals of worldbuilding: wonder, immersion, and participation.
Wonder
What is wonder?
Seth: Wonder is what the reader doesn’t know about a setting. It’s all the gaps a reader sees and fills in for you. Wonder is the hints, mysteries, tidbits, and breadcrumb trails you never finish but that readers spend their time thinking about. Wonder is about giving readers enough information to ground them in a setting but also providing enough space for their minds to make connections in the setting.
Our brains are designed to make connections in mass. We see patterns in everything, whether they actually exist or not. Wonder is playing to those tendencies in a way that hooks people, leaves people wanting more, and pulls them deeper into the story.
Stories that facilitate wonder are the ones that leave you thinking about the story when you’re not reading. When you put the book down, there are enough questions for you to mull over in your mind.
I’m not talking about being intentionally mysterious. Authors sometimes do that, and it can be overplayed.
I’m talking about creating a world where people naturally want to know what’s over the horizon or what’s on the other side of the building. Their brain will grow and expand your setting to try and answer those questions for themselves.
Thomas: A bit of mystery can really help here. There’s a great quote from The Two Towers where Gandalf, who comes back as Gandalf the White, is telling his story of fighting the Balrog. He says:
“Far, far below the deepest dwellings of the dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things. Even Sauron knows them not. They are older than he is. Now I have walked there, but I will bring you no report to darken the light of day.”
What are those mysterious, nameless things that gnaw at the deepest parts of the earth? The beauty of the mystery is that Tolkien doesn’t have to know.
It’s like putting on a stage play. It only has to work as far as the stage is concerned.
Actors do tricks with props. When I was doing theater, I remember being in a Christmas play where one of the wise men in the Christmas story had a bowl of gold. The bowl wasn’t actually filled with gold; it was filled with cloth, and gold coins were just covering the top, so it appeared to be full of coins. You only need a handful of coins.
Authors and actors can use millions of tricks like that, but it is a little risky because you can get yourself into continuity issues, which can mess up the second aspect, which is immersion.
Immersion
How do you build the wonder without breaking the immersion?
Seth: When you watch an old Western, the wandering hero rides his horse into town, and it looks like a town. But if the camera were to pull back three feet, you would realize that 90% of those buildings are a false front with some two-by-fours tacked up behind them and a guy hiding back there with a boom mic.
Framing is what matters in that context. If the framing is a foot too far out, it doesn’t look real. But if you frame it correctly, the illusion of completeness exists, even though the buildings are facades, and the same extra walks by in two different hats.
Immersion is about giving people enough information, and wonder is about giving them enough space. We tend to err on the side of wonder because different people have different levels of willingness to suspend their disbelief. But we found that if you can nail the wonder, people are fairly forgiving on the immersion side.
At the same time, if you don’t pay attention to immersion, you’ll give a whiplash effect where somebody suddenly snaps out of your story and thinks, “That’s weird.” When readers are snapped out of a story by something that doesn’t make sense, it damages their participation in the story. So, make sure that when your character accidentally forgets their sword at home, they don’t use it in the next scene to slay the dragon.
Continuity and Suspending Disbelief
Thomas: Continuity is following the rules that you set up for yourself in the story world. If people can breathe in space, but your character is exposed to space and dies, you’ve broken your own rule, and that breaks the story for the reader.
But it’s also about choosing what you’re asking people to suspend their disbelief on.
I recently watched Treasure Planet, which I never watched as a kid because I thought it was stupid. The characters are sailing Victorian-era ships in space, and their faces are exposed to space. My 12-year-old self, who thinks he knows everything, says, “Obviously, they can’t breathe in space.”
It’s a fantastic film, but as a kid, I couldn’t suspend my disbelief in that one area. Every 12-year-old boy knows that tyrannosaurus rex will try to eat you and that you can’t breathe in space. We can’t believe a story about a vegetarian tyrannosaurus rex or people who can breathe in space.
This is a dance with your reader. You need to understand what disbelief they are willing to suspend.
Seth: Genre tropes can really help us with that because if you understand the tropes that attract readers to your genre, then you have a template for which suspensions of disbelief are established and, therefore, acceptable to the reader.
New authors sometimes talk about subverting tropes, but you have to be careful with that because if you subvert too many or too much, you are no longer writing the genre you set out to write. You’re writing something else.
Understand what tropes are important to the setting.
If you can identify which of those tropes are the lynchpins and which are less important, then you can really understand the interplay between what can be a cardboard cutout and what actually has to be fleshed out.
Besides identifying your core concept, we also encourage people to set a few boundaries. Determine which rules you won’t break.
We typically advise people to have one core concept and three boundaries. By creating a center of your world and the boundaries of it, you’ll have an easier time with continuity and coherency. You’ll be less likely to break your own rules.
If you’re creating a space opera and you decide one boundary is that outer space is going to work as it naturally does, then you have a clear understanding of what your characters can and can’t do in space.
Your people can fight in space as long as they have spacesuits, but they can’t sing opera in space without one. Boundaries give you clarity about what you’re writing and what the reader expects.
Immersion is really about expectation. When somebody comes into your setting, what do they expect to find, and what are they willing to not find?
Thomas: Be judicious with asking people to suspend their disbelief.
I’ve been talking a lot about one of the bestselling video games of 2024 called Helldivers 2. The game is so successful partly because it doesn’t ask the player to suspend much disbelief.
It asks you to believe that aliens exist and that humans can travel faster than light to other planets.
It doesn’t ask you to suspend any disbelief on anything having to do with the weapons. The creators of the game went out of their way to hire veterans to build the game, so the details of the weapons, even the military-grade weapons, are accurate down to the minute details. That accuracy makes the aliens feel more real because I do not have to suspend disbelief for how the recoil works on the assault rifle. It works exactly the way the recoil works on the assault rifle I own as a good Texan.
How do you know which tropes readers want?
Thomas: The best way to learn the tropes is to read in your genre. Become fluent with the kinds of wonder and immersion other authors in your genre are using.
The requests you make for the reader to suspend disbelief are more acceptable because other authors are making those requests as well.
You also mentioned subversion, and I think the time of subversion is coming to an end. Readers have gotten very tired of subversion. Subverting a trope is like using adverbs and adjectives to fix your nouns and verbs. If you have to use adverbs and adjectives to fix your verb, you probably used the wrong verb. If you have to subvert a trope, maybe you’re writing in the wrong genre.
Do you know who likes those tropes? The readers of that genre who will be buying the book. They don’t want their expectations or tropes subverted. If they’re reading a romance and they’re expecting the hero to rescue the damsel. They don’t want a subverted version that’s the other way around.
Subversion can break immersion. It can irritate readers.
Subversion can break immersion.
Thomas Umstattd, Jr.
Know who your Timothy is and what they expect from the book you’re writing. Don’t subvert tropes because your English teacher taught you to. Your English teacher is steeped in postmodernism, and that worldview doesn’t lead to commercial success.
Participation
Thomas: How does participation work?
Seth: We realized that when we talked about worldbuilding and creating settings with wonder and immersion, there was another factor.
While the author builds the town, the person who steps into it is the one who experiences it. Each reader’s experience will be unique to some degree. Readers bring their own lens to whatever you create, which makes a book a participatory exercise.
When I read a book, I construct the world that the author is giving me in my head. I create it for myself, and then I watch the characters move through it. And then, the next reader does the same thing in their own mind with their unique lens.
To a certain degree, the visitant is the person who is worldbuilding. The author is simply laying out a set of instructions, or a recipe, for the world they’re trying to create.
Thomas: You’re saying reading a book is like guided hallucination.
Seth: It’s absolutely like guided hallucination. This participation piece is the reason some books and settings do better than others.
Why does everybody want to live in the Star Wars universe? We can argue all day about how good or bad the worldbuilding is, but whether it’s good or bad, it invites people to participate in an astonishing way.
There are conventions for people who like Star Wars, where people dress up in Star Wars costumes. There’s a tremendous number of products built around Star Wars. It gets a lot of media coverage because the worldbuilding nailed the participation aspect. You can participate in the setting and imagine yourself there, whether as yourself or as a character.
Thomas: We want to be a Jedi or an X-Wing pilot. I remember reading Star Wars books as a kid and picturing myself as Kyle Katarn with his lightsaber, burning the wall as he walks by, dejected because life isn’t going his way. I could relate to Kyle Katarn, and I was very angry when he was erased by the new films.
Seth: Yes. Because that world was real to some degree, and that’s what participation is. Participation is when a world goes from being merely a setting to being real in the minds of the people who are participating with it—the reader or visitants. Obviously, it’s fiction, but people still dress up in Harry Potter costumes and look in the mailbox for their letter to Hogwarts.
Participation is the quality that takes a story from belonging to the author to belonging to the readers as well. If you can cross that divide, because it is a divide, it makes a setting people want to revisit that world over and over.
How do you create that world, practically speaking?
Thomas: Creating a story bible is a technique pioneered by Robert E. Howard, who actually predated Tolkien. Tolkien took his own intense approach, inventing languages and creating thousands of years of history before even beginning his stories. That’s more of a lifetime project for a linguist than a practical method for most writers.
Robert E. Howard’s approach was much more practical. He developed a consistent history and geography for Conan’s world to keep his short stories cohesive. Each short story feels like part of the same world, even when set in different regions.
This reflects two main approaches to worldbuilding: deep and wide. Star Wars is wide, with countless planets but only about a century of history (not counting the Old Republic). On the other hand, The Lord of the Rings is deep, with a meticulously detailed history where even rocks have a backstory and forests have ancient significance. Tolkien’s approach is so deep that his characters often have genealogies spanning thousands of years.
Both approaches work, but combining them can be overwhelming. Tolkien’s depth-focused method nearly overwhelmed him, and he limited himself to Middle-earth without creating an entire galaxy.
A story bible or similar companion document can be a powerful tool for maintaining consistency in your world.
Do you create a story bible for your worlds?
Thomas: Do you create a story bible or some companion document that is just for your use as a storyteller?
Seth: I do, but I am very much a pantser, so I do it on the fly.
When I first started writing, I tried to flesh out everything before I started writing the story. I quickly realized that I would get so lost in the weeds of filling out all the details that eventually, I would get bored of the story, and I wouldn’t finish it.
So, I went in the opposite direction and decided just to write a story. I wrote a second, third, and fourth book. Suddenly, I realized I needed to keep the details straight because I was having trouble holding them all in my head.
I started to create notes to give me a sense of the boundaries I needed to stay within. Those notes gave me reference points to call back to. That’s really helpful when you’re writing a long series.
My first series was 10 books long. Towards the end, I wanted to call back to what happened in the beginning. I wanted to be able to set up threads that didn’t resolve for a couple of books and then jump back in. Having those notes or a story bible is really helpful.
Thomas: There is no end to creating a story world. There’s no limit on geography, history, or characters you can add to your world. If you’re not guided by the needs of the story, you can do all this worldbuilding the reader never sees. You might build a whole city with different political factions and a long history, but your protagonist may never visit that city.
You don’t have to create all that if they’re never going to visit the city.
Seth: That’s what I was doing. I was writing these micro stories, and they were diverting my attention from the book I wanted to write. As a full-time author, finishing books is the most important thing.
It doesn’t matter how many I start; it’s the number that I finish and take to market that matters. That’s the key metric that I need to be measuring against.
Worldbuilding and Reader Magnets
Thomas: Micro stories can be expanded into short stories or even novellas, and they can make wonderful reader magnets.
Maybe your protagonist didn’t visit that town, but the romance between the Merchant Guild Girl and the Builder’s Guild Boy is an interesting romance you can explore in 7,000 words. You can then offer it as a free download on your website and at the end of one of your books. Suddenly, you’re drawing people onto your email list, which makes your future marketing possible.
In that way, that story work creates a valuable marketing asset and sparks curiosity about your story world. The more it connects with the main plot and characters, the better, but you also don’t want it so connected that readers feel they’re missing out on essential details if they don’t read it.
A classic example is the line from Avengers where she says, “This is not at all like Budapest.” You can write a short story about what happened in Budapest for people who are curious. Everybody else can keep reading the main narrative.
Character-based prequels work really well, but you can also explore locations with short stories.
How do timeless themes enhance participation?
Seth: One of the best practical tips for participation is to choose timeless themes or tropes as anchors for your setting and story. Timeless anchors give people a personal way to connect with the experiences of your characters. You mentioned being able to relate to a character who was distraught that life was not going his way, and how you projected yourself into that situation.
That happened because the theme is timeless, but the trappings of that theme are also aspirational. You wouldn’t mind being down in the dumps if you also had a lightsaber. A timeless theme with an aspirational twist makes a reader say, “I’ll suffer or be bullied if I can be in a magic school,” or “I’ll be chased by pirates if I can be on a spaceship.”
You want to include something in the setting that makes people think, “Sure, I’ll take on the challenges because it has this element I really enjoy.” This is a practical way to anchor readers in your story and spark their desire to engage with it.
Thomas: Character and setting are separate. Those characters still have to be good, aspirational, relatable, and believable.
I think we’re moving into an era where aspirational characters are more appealing and relatable characters are less appealing.
People are tired of wallowing in the problems around them, and they want to rise above. They want characters who encourage them to overcome suffering. Kyle Katarn overcame. He was a loser at the beginning of the story, but he rose and stopped being a loser by the end of the story.
When a story is well written, the story, characters, and plot are connected and drive each other. We talked about plopping a story in a different setting, but there has to be some work that goes into doing it in a believable way that works.
How does a map help with worldbuilding?
Thomas: We talked about the story bible, but an even more universal worldbuilding tool is a map.
Many authors find that having a map helps keep their story consistent. Some go even further, creating detailed maps of towns and cities and even building layouts to keep everything straight.
What advice do you have for writers who want to use maps to help make their stories more believable and immersive?
Seth: A map is such a good idea. Anchoring a story setting in a place is one of the most powerful things you can do. When you know where you are, you can describe it to somebody else.
I’ve traveled a lot as both a kid and an adult, and I’ve often had the experience where someone stops me to ask for directions. I look around, and I recognize a few buildings, but sometimes I don’t know much else about the area.
By contrast, if someone asks me for directions in my hometown, I don’t have to know all the street names. I can say, “Go up two lights, then turn right.” When you’re anchored in a place, you can communicate about it clearly.
A map is just such a good way to anchor yourself in the setting of your story.
I love maps. I’m not very good at drawing, but I still sketch out maps all the time for my worlds. I’ve also had maps made for my books because of how helpful it is for readers to be anchored in a particular place.
How do you convey your idea of the map to a professional to create?
Thomas: How do you convey your idea of the map to a professional to create?
Seth: I’ll sketch the map and give it to a map artist I enjoy working with. His name is Jog Brogzen, and you can find him on Instagram or Patreon.
There are many incredibly talented map makers out there, and the cost isn’t as high as you might think. While prices can vary depending on the complexity of the map, a simple map can be a very worthwhile investment.
A well-drawn map naturally builds wonder in the author’s mind. Because the artist will draw elements the author hadn’t realized were there. When an author describes their character’s epic quest, they look at the map to plot out the route and discover mountains and dark forests beside the route.
What’s coming out of that forest? What’s coming down off that mountain? Suddenly, the map starts to build questions in your own mind, and you get to participate in your own story world and explore it. There’s so much joy in that.
A Warning About Maps
Thomas: My one warning about maps is that a map is not a to-do list for the author. Don’t feel like your characters have to visit every location on the map. You’re not trying to 100% a video game. The places your characters don’t visit are places your readers can visit in their imaginations.
It’s okay to have a dark wood that your characters never visit or even mention. You don’t even have to write a short story about it and give it away as a reader magnet. You can if you want to, but it’s totally fine to have places on the map that you don’t visit.
Seth: I think those unvisited places are necessary. If you have a world that is completely fleshed out, where every corner has been explored, readers will wander off to find a new story world to explore.
You can’t create immersion with tables of data. We create immersion by giving people something that feels real and letting them fill in the details themselves. The more you can give somebody an impression without being hyper-explicit, the longer they’ll stay in the story.
What worldbuilding tools do you use?
Thomas: What are some other practical worldbuilding tools you use when you’re building a world?
Seth: I use The Worldbuilder’s Journal that the Worldcraft Club created. We have done a poor job selling it because I write books for a living. But you can actually replicate it at home.
It’s very simple. It is a core concept plus three boundaries. For every important thing, I write down in no more than two sentences what is important for the reader or visitant to know about it. The Worldbuilder’s journal is designed with spaces for you to fill in. You can answer questions about people, factions, nations, and countries in one or two short sentences. The goal is to continually build or extrapolate from your core concept into a world that works and feels alive and vibrant.
I find that being forced into that concise template of determining the most important things the reader should know helps me communicate it clearly.
Thomas: What I like about building the world as you go, rather than spending weeks or months on extensive worldbuilding, is that it feels more organic. This approach gradually introduces the reader to your story world as the story unfolds instead of dumping an encyclopedia’s worth of information upfront. Readers don’t want to sift through a lengthy explanation of the world; they want to explore it organically through the story itself, without interruptions.
If you are educating readers and writing for a male audience, pausing the story for an info dump can be okay.
I’m totally fine with a page explaining how a trebuchet works because I find it interesting and might want to build one myself. But if it’s a magical trebuchet, and the page is all about your magic system, it needs to connect to the story. If the protagonist is struggling to use blue magic to make the trebuchet work, I’m less patient with that kind of info dump when it’s purely for worldbuilding purposes. I’ll tolerate a real-life info dump, but not so much for a fictional background.
Seth: Again, it’s important to understand your readers so you can match the experience that the visitant wants to have. We don’t talk about that enough.
We talk about things like writing to market, but what we should really be talking about is the experience the readers want to have. Tropes are a shorthand for the experience my reader wants to have. Genres exist because there’s a group of people who want a particular reading experience, and they find it in a particular kind of book.
You might even ask your readers in a roundabout way what sorts of things they want to read about or experience. Then, think about how your story can facilitate that experience. The writing becomes a win-win because readers are buying your book, and you’re delivering a great story.
Thomas: Sometimes you can just straight up ask them through a reader survey. A reader survey can completely transform your connection with your audience and give you insights that allow you to make your story uniquely appealing in ways other authors aren’t considering.
Almost all authors simply follow other authors, and that is a mistake. You should be following your reader. Your reader is going to lead you to the promised land.
There’s a bunch of authors walking around in a circle, all following each other. They’re all struggling, poor, frustrated, and blaming somebody else. But if you can escape that circle of authors following each other on social media and find your reader, your reader will take you to the green valley where there are plenty of star leaves for all the dinosaurs.
Do you have any final tips or encouragement for writers trying to make their worlds more appealing and believable?
Seth: Don’t stress about it. Write what you like. Write the things that excite you because if they excite you, they will excite a reader. All readers are different. Don’t let a reader who says, “I don’t really like this thing,” deter you from building the world and setting you want to build.
I recently launched a book, and it was getting great reviews. Then I got an email that said, “This is the worst book of yours that I’ve read. It was so bad that it is literally irredeemable.”
I wrote back to the guy and said, “Thank you so much for your feedback. I’m interested. What’s something that I could do that would make it redeemable in your eyes?” He replied and said, “Nothing. There’s literally nothing that would make me finish this book.”
I figured, “Okay, cool. I wrote some stuff he liked, but he didn’t like this one. No sweat.”
That one email won’t stop me from building this world. The 230 reviews in the first three days are all five-star reviews. That tells me people like it, and there is an audience for it.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take feedback or try to improve, but you should be confident in the world you want to build.
Thomas: You have to earn one-star reviews. In many ways, a one-star review is a higher compliment than a five-star review. A one-star review tells you that somebody finds your work so important that it must be responded to.
The internet has an infinite number of bad takes and stupid people. There is an unlimited number of people on the internet to disagree with. People will only leave a one-star review or rebuttal for somebody they think is worthy of it.
One-star reviews actually boost sales instead of hurting sales. So celebrate your one-stars. It’s actually harder to get a one-star review than a five-star review. Your friends and family will give you five-star reviews for free, but you have to earn a one-star review from your enemies.
Connect with Seth Ring at his website, SethRing.com, or on his YouTube channel.
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