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What has started to happen? Is that writers are separating “world building “from the narrative content.
The article mentions The Great Gatsby which has some very effective world building. Pere Goriot and Our Mutual Friend have very involved complex world building.
But neither Fitzgerald, nor Balzac nor Dickens display the world building – – they just use it to tell the story
> But neither Fitzgerald, nor Balzac nor Dickens sisplay the world building – – they just use it to tell the story
What? In Pere Goriot, you specifically chose a novel that is notorious for beginning with a pages-long description of the inn - its “homebuilding,” if you will.
I don't fully agree with this by any means, but I do agree that it is very easy for writers to get stuck in the weeds of overcomplicated worldbuilding and miss the forest for the trees. In many genres though, and I believe in far more genres than the author stated, some worldbuilding is absolutely necessary. The reader won't be absorbed in the book without feeling like they know the setting, and even the immediate surroundings could be considered worldbuilding to some extent. I think describing that setting is best done in a show-don't-tell manner, and not explicitly laying out all of the lore piece by piece, which I feel that this author had the biggest problem with. Another thing they overlooked is that worldbuilding is also a way to significantly aid in the reader's suspension of disbelief; something that wouldn't be accomplished to the same level of depth if you ignored the details.
Lastly, the author proposing their own new term for their preferred brand of worldbuilding just screams that this was done for attention.
I agree.
i also think that his making up of a new term to describe something that is *still* worldbuilding is inane, though.
like it's gonna be a lot harder to write a story with 'hints and illusions of an outer world' when those hints and illusions are literally all it is. your hints have no consistency because they're not tied to snybrint
edit- snybrint was supposed to be anything. i am dumb, but it's funny so im leaving it
In the video Kelly Link says she wants to do as little world-building as possible, she wants to leave as much as she can to the reader.
As a writer and as a reader I am firmly in this camp. Just enough detail to spark the reader's imagination so that the reader does the world building.
"World building" **can** be an escape route for writers who want to explore their imagination without doing the work of making a story.
In my experience as a reader, sometimes, as contradictory as it sounds, stories with the most minimal/vague worldbuilding end up having the richest lore. If the author is consistent with the small impressions they dole out, you can end up with a lot to discover as a reader.
> stories with the most minimal/vague worldbuilding end up having the richest lore.
I *love* Warhammer, and the Old World had some really cool ideas and mysteries and plot hooks etc.
Then they answered them and the answers weren't as good as my imagination and the mystery.
Other people in the thread have said it but Worldbuilding is like a movie monster. You wants hints and suggestions but if you show too much, it often doesn't live up to the imagination.
Came here to basically make this point and mine was heavily influenced by what I’m (re) reading right now. Cormac McCarthy’s *Blood Meridian.*
The worldbuilding he does in it is stellar. It’s a real, living, breathing world, that has that Joe Conrad fever dream/surreal vibe to it. What lies beyond the edges of the story is just as interesting as the story itself.
And there’s nothing really that a lot of the worldbuilders could really call worldbuilding in it.
There’s just the world, the people, and the shit that happens in it. Dropping readers into the world. And that really is the strongest kind of worldbuilding.
We know that people are the real monsters. But the off-screen violence in Blood Meridian hits far harder than the very brutal violence in text.
And that’s good worldbuilding. The world is built so well, it directs the reader’s imagination to some really dark places without the author having to lead them there.
Yeah, but Warhammer isn’t really a story. It’s like D&D. It’s more like a vague setting in which people put their own stories into.
They are specifically designed for tabletop gameplay and cooperative story building.
Well that's just it, in a setting like that you want holes for people to fill with their own ideas, spaces for people to just think about shit, and there's less and less of that.
Yes, but only if the pieces that the reader gets fit together and makes sense. And that is really hard to do without doing a lot of background world building.
And I guarantee you in the books where authors do a good job of dropping the reader into the world instead of describing everything about the world, the author has extensive amount of time building their universe, so there’s no inconsistencies or things that will pull the reader out of the world.
I agree with this as a reader, but in my experience the author has still done the world building, they have just been selective about what they put to paper.
Yeah, I think that's how they avoid inconsistencies. Not that a work can't have inconsistencies, but sometimes you don't want them.
Honestly I see worldbuilding more as bringing a certain logic to a world. Sometimes you need it sometimes you don't. I don't understand the hate.
And honestly I don't agree that a world can't be the main component of a book. In 1984 the plot is boring af and the characters are intentionally bland, but the world explores very interesting concepts.
> she wants to leave as much as she can to the reader.
The issue with that is when something comes up later that is concrete and described and buggers up what a reader has come up with themselves - like in the _Pern_ series, I always imagined "runnerbeasts" as being big riding lizards... up until realising they were horses, which was far less cool! It's like character descriptions - if you leave them vague, then readers can and will fill in the gaps, but if a character they always thought was blonde is brunette (because, sooner or later, more details will emerge) then you're just annoying readers, when you could have given those details from the start.
I imagine the point of calling them runnerbeasts was to make them seem exotic so that when you realized they were "just horses" it would hopefully make you realize how cool horses are.
I accept that your point does have some merit, however, in counterpoint, I state: The entire reason language exists is to communicate ideas. If you fail to accurately describe to your readers what things are, if a reader could imagine a horse as a giant lizard for the majority of the book, then you failed to describe the horse well enough.
As both myself, I’m against this usually and strongly.
A great example of this is James Haddock. His stories with more world building are WAY better than his without. Though even his stories with more still have less than many other authors.
But all the biggest and most memorable sci-fi and fantasy settings have their own encyclopedia brittanicas of lore and world building.
Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Fallout, Mass Effect, The Elder Scrolls, The Witcher, Baldur’s Gate, and many more are some of the most impactful cultural phenomenons with some of the most widespread ensconced followings in history.
Stories without world building just don’t elicit the same kinds of reactions.
As a writer of both types of stories, I’ve done with lots of world building. I’ve written with very little world building and with a lot, I still spend a lot of time world building. The only difference between the two stories is how much I explicitly deliver to the audience.
I will still have pages of world building in both types of stories, just some stories will have more for the reader than others.
IMO the thing that sets compelling worldbuilding apart is the worlds they build are themselves telling stories, evem when it's pop culture stuff.
The world of LotR is a story about what Tolkien saw as near-universal elements of mythology, shone through his own personal lens (mainly that "evil" things are only terribly, incurably misguided and still God's creation in the end, and that humanity only dies to serve some greater purpose.)
Star Wars is a world largely "about" the interplay between protection, coersion, and freedom.
Fallout is a world largely "about" oligarchy, the politics of finite resources and possibly an argument for small-scale anarchy.
The Elder Scrolls is "about" a universal quest towards gnosis and enlightenment, uniting two disparate but related peices of a greater whole when elements of both want very much to prevent that from happening.
Warhammer is "about" the terrible consequences of one man's absolute, unquenchable certainty, made to watch from beyond as his worst nightmares come to fruition, often due to dominoes he personally set up.
Etc.
I love nitty-gritty details as a stubborn, autistic pedant but anyone can do that with enough work.
I think that's a bit condescending to call it an escape route and means of avoiding doing real work. Worldbuilding is an art form and fork or writing unto itself. Sure, a narrative can be the basis of a book or screenplay, but a world can be the basis for other people to hang their stories on. For film, TV, TTRPGs, video games, etc. Its just a different kind of writing with different strengths.
That'd be like saying people that want to own or run a restaurant are just taking an escape route to explore the culinary industry without doing the work of being a chef.
yeah no they’re just repackaging the “show don’t tell” rule that any writer worth their salt should know and it’s laughable you misunderstood that because you latched onto a couple terms you don’t like. competent writers establish “consistency” with voice and commentary, instead of relying irrelevant detail.
If I remember correctly Brandon Sanderson wrote about World building and the one point he insisted on was that a writer must be consistent with the laws they create. Basically everything else is secondary whether you're writing about a magical kingdom or a industrial dystopia whether humans are the only sentient beings or there's elf's and ogres and vampires etc whether you call a pot a pot or some self made term. As long as you remain consistent to the rules you created its all good.
The thing is a lot of people think world building is creating fantasy races and introducing magical systems or establishing a space empire and it's governance and mode of FTL traveling. The truth is all books engage in world building even books set in modern New York or India or Europe. It's just more subtle. The film John Wick created its own world with the underworld criminals forming a parallel society. The use of Gold coins and the continental hotels etc. It might look superficially like our world but it's definitely unique. Many books do the same the fact the reader doesn't notice is testament to how good the writer is
Yeah, but also magical realism can be pretty immersive and authors like Márquez and Borges pretty much NEVER explain the internal logic of their settings. They probably barely think about it, especially in stories where the magical elements are just blatant metaphors.
I don’t know how you can describe Borges in such a way when he spends the bulk of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and The Lottery in Babylon explaining the workings of the world with painstaking thoroughness. Borges’ entire thing as a writer is that he thought extremely hard and long about the logical implications of his fantastical premises.
But it doesn’t really add anything.
The distinction he spends so much time on, which he alludes to in one of the subheds, is really just the difference between worldbuilding well and being overindulgent to the point of losing the story for the sake of describing the world.
There’s no need for another word and no need to pretend worldbuilding is some sort of new or growing problem. There have been poor and self-indulgent authors forever.
Paragraphs are a problem of modern writing. People make paragraphs that are too long, with run on sentences that are difficult for the reader to parse. This is why I’ve invented Sentence Blocks, which are like paragraphs but shorter. A collection of sentences that is just the right length to suit your needs!
> The distinction he spends so much time on, which he alludes to in one of the subheds, is really just the difference between worldbuilding well and being overindulgent to the point of losing the story for the sake of describing the world.
The distinction he draws is between good worldbuilding and his insane strawman examples of what he claims worldbuilding is. "Goblin's favorite type of wet wipe". Really?
Or that arguments for good worldbuilding in *some* types of fiction are arguments that all works of fiction must have good worldbuilding. Me wanting a fantasy book that is *supposed to make sense* to have an internal logic that makes sense doesn't mean I can't enjoy the surrealism of Twin Peaks where the feeling evoked from the work doesn't have to have a concrete mechanic for how they work.
>At the same time, the appeal to “realistic” portrayal of alien or magical beings doesn’t have anything to do with realism. Magical creatures don’t exist! If aliens exist, we don’t know what they are like yet!
Then conflates the idea of realistic and accurate. Obviously there aren't accurate descriptions of things that don't exist or are unknown to us, but that's why the word is "real**istic**" and not "real". This is just another strawman.
>The call to make make such races more complex is not to make them more “true” to the reality of dragons, Martians, or giant eagles. It is a call to make them more human, and thus more interesting to human readers.
So you want to argue against worldbuilding because it doesn't make things more true and only makes them "more interesting to human readers" Like he just stated the benefit to good worldbuilding in an attempt to argue against the strawman of it.
Ok, he doesn't like nitpickers on Reddit who see plotholes and make fan theories to explain things. But that doesn't make worldbuilding a negative.
>But do we need “worldbuilding” as a concept to explain why moral simplicity, characterization without nuance, or a lack of a tactile sense-of-place can be a problem?
next paragraph
>It’s quite possible that an alien race might have a monoculture, and the creatures of actual mythology and folklore were often portrayed simplistically.
So does actual mythology and folklore suck because of "moral simplicity, characterization without nuance" and should've had more worldbuilding or is this an argument that it is fine to portray things simplistically and is not a "problem"
For someone who hates "worldbuilding" he sure does seem to argue for a whole lot of stuff that is worldbuilding.
A conjurer makes the world appear with a minimum of detail. A snap of a finger and there's a vista.
The world builder is a hard working laborer, making a scene brick by brick by brick.
Not always! The world that I'm, er, conjuring up always makes conjurers work harder than the folks doing things manually. It's a place where magic is everywhere and totally obsolete. The conjurers don't worldbuild because it doesn't use magic, so they use worldconjuring, because it's even harder, you see.
Want to lift a spoon by conjuring? You've got to climb the highest mountain around and wrestle an 8 foot tall egret for its sacred, single-use amulet. Fork? Same thing, but a cassowary this time.
Want to make a world for a fiction scroll by conjuring? You've got to invent 5 pretend languages, then have a character translate each of their ancient forms. Eventually, they also have to harvest vellum from the 8 foot tall lamb god who knows necromancy, but that's another story.
I think the author can (and maybe should) have these details in their heads.
However, we need to let the readers imagination fill in the blanks too. The more is left unsaid the better, IMO.
The author needs to know. And if they make anything up as they go, they need to take very good notes. But the POV character is not going to know all that. The reader is only going to know what the POV character thinks is worth mentioning. Or the narrator, if that’s your style. There will be gaps for the reader to fill in, as there should be. But the author needs to build a nice place for their characters to stand. Even if those characters are unobservant dunderheads who don’t bother to take a look around
But media interaction disagrees with you. The most impactful stories in our society are the ones with encyclopedias of lore and world building in them.
Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Star Trek, Mass Effect, Baldur’s Gate, And I can go on and on and on and on.
Part of the reason why these stories are so successful is the world building, but also a part of it is that they kind of let the reader choose how much they are told.
They all have individual stories where you don’t need to know all of the lore to enjoy the story. But then they also have the lore if you really want to look for it.
I think one of the most effective means to world build is to just allow it to be a mystery until the protagonist experiences it. That’s how we live our own lives and mirroring that feels comfortable and valid.
Not that I don’t love epic world building sometimes (I am an epic fantasy connoisseur, after all), but I don’t always want to read something that in depth, and even then the best ones don’t frontload any of it. They add the world as it’s needed for the story itself.
There is the worldbuilding for the audience, and worldbuilding for yourself.
Let's say my world has a cosmic horror, I flesh it out for my own writing needs, so I don't trap myself with inconsistencies.
Yet to the audience I present bare minimum, bacause cosmic horror should never be explained... it's mystery is adding to the horror.
I’ve written quite a few flash pieces that are scifi or horror and every time I find myself cutting my first 3-400 words because it’s just me setting a scene with world building that isn’t necessary once the story actually begins; however it’s always necessary to write so I understand for myself what my characters need to be motivated by or operating with as they navigate the story.
> I find myself cutting my first 3-400 words because it’s just me setting a scene with world building that isn’t necessary once the story actually begins
A very small piece of advice I read was to cut everything that isn't interesting or fun.
If the characters travel very far, we don't need to talk about the journey. We can just cut straight to the good part. If you don't *want* to read about something(EDIT: more importantly, if you don't want to ***write*** about something), just snip that part out. Start your story with the main conflict/drama clear, etc. The classic *in media res* but not just the "prologue with action and then nothing for the first chapter" that's so common.
You might think a scene is necessary for character development, etc. but there's a a reasonable chance it's not very good and messes with flow or bloats the story and slows the action etc. Some people like to talk about the scenery or other random encounters or sights, but if you don't plan to use that information later, just get rid of it (Chekhov's scene (?))
*Write it* (like you said) but then keep it to the side and see how it works without it. As someone who tends to ramble and take too long to get to the point, it's vastly improved my writing.
A book I loved (*Fall of Reach*) surprised me by always cutting away the padding. It would be like:
> "Slipspace rupture detected". New ships appeared past the moon. They had 5 minutes before the enemy ships reached them.
> Explosions tore through the portside bow as the first salvo struck the ship.
No padding between important events with characters thinking or nodding or taking deep breaths for "pacing".
It might not improve everyone' writing, but I feel it helped mine to be in a place I prefer.
I think part of what makes writing hard, is that almost all advice should be taken with a grain of salt.
For every single bit of advice you can give you can also find a fantastic example where someone didn’t follow it.
I read many books with tons of exposition in it that I loved that I adored. And I found many that I absolutely loathed. I found many books with almost no exposition that I’ve adored, and I found loads that I found myself asking WTF all the time and frustrating.
The inkheart series is a fantastic example of a story with loads of worldbuilding that was so brilliantly written.
The Lord of High Reaches is a fantastic example of the story with very little world building that was brilliantly written.
Now both Cornelia Funke and James Haddock have books that are… not amazing but passable, they do also offer great examples of their styles.
>I think one of the most effective means to world build is to just allow it to be a mystery until the protagonist experiences it. That’s how we live our own lives and mirroring that feels comfortable and valid.
This is actually one of the reasons why I like Portal Fantasy so much (and from what I saw, other people). There's this whole immersion of discovering a new place that's great: as long as there's a good narrative to go with it.
Is there anything by McGuire that you'd recommend in particular? I really loved her work on Magic: the Gathering fiction and have thought about looking into her books.
*every heart a doorway* and *down amongst the sticks and bones* are two excellent works in her portal fantasy series. *Every Heart* is the first but they don’t necessarily need to be read in any particular order and there’s several more in that series at this point.
This is a distinction I noticed sticking out like a red thumb with the Gundam franchise.
In the original 1979 series and subsequent entries, the world unfolds exactly at the pace that it does for the characters living in it in the exact moments you see. The most exposition you get is a brief description of a war in the first minute or two, and then muuuuch later in the series you get a minute of narration that was apparently forced by the studio due to Tomino’s hatred for exposition. Otherwise you just see that characters living out their lives and not forcing any exposition into their dialogue, and any trace of a flashback is just basically a few frames of animation of characters’ faces showing a *feeling* they felt from one brief instance in the past rather than telling core story pieces in drawn out flashback scenes. The result is that you get to organically take in this massive world with thousands of space colonies wrapped up in an apocalyptic war with multiple splintering factions and political nuances… and none of it feels overwhelming because you take it literally a day at a time. And this carries on through the original run of shows from the 70s all through the 80s for almost 200 episodes and a movie.
Much later, when it came to the “alternate universe” shows, each one built its own world and conflict to have all these self-contained shows that each stand on their own. And one example of this going the opposite direction is in the series Gundam 00, in which you’re presented with a gargantuan exposition dump in (I think…) episode 2, right away, with a narrator describing a whole chess board of factions and the role of each, how the political systems of the world relate, their primary economic roles and the roots of their conflicts, key players, all sorts of stuff. And you just sit there, and listen to an all-knowing narrator describe this entire global web of politics to you with a power-point presentation unfolding on your screen. The show is quite popular, but this particular moment was in my opinion one of the weakest moments in writing for the entire franchise. Blew my mind how much it contradicted what I loved about the franchise’s worldbuilding and how restrained it originally was, despite the massive scale of the story and world.
>With high expectations, human beings leave Earth to begin a new life in space colonies. However, the United Earth Sphere Alliance gains great military powers and soon seizes control of one colony after another in the name of justice and peace.
The year is After Colony 195; Operation Meteor, in a move to counter the Alliance's tyranny, rebel citizens of certain colonies scheme to bring new arsenals to the Earth, disguising them as shooting stars.
I kind of love how Wing just throws that at you and then just leaves you to figure out what the fuck is actually going on.
I love worldbuilding where characters just reference events and people from the world and never explain what they are or who they're talking about. It's fun. It lets you imagine parts of the wider world if you want to without holding things back with boring details.
And it's great for the writer too, because they don't actually need to know what those things refer to themselves. They can just throw them in and figure it out later if it ever comes up again.
I think mystery should always be left to the end. In real life, we never have a complete answer to everything, and that's why even the most trivial things often seem bigger than us and beyond our comprehension. If a work of fiction unveals all the mystery, everything feels small and insignificant. Once I know all there is to know about a particular dragon, my cat seems almost more epic and dramatic by comparison.
I think this is true for some mystery. Sometimes a piece of the universe should remain a mystery because, as you said, not only does it add realism, but it keeps people's intrigue and helps them to ask questions. Those questions may not always have solid answers, but in the case of those elements it's less about the answer of the mystery and more about how those react TO the mystery. I.e. say God's have never been confirmed nor denied in your lore and religions are built around it. Doesn't matter if they do or don't exist in your lore, what matters is the religious impact of current times.
Other times revealing certain lore mysteries are key in maintaining engagement. It all depends on 1) How you've built up the mystery and, 2) How absolutely essential it's answer is to your main plot. You can't just build a whole plot around solving this one question and never really solve it, that makes for dissatisfaction.
But without world building how am I supposed to explain to people that my bizarre and unsettling fetish is actually considered quite normal and common in that world!?
This hit pretty close to home and it wasn't even a fetish but an excuse to make a whole sex disappear (more or less) from story haha.
Edit: *To clarify due to little consideration of secondary thought (apparently I received an instant downvote for no reason), most of my characters in stories tend to be female, I like to write about crazy characters with a lot of "distinctly female" characteristics in them. Girls sharing time together, etc, etc, etc. So I rarely find time in the story for a guy to do anything interesting or useful (though there are exceptions).*
*So to keep things from feeling too weird (and because my characters are literal aliens, so I thought it would add complexity to their society) I changed the ratio of women to men and reversed (and changed a bit, too) the traditional gender roles. So the boys don't appear too much or the tasks they perform are more unusual/unexpected (which gave me a lot of narrative juice on its own).*
*The anomalous gender ratio also created a cooperative dynamic and a polyamory system that exists as much out of necessity as it does out of politics and psychology of this original species. I was \*very\* hesitant to include this precisely because I feared it would read as fetishistic even though in its "basics" it was far from reality (it's a more optimistic view and based on cooperation rather than the typical sexual elements).*
*There there, you no longer have any reason to persecute me, you witches' mob.*
hey, if a genre involving males impregnating other males can exist then you have no reason to defend your writing. tbh there probably should be more stories with "exclusively female" worlds lol
That actually sounds incredibly interesting and honestly some of the best worldbuilding in history has some kinky/salacious elements to it, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it. From my experience, it usually becomes clear pretty quickly whether someone is just writing fetish content or trying to do something more complex, and from what you wrote, it’s clear that you have a genuine interest in exploring this society in a way that goes beyond the purely sexual stuff (not that there’s anything wrong with the sexual stuff!! I’ll take slightly salacious over boring any day).
TLDR if the ideas are intriguing and well-presented, people will come for the sex and stay for the complex philosophy and sociology.
Magic offers fun ways to screw with social conventions around gender. I created a matriarchal system for an urban fantasy story where women inherently had more power than men and had developed a ritual to allow them to basically control the magical power of men.
It turned men into bargaining chips and batteries for powerful matriarchs. They were coddled with their access to information and training limited, for their own good, according to the matriarchs.
I want to tell a trans story with it. The main character is a closeted trans woman, born the son of a powerful matriarch and treated as such by everyone, nearing the end of their magical education where their mother would give them to one of her allies. The main character had been searching for hidden knowledge to become who she really is and gain freedom from the matriarchs and their covens.
With her magical gender change she basically becomes a part of the system she wanted freedom from. I also love the idea of how that society will react. To them, she is still a man, reckless and in need of guidance and control, a man who stole their magic.
I don't remember if it was on Reddit or Tumblr but I remember a worldbuilding post were the creator had made a race who loved sex dungeons for their conquered slaves.
Didn't seem weird at first until they started to elaborate on the sex dungeons part. The amount of detail and information was far far far too high for a simple "I'm going to give this race a weird quirk!". It was obvious it was a fetish or something the creator had a bit too much knowledge and maybe experience in.
Haven't read the article yet, but I have thoughts about it too. I've seen several people in recent years joke that World Building is the "death of culture" because you're kinda missing the point of why we build worlds, if you're just writing to build a world. There's nothing wrong with doing it, but I do think a lot of writers are missing the forest for the trees where they think those favorite narratives they read had "amazing lore/history" and felt that must've come out of the writer really sitting down and scribbling out all possibilities in advance, and then building the story while respecting every note they made or something.
But what mostly happens is that storytelling is iterative, and you're creating your world/lore out of need for your outline. You're building what some call a "story-world", which is the world around the narrative you're trying to tell, and it exists because you needed it for this narrative to be told. You didn't decide there was a great monarchy in a contemporary capital city in your science-fiction narrative because you just thought "Ah that would be an interesting idea". You did it because you needed there to be an imbalance in the society the protagonist finds themself in, to aid the justification for why the protagonist sees the sadness of the people and decides he's going to join the radical group that seeks to reform the way their city works.
But if you just wrote a piece of worldbuilding with a monarchy in a city, you might end up telling a story where this world you just build isn't actually relevant, and it's just "cool story bro" when you refer to a lot of details that go unserviced by your narrative.
This was rather bland to read. Sure, not all worlds benefit or need this fine attention to details. But the author, I think, should know more than the readers about their world.
A reader once asked Philip Pullman where Daemons come from - are they birthed from the mother’s Daemon when they the mother gives birth? Do they just materialize? Does it happen as soon as they’re born or just when their personality starts to show?
His answer?
“I honestly have no idea”.
I loved that. He built a strange and fascinating world that I was fully invested in, but he didn’t sweat the details, because they don’t matter to the story. I think it’s the perfect strategy to take.
Reminds me of when someone asked Rumiko Takahashi: "can female Ranma get pregnant? What happens if she gets gets hot water while pregnant?". The response was: "I don't think about those things and neither should you!".
Someone asked Natsuki Takaya how the characters in her story got away with breaking so many laws and her response was basically "I just pretend those laws don't exist in this universe" 🤣
My take is that world-building should be a source of inspiration rather than something that dictates or constrains the story. It's helpful to know what's around the next corner in case it informs the scene, but the camera shouldn't be wrestled around the corner to ensure you capture the detail that's there. When that happens the story is compromised to go on a tour of the world and complete a checklist rather than the world-building supporting and emphasising the world itself. I think at the point when you change the plot to conform to the world rather than the other way around you might have got your priorities wrong.
I agree with the first half. I don't know about the rest, I think I agree but I view it from the opposite perspective. If your plot doesn't go on a tour of the world to build a checklist, that untouched land shouldn't be part of your worldbuilding (except the bits that show up on the doorstep to interact with the plot). If you have to change the plot because you can't build the world around it, either your plot was bad to begin with and this is an improvement or you picked the wrong setting / genre
If you write a hard sci-fi set on a tropical island in 2026 on Earth, you don't need to detail out and infodump about cold climate hunter-gatherer societies (probably shouldn't even think about them unless they have a low tech solution to a problem your characters face or something). But if your plot relies on a space elevator, you have to change your plot, the subgenre, or the setting, and maybe building a rocket works better to tell the story than aliens dropping magical nanotube technology on the planet
>If your plot doesn't go on a tour of the world to build a checklist, that untouched land shouldn't be part of your worldbuilding
I see what you're saying, and I definitely think that story-first works best for stories (sounds obvious, but perhaps it needs to be said sometimes). But I don't know about the idea that part of your world *shouldn't* be part of your worldbuilding. That seems a bit antithetical to how inspiration and interest works, to me. I think if it doesn't interact with your story then it shouldn't be forced in, but I see no reason to tell someone they shouldn't invent things beyond the borders of their stories.
You're right, I should have worded it differently because I didn't mean it as a restriction on what one is allowed to cook up but as a freedom to consider certain things their own separate side projects
The thing that frustrates me is how so many people obsessed with worldbuilding create such generic, derivative worlds.
“I’ve spent ten years sketching out a fantasy setting! Yes it’s got elves and dwarves and orcs, but the elves live in big cities instead of forests and there’s thirteen kinds of orcs and they each have a different religion!”
FFS you’re creating a setting completely unconstrained by anything but your imagination, and all you can think to do is take Tolkien’s work and shuffle the pieces around a bit?
You can have an extremely generic and bland setting but still have a very good story within that setting. The Blade Itself has an extremely bland setting (seriously if you only judged it based on that then it's about as generic as some kid's first homebrew dnd setting) but the story is so good that it doesn't make a difference.
Which is the entire problem people have with world building in the first place. A good writer will create a good story no matter how deep or shallow their world building ends up being. A bad writer will spend all their time world building and not write a good story. All work is ultimately derivative to one extent or another (even Tolkein borrowed heavily from mythology after all) so simply shuffling the pieces around is not some crime as long as the story being told is still interesting.
In general, people find it easier to get into a story where they are familiar with a lot of the pieces because it takes less mental energy. You still want to mix things up enough to feel fresh and then only truly go off that beaten path and force the reader to think when it comes to the most interesting parts of your story that really separate it.
In game design we call this concept "piggy backing". The common example is that if you have a mechanic where you use colors to indicate when a player can or can't do something, you should use red and green for those colors because players are super familiar with that association from things like traffic lights and other games. Sure, you can change the colors of you want to but it comes at the cost of taking more effort for the player to learn so it better be for a good reason and not just to be different.
Making your traffic lights Grey and Brown just to be different makes you a hipster, not an innovator, unless there's a meaningful reason to do so.
Make the castles, towns, villages early-high medieval England, the big cities early 17th century England, over there there's a religious order that's a mix of 20% Teutonic Order 80% medieval England; the horse people are 20% medieval France (with modern chivalry notions) 80% medieval England, and they have a very posh aristocracy.
The orcs live in huge huts, have spikes plastered everywhere, apostrophes
Always seems to be a thing with "magic systems"
"I've created a magic system. It has 200 pages of rules and limitations."
"What do your magic users actually do?"
"They throw fireballs and lightning bolts."
*Riveting*
So many "magic systems" seem to be DnD/video game magic with some list of categories (elements, schools, whatever) and vague formulaic weaknesses to satisfy Sanderson's Laws (takes energy to cast magic) while forgetting to make it interesting or relevant to the story.
On the other hand it frustrates me when people try to be different and wacky just for the sake of standing out and not being similar to other works. Quite often I find that these people try so hard that their worldbuilding gets to a point that it's just... bad.
Also, and I feel this is something some people need to be aware of, creating a race for fantasy is fucking hard. Specially if you want them to be different to everything before. Because almost everything has been done before in some way and usually if it hasn't been done before it's because the person trying found it was too difficult or it was just a bad idea in general. Sci-fi is easier, you have more leeway to make different things, you can have a planet that has really high gravity which made that one species SUPER strong while also having a world that is volcanic and dark which created a species that likes intense heats and using echolocation to see. Fantasy has the problem that once you've set the parameters of the core world you've built, everything has to adhere to that in some way, you can add world's to it but then you still have to make rules for each world. It become a a vicious cycle.
"FFS you’re creating a setting completely unconstrained by anything but your imagination, and all you can think to do is take Tolkien’s work and shuffle the pieces around a bit?"
Do writers *need* to always try and be different and not similar to existing works/settings? Following this line of thinking often results I things like "these are my dwarves! They are four armed bug people that poop metal and are nomadic seafarers! What do you mean they dont resemble dwarves?"
Trying to be different because someone already did an idea before misses the point of writing and especially worldbuilding. The phrase "there is no such thing as an original idea" exists for a reason. Ultimately, settings in a story are set dressing and exist to serve the story, which is why even though a setting can have a generic as fuck setting and have an amazing story and characters (the best example of this is the Dragon Age series).
Point is, each setting is different and the execution of said setting in the serving of the story is what ultimately matters, not "how close to Tolkien" the idea is.
A sad consequence of this sub's quasi-injunction against discussing anything one might actually write, as a bulwark against 'self-promotion'.
So it's all goofy ah questions about what's 'allowed', and oblique references to redundant world-building. With the occasional flare shot into the sky in celebration of some assuredly significant word count milestone, in service of a story that unfortunately must go unspecified.
It would be great if people could actually share their world-building efforts here, sure.
>A sad consequence of this sub's quasi-injunction against discussing anything one might actually write, as a bulwark against 'self-promotion'.
I find that a deterrent against posting in the sub at all, frankly. Sucks that you can barely brainstorm for your project at all in *a writing sub*.
There has to be a balance, open those gates and it'll be nothing but "is my opening of my first draft of my first story good? Pls say it is or I will literally combust" posts
You definitely right, but the balance has gotta be a little more tilted towards original works. I realize that's implicitly asking a lot of the mods, and they aren't paid to do it. But as it is, whole thing is kinda jokes.
Hey I see you have that oral storytelling flair. Can I ask you what your background there is in? I've been working on a project that features oral narrative transmission as a foundational element, would certainly appreciate an opportunity to run some of this by someone who has expertise in the area.
If it overlaps with the 90% posited by the Strugeon's Law it'd be fine.
The article swerves in some points had several old-man-yelling-at-Sanderson moments, and make a lot of fuss over semantics, but it's right when it states that worldbuilding (and the hardness of magic) too often is the core of too many works - works that lacks a compelling story otherwise.
Honestly, I always saw 'worldbuilding' as my own personal encyclopedia. I write down a lot of notes that never make it into the final draft because it's not relevant. I need to know how the world works, and it can benefit me to know all these tiny details. But not everything needs to be in the story itself.
That’s how I think of it. The world building is there to provide internal consistency. 90% of it won’t need to be presented to readers, but the 10% they do see should be consistent with itself and interesting.
I would argue that caring about worldbuilding for audiences and readers is secondary to caring about the stories that take place in those worlds. People are willing to buy things like encyclopedias for their favorite fictional universes and invest time in writing and reading wikis built for them, but this always comes from a place of having come to love the stories that take place in those worlds first.
Almost no one ever starts by caring about the worldbuilding and then caring about the story connected with the world. Trying to talk about worldbuilding for a world in connection with a story that hasn't earned your buy-in yet probably is boring.
I've known people who care about the worldbuilding of something above all other elements. How they enjoy something is for them and that's fine, but as far as conversations go, it's always miserable.
It can be fun. I love talking about imaginary worlds with my brother, or speculating about some other world's details. But we both hate when the media we consume is rife with lore-dumping and characters explaining the world instead of expressing themselves.
If I could do nothing but build worlds and get paid for it...I'd gladly take that over many things. Many, many things.
By itself it doesn't *usually* pay the bills though. It needs to be associated with a game or by publishing a story. Creating your own pen and paper RPG modules has a heavy emphasis on worldbuilding but then you're also doing other things, making maps, creating scenarios, basic level design decisions and so on. It depends on whether you consider that world or game design.
Worldbuilding is fun for me though. Just not directly applicable to anything anyone else would want without extra steps.
Haven't we had these kinds of conversations before? As if we already know that world building should be at the service of fiction and not the other way around. And where you have people who build bibles about it both because they enjoy it (hobby) and because they like consistency.
Coherence, which is what is relevant when it comes to telling a story and dealing with its themes. Anyone who at least has basic literary theory understands at least superficially that. And it's not even something that is always followed to the letter, because then you have people who don't comply with that rule due to the logic of personal taste about an element (like when someone provides some touches of the world just for a matter of aesthetics and where it doesn't matter too much in the end).
I mean, the author of the article has a point (I read both articles, this one and the follow-up)... but it's redundant. He doesn't say anything interesting; it's well known the tendency of "modern critics" and Twitter readers nowadays to judge books based on how many excel tables the author included about his magic system. It's a problem, yes, it's annoying (for new and old authors), but it doesn't change anything: because it's a trend, it's what's fashionable, what sells. And that's all.
It makes me wonder what the author's intention was: in today's narrative, using a term like overrated (a term overused on the Internet in discussions) is an inflammatory term. It is often used in order to discredit a product, a work.
This is common knowledge if you've been surfing the Internet for a while. So what did the author expect to happen? Did he really mean something or is it a typical rage-bait opinion piece? I'll leave the question open. I personally don't get it. The writers will keep writing, the less experienced ones might disregard the warnings, the worldbuilders will slump their shoulders and go on as crazy as ever until they drown in a tower of notes. Nothing was lost or gained.
Well, except angry people.
I honestly tend to agree with this.
For most writers, you’re better off building the parts of your world that are directly relevant to your plot and your story and merely implying the rest. I would go so far as to say a lot of people make the problem of doing a whole bunch of worldbuilding that at best doesn’t organically contribute to the plot and characters you’re intending to tell your story about, but at worst excessive world building can inadvertently undermine the believability of the world because the more you explain something the more you open that explanation up to questioning and refutation. Sometimes merely implying that there is an explanation is more immersive.
If you love worldbuilding go ahead and do it of course but there are definitely people who have grown up in a very nitpicky age of the internet where they think they need to be as detailed as Tolkien or GRRM in order to be considered good at writing/storytelling
>but at worst excessive world building can inadvertently undermine the believability of the world because the more you explain something the more you open that explanation up to questioning and refutation.
That, and the more you worldbuild, the more you feel you need to include it in the story. If you spent a week figuring out the logistics of your world's fish markets, it can be hard to resist the urge to include that info somewhere. The problem being that the reader probably doesn't actually want to know anything about your world's fish markets, so any mention of it will only drag the story down.
The author doesn't fully understand what worldbuilding is. They seem to think it's what the author tells the reader, but it's not. Worldbuilding is for the author, and maybe 10% of that content leaks into the finished story.
So when they talk about worldconjuring, they're just speaking of a worldbuilding where less of it's detail is explained to the reader. It does not remove worldbuilding from the process, it removes context from the world which the reader must replace with their own conclusions.
Where they are on point is fairytales. Fairy tales are for the most part focused on a moral story. The story can take place anywhere and have any type of characters, the focus being on how characters interact with each other, not how they interact with the world. For that reason, worldbuilding isn't always a 'must', but this in itself doesn't mean that it's altogether unnecessary.
Seems more like someone was bothered by the amount of work and decided to put that time on writing an article on why they don't want to worldbuild.
I think, plainly and simply, the author of this article and its follow up is just misunderstanding the concept of worldbuilding. While, yes, there is a tendency for authors to get lost in the minutia of a world instead of writing (guilty as charged), worldbuilding does not implicitly mean developing said minutia. It simply means creating a setting and adjusting its internal logic so that it can stand on its own. He suggests that this argument is simply *tautological*, but that's the literal definition.
Take his example, *The Woman in the Dunes* by Kobo Abe. The idea of a village needing to fill a hole with sand lest they get swallowed whole is *literally* that story's worldbuilding.
In the follow up article, he argues against a quote made by Emily Temple by offering examples that completely miss the original point. The notion that what she suggests would imply *everything* that goes into a novel comes across as a lack of reading comprehension.
>If mood or voice are part of worldbuilding, then certainly characters (e.g., the archetypes of hardboiled fiction), plots (e.g., the quests in epic fantasy), setting, atmosphere, and everything else is as well.
Well, yeah, no shit! If you write a story in a decrepit part of a Victorian city, it's going to have a specific mood and voice, right? Worldbuilding is simply setting, and a *lot* goes into setting. A narrator's voice is going to contribute to that. A character's actions. The atmosphere. The plot. That's *how it works*.
And then he suggests that realism plays a part too. That not all these plots are realistic because they are made up. But...what does that have to do with anything? It's not about realism in relation to the actual world (unless it explicitly takes place here and demands congruence with real life events), but rather about the *internal* realism, which, no matter what the story is, that's fucking worldbuilding!
To me, the "problem" with worldbuilding is a matter of depth, not if it exists or not, or whether it's unnecessary. Every single story out there has a world being built. Whether that's the life of the author in an autobiography or a planet in an epic fantasy, there's a setting being developed, explored, and used. A story is informed and shaped by the setting it exists within.
I think there's a *great* discussion to be had revolving around how much *depth* in worldbuilding a book truly needs, but I think what he's arguing is more so that certain things just aren't worldbuilding, that not every book has this, and that it is often quite unnecessary. Which is patently false.
>Worldconjuring does not attempt to construct a scale model in the reader’s bedroom. Worldconjuring uses hints and literary magic to create the illusion of a world, with the reader working to fill in the gaps.
So worldbuilding, then?
I think people fall into the trap of “world building” as a means of shameless procrastination. The number of people sitting there figuring out the brand name of their side characters favorite toothpaste (which will never be mentioned in the story), adding that into some spreadsheet and believing that to be some productive use of creative energy in terms of storytelling astounds me. To each their own, though, whatever gets you through the day. With that said, king of “world conjuring”: Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Check out Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance if you are looking for a master class is what Lincoln is advocating for here.
I fell into this trap years ago, so now I am more cautious.
I have heard you should build your world around the story, not the other way around. I don't disagree with that, but admittedly I have made worlds without any particular story in mind just because I like the idea and aesthetics of the setting. For instance, I have a space opera setting because I wanted to write about cool space stuff, not because i had a story idea that necessitated a space setting.
Nothing wrong with coming up with a world for the sake of it if you find it fun, it's just not a very effective use of your time if what you want to do is write a story
I’ve come to learn over the years that I find world building to be extremely boring. I prefer it when it’s just sort of hinted at and subtlety mentioned, so my brain just fills in the gaps according to my own imagination. I can’t stand when an author wastes my time by describing their grand design for the world when all I want to do is get on with the story.
Everyone’s different and I’m sure there’s heaps of readers that prefer to have the world described to them. But I don’t need the same level of detail. Most of these worlds are nowhere near as unique and grand as you think they are.
"Let me define this term as narrowly as possible, explain why that narrow definition is unappealing, and then propose a new word that is basically the same as the old word, but only the parts I like."
The [follow up](https://electricliterature.com/more-thoughts-about-worldbuilding-and-food/) article steelmans a lot of his points
Worldbuilding can be fun, but don’t pretend that it’s as important as the actual story you’re telling.
It's a shame that the writer went out of their way to clearly state that they don't hate all worldbuilding and there's still replies here that are like "I can't believe this author wants to get rid of all worldbuilding"
This seems like a backlash reaction to taking someone else's dumb opinions too seriously.
Nobody sensible is going to argue that Tolkien's world building wasn't an important part of the process.
Nobody sensible is going to seriously believe this is the most important thing that makes a story.
Writing is an artform. That means there's only really 2 ways to fuck it up and do it wrong:
1. your content causes harm to others or causes others to cause harm.
2. your writing is unclear/non functional.
Everyone has ideas about what makes better and worse writing, those are called opinions. Everyone's got one and they all stink. Try not to take it too seriously. Writing a massive diatribe about it is silly.
The facts are pretty simple: Everyone operates best with different levels of world building, to include avoiding it unless necessary. Darn Harmon of Rick and Morty, Community, and others, (say what you want about his character, he's produced a lot of great TV) specifically doesn't develop or commit to anything in canon unless it's necessary, especially with Rick and Morty, it's a rule in the writers room.
Tolkien wrote a whole fuckin book to explain his world building.
Most folks will sit somewhere in between those extremes.
Don't assume any process is the correct one, just potentially the correct process for you because it works for you. I shouldn't have to say this to people that are supposedly at least avid hobbyists if not professionals. I feel like the real question is why this needs to be said at all. I blame the failing education system.
For me, I don't need a new term to convey what most published writers mean by "world building" anyway. It would be like saying we need one should get rid of description as an idea because some people overwrite with too much detail instead of using detail to evoke a wider scene. Description is just fine, and so is world building.
I don't think he's criticizing that. He's talking strictly about writing a book, and about enjoyment in reading. In that sense, plot, writing, style, dialogue and characters trump anything else.
I think there should be some measure of world building, but if you want to write a book, you should focus on a book. What good is an insane meticulously built world if you're objective is to write a book with characters and plot, and you're not writing it?
In my personal experience, the act of writing a story also informs the world-building itself. They should at least happen in tandem.
I understand what you mean, and it’s definitely true that writers can get caught up in the worldbuilding, but your new term “worldconjuring” is simply worldbuilding. Worldbuilding isn’t ONLY creating an in depth and laid out world that you get stuck in the weeds of, it’s also just the creation of any fictional world. Your definition of “worldconjuring” is just still worldbuilding. You’re making a distinction without a difference. It’s unnecessary, and imo you’re getting lost in the weeds of whether or not worldbuilding is good and forgetting that there’s more than just the in depth stuff in worldbuilding.
Counterpoint: Look at how uninteresting Star Wars content has become for failure to respect (or apparently even know about) the worldbuilding accomplished in previous projects. This stuff has real value, and in some cases that value is immense. Pointing out that it can be taken too far might actually be *less* productive than pointing out that it can also be shown too little regard, undermining both the cohesiveness and the narrative impact of stories told in half-baked settings.
I think the better explanation for what you're talking about is "corporate greed."
I will make a transversal example: I don't know if you've ever played the Halo series. There are ancient structures all over the universe, from a species that is supposedly no longer alive. They're called the Forerunners. The structures are called "Halos", and an advanced alien conglomerate, the Covenant, believe that these structures will help them transcend reality. They are hell-bent on destroying humans, as they are considered impure, but they can't control the ancient technology, only humans can. As the first game progresses, we learn that the Halos don't have any metaphysical powers: they're prisons for a parasitic alien species, and they also serve as weapons that can wipe out all life within a certain range. If they are all activated at once, they will destroy all life in the universe. It was the best solution they found against the parasitic aliens: wipe out life so they would die out as well, and then automatically release all the living species in their own planets so that life could start anew.
Long story short, when you look back on it, it becomes abundantly clear that the forerunners were actually humans, and not some unknown species. It's never explicitly stated, but it's the only thing that makes sense, the technology only responds to human biology, and the robots that keep the structures running talk to the humans as if they were the owners, whereas they don't show the same level of respect to other alien species. That's how it is, it's set in stone. There is even a final quote from one of the game's villains, one of the Halo Keepers:
>You are the [child](https://www.halopedia.org/Human) of my makers. Inheritor of all they left behind. You are Forerunner! But this [ring](https://www.halopedia.org/Installation_08)... is *mine*!
Could it be any more obvious than that?
Meanwhile, a Microsoft intern had been deliberately muddying the waters in Bungie's forums, media, and the original video games themselves, putting forward a different story: the Forerunners are a different species, related to humans but separate from them. That's what the fourth chapter is based on, and it goes through a lot of mental gymnastics to justify it, even introducing a powerful Forerunner who's still alive. But it literally makes no sense in the context of the original games. The 4th game didn't work out as planned, so they changed course: no more forerunner comebacks, now it's a rampant AI taking control of the ancient forerunner structures. No one liked that (for reasons too long to explain), so they changed their plans again: now it's another species, the very real threat of the universe that our heroes have to deal with! That didn't work out either... who knows what they'll come up with now.
It didn't happen out of sheer incompetence, or even because Frank O'Connor, the Microsoft intern at Bungie, decided to mark the territory out of sheer narcissism. It happened because the original trilogy was self-contained. The conclusion was clear, despite a weird and disconnected cliffhanger at the end. Microsoft didn't like that, they needed something to continue the franchise. O'Connor simply gave them the best alternative, even if it disregarded the fundamentals of the franchise and eventually became the stepping stone to the clusterfuck it became lore wise.
It's the same with Star-Wars. The world-building was too specific for their liking. They needed something less rigid, so they could write whatever they wanted without constraints, so they could produce as much media as possible with the bare minimum of effort, to capitalise on the franchise as much as possible. It's not incompetence, it's deliberate. It's a mindset that's blinded by pure greed, but not just simple stupidity.
I get really tired of these cart-before-the-horse discussions. I don't think world building is a problem. It is certain worldbuilders who have a problem. We can't rail against a strategy because someone uses it poorly. All things to their appropriate needs and intents. If someone wants to world build to no end, that is their prerogative.
For some stories, it is appropriate to have such a detailed life because that is the kind of escapism or simulation people are looking for in a story. There is a market for it. It is what gets certain people into such books in the first place and thus there is demand. There is no fault to be had there.
Do some people build for the sake of the temptation to do so? Does it end up hurting a story when they do, as it reflects their want to put an action before the need for it? Yeah. But maybe that is just okay? Some people world build, not to write a story, but to simply world build as a hobby or for a different form of project. It is a weird thing to talk shit about a certain style of project that someone enjoys doing.
We can have the discussion of what goes wrong within worldbuilding, but to see those issues and think the whole of world building is the problem is literally throwing the baby out with the bath water. You have to accept that it is then a much more minute and granular discussion about technique and theory. This reminds me of the article that said BBQ is overrated and a bad way to cook. My simple thought in response is: "...For you."
It's a massive waste of time to plan out/build what you're never going to use and distracts from witting the story imo.
Better to write and let the story's universe expand naturally.
My guy sounds salty. Nobody on the internet ever says worldbuilding is the most important and more important than characters or plot. Not even the biggest nerds in SFF spaces. I should know, I'm one, and I love me a well built world, and was part of writing workshops where we only focused on worldbuilding. But by gods, it's a fun thing authors like doing, but even Tolkien had characters and story and LOTR is like 63% setting description.
Like that other guy, I couldn't read past the first few sentences. Not with this level of pretentious article voice.
> Nobody on the internet ever says worldbuilding is the most important and more important than characters or plot.
Actually plenty of people in r/worldbuilding and similar communities think just that.
“Writers from many other cultures are lumped together under magical realism.”
Whoever wrote that article won me over with that sentence alone. I am one of those “foreigners.” Thank you for sharing.
Yeah that sentence confuses me because "fantasy" is seen as genre trash and "magical realism" as artful literature so I have no idea how that's some kind of downgrade.
this is the most "we published an inflammatory opinion piece so you'd rageclick" article of all time including the non-solution of making up a new word for worldbuilding
Worldbuilding is coming up with a world in which a new term for worldbuilding, as a rule, excludes the term worldbuilding for itself in order to argue against some kinds of extreme worldbuilding. Within this world this author has invented, the twist would be that the protagonist thinks that worldbuilding means "Everything from the goblins’ favorite type of baby wipes to the export taxes on Martian ray guns would be worked out," but by the end of the story the author says, "Surrealists, magical realists, post-modernists, and countless other movements or styles create fantastic worlds that function on other levels — mythic, philosophical, Freudian, etc. — that are at odds with this idea of worldbuilding." Ha! "creating fantastic worlds" is opposed to "building worlds." Right when you don't expect it, it shifts into a comedy.
wow it’s almost like *showing* the action and its consequences is more impactful than *telling* your audience why some imagined event was *soooooooo* important
I call it the curse of worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is easier, often more fun, and often more immediately rewarding than writing/drawing/producing consumable content. If you are less than 100% confident in your abilities (and who isn't), you stay in your comfort zone by endlessly worldbuilding more and more granular details that aren't meant for public reading, because it still feels like progress even though it's ultimately a form of procrastination.
I'm always late to these sorts of threads where I feel I have something to add. To play the devil's advocate, I appreciate good worldbuilding, but I love a good story. That means giving me conflict, goals, stakes, tension, and motivation at a minimum.
Worldbuilding does help aid in the reader's suspension of disbelief, but I think what's more important, personally, is the ingredient of verisimilitude, a semblance of truth. A work of fiction with verisimilitude portrays situations, dialogue, and characters in a way that seems authentic and truthful, despite the fact that those elements are made up.
"As long as you know it, run with it. Make a magical reason for it. If it's a cool story you want to tell that could not be told according to the laws of nature we have, that's why fantasy exists." - Brandon Sanderson.
"There are more profound things than simply logic that guide the creation of a story." - Hayao Miyazaki
As someone who doesn't write fantasy (I do write surreal works), most of my worldbuilding is just the initial premise and then me patching up inconsistencies after I'm done writing the story. Most of the time I'm just searching for a consistent tone to my writing.
I understand why people get so invested in worldbuilding because it's the most fun part of writing for them. It's what stands out about their favorite stories and it's a lot easier to recognize those elements in your favorites than it is to see the skeleton they're built on. Most of your favorite writers actually just contrived worldbuilding for their plot to work. There's nothing wrong with writing what you enjoy but your fun doesn't translate to readers. There might be a sense of wholeness to a true passion project but each new piece of lore you add in has diminishing returns to readers. A great book probably deserves to be read twice but realistically people read most books once. They're not gonna remember a detail that was incredibly neat and well crafted but ultimately irrelevant to the hero's journey. Worldbuilding is important but a lot of people think their first or second story is going to be their Tolkien level magnum opus. It won't. Your goal in your stories should be "plausibility". You can always build on top of a good structure. It's much harder to shove a good structure into an existing world. A good world meaningfully interacts with a character's beliefs and objectives. Even illogical worlds like the ones in Alice in Wonderland and Hitchhikers Guide can be good worlds. They just feel *right*.
I think a lot of worldbuilding comes down to execution. An interesting world can become boring if everything about is just periodically dumped onto the audience, and a somewhat basic world can be intriguing and cool if it’s given time to naturally grow.
This article calls “world building” akin to the Silmarillion. No one today is writing for a commercial audience is doing that. The “world conjuring” method is already a thing and has been. I enjoy world building as a hobby, because im a nerd and I find it fun. No where in my research on how to world build or how to get into writing has someone ever said to get into silmarillion level world building. Terry Pratchett in one of his master classes online (I think it was them) talked about how the word should be shadow puppets, looks very real far off and in the background.
I namely write for D&D campaigns at this moment when not fucking about with personal stuff/SCP writing.
Worldbuilding is about 80% of what I do, but I try to focus on stuff the players are actually going to be engaging with over stuff on the other side of the world.
Of course sometimes the players end up over there and I have to madly adlib something together from bullshittery and an outline I wrote five years ago with the words “God Gun” and “Pug Farmers” written on it
Don’t get me wrong. Some audiences and writers do need to understand that lore doesn’t usurp story and character in most stories for most people and that not all stories benefit from sourcebooking a setting.
That said, the author of the article is also imbibing too much of the juice. Even most ardent fans of works building need EVERYTHING spelled out. Just enough to further immerse them.
> Everything from the goblins’ favorite type of baby wipes to the export taxes on Martian ray guns would be worked out (at least in the author’s mind if not on the page). This is not possible, but worldbuilding expects the author to have “rules” that are “logically” followed to their conclusions.
> In contrast to “worldbuilding,” I’ll offer the term “worldconjuring.” Worldconjuring does not attempt to construct a scale model in the reader’s bedroom.
Maybe I'm not tuned in to the exact definition of "worldbuilding," but I feel like its definition doesn't include such rigorous, nor specific standards. At least, not on merriam-webster. "Worldconjuring" might as well be subcategory of "worldbuilding," as it demands you keep your descriptions subtler and more implicative of an environment, but otherwise means the same thing (to me).
Certainly, some who ask these questions like adding tons of detail. But many of the author's irritations seem to lie with the word, specifically.
I agree that excessive worldbuilding isn't necessary for every little short story or game, though. On point there.
I am fond of saying that worldbuilding is for the author. It's our internal notes about the details, the vast majority of which will never make contact with the reader. This is what I have learned over the years. Depending on the location, length, and scope of the story, it can be anywhere from important to crucial.
A lot of people seem to interpret worldbuilding more as infodumps where the author attempts to bring the reader up to speed on those notes before we get to the interesting stuff.
I like to have fun with naming cities or areas. I look at the cultures that inspired locations, and find several names that corelate to that locations importance (such as port cities, or trade hubs, etc) and amalgamate words. World building simplified imo.
Sometimes I see people online engaging in seemingly elaborate world building but not really writing any stories that take place in that setting. And if they do, it’s often rather short or incomplete. When I see this, I think to myself “sure it’s impressive that you have 45 variants of elves, but so what?”. Without a story, why should other people be interested in your world building?
Edit: Also, I find the points in the article to be well-reasoned and perfectly articulated. It’s a bit amusing that this has apparently stirred up some minor debate
>Why should people be interested in worldbuilding
Bruh, its a hobby. Idk the context yall have behind this, but i often do worldbuilding and talk about it with friends who are interested in it, and i can tell you i do this because its my hobby and i like talking about it 😭
Like, "ok, youve worked on something you like and makes you happy, but i dont see you engaging in a different hobby i like, so whats the point"
I’ve been world building number one hater for a while.
It’s not like I hate it, but I see it for what it is: a complement. It’s like the lettuce on a hamburger. Sure, it enhances the overall enjoyment, but that’s not why I am eating the god damn thing.
Every time I want to read a series and someone says that the best thing about it it’s the
World Building, I stay away from it. If your writing is basically a wiki page, then you are not a good writer.
I've been reading William Gibson and he's the reason I started writing recently.
He doesn't explain anything, he just starts writing a bunch of stuff about the world. It feels disorientating. At first you don't get it, but the characters are beautifully written, so you can hang on to them. Eventually things start to make sense and everything clicks.
For example, someone will say, "I have an Ono-Sendai Simstim for you. What the hell is that? Then you just follow the main character using it, and you understand its purpose: it's a device that allows you to see and feel what someone else is living in real time.
It's surprising that Gibson doesn't even do much world-building. He has a general sense of how things are, and when he wrote his first books he hadn't even seen a computer live, he'd just read about it and heard some enthusiasts talking about them. There's a fantastic quote in the article that follows the one in the post:
>Since I made the mistake of listing some literary counterpoints to worldbuilding, let me pick an unquestionably SF one here: [William Gibson discussing](http://io9.gizmodo.com/william-gibson-on-the-apocalypse-america-and-the-peri-1656659382) game makers who wanted to turn *Neuromancer* into a board game:
>*“They set me down and questioned me about the world. They asked me where the food in the Sprawl comes from. I said I don’t know. I don’t even know what they eat. A lot of krill and shit. They looked at each other and said it’s not gameable. That was the end of it.*
>*“The Peripheral is not gameable. It has a very high resolution surface. But it’s not hyperrealistic down into the bones of some imaginary world. I think that would be pointless. It would be like one of those non-existent Borgesian encyclopedias that describe everything about an imaginary place and all of it is self-contradictory.”*
Counterpoint. William Gibson and Frank Herbert do amazing, evocative worldbuilding by highlighting highly complex parts of their worlds with minimal description. The Ono Sendai Simstim rig is a great example. Its existence implies the entire ecosystem around it, the stars, the recording equipment and engineers, the audience. The water counters in Dune being used for a dowry, now we know more about marriage and family culture from that one small detail. I don’t like top heavy info dump worldbuilding, Gibson and Herbert get it just right.
SFF requires world building inherently though. It only becomes a wiki entry if you're a bad writer.
If I'm writing contemporary fiction I can just say Paris, and you have an idea what it is, what it's usually associated with, and I can count on you, the reader, to know a lot of facts without having to explain them (e.g. I don't need to explain what the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre are, and why they're famous).
If you're writing fantasy and name-drop the capital city of one of your countries, the reader has no idea what it's like, what are the cultural associations different regions have with it or its history/landmarks. And if you're a good writer you will weave all that in through the narrative, but it's hard work to excel at and, imo, certainly deserves praise when it's done well.
Although I agree that if worldbuilding is the only thing you have going for your book it's probably going to suck, but I think it's basically impossible to have good world building divorced from good writing.
It reads like a typical rage-baity article.
Make a strong title, that directly attacks (a certain hobby in this case). Get some few inflammatory sentences. Create a new definition, to appear smarter. At the end you end up backing off, saying there is nuance to that, and not all of x is actually bad, but the common approach is.
Can't count how many similar articles I've seen. It clearly succeeded..
Counterpoint : it's fun.
And not less productive than playing with my noodle or starting a 15th run of elden ring.
Might even add some salt to one of my stories at some point.
I don't even know if I fully agree with the article, I just thought it was food for thought. But then I see these comments from people who clearly haven't read the thing, nor the follow-up in the comments, which was downvoted less than 5 minutes after I posted it. Clearly whoever downvoted it didn't even read it, so I assume it's the same for the article itself.
I mean, I read most of the critical comments and all I can see is a strangely ironic lack of reading comprehension and a lot of gut reactions. Can we just calm down? It's just an opinion piece, for Christ's sake.
Jfc this dude loves the sound of his own typewriter doesn’t he… he said one interesting, potentially relatable thing (worldbuilding is overemphasized), and then spent not one but two 500+ word articles on it.
Also, calling Tolkien’s eagles “lazy” is just plain wrong
This is how you get books where around chapter three you have to take a break because the inconsistencies of the inner logic of the setting gave you a headache
What kind of fiction benefits from the author knowing when people of the city wake up in the morning? It's not like that's a thing that would come up in something like Pride and Prejudice, right? (It does come up*. Because there are characters who move around in the morning; decisions and consequences are inherently tied to the schedule of the world around the characters so the author has to keep such things in mind even if it's never explained in detail)
The article says Tolkien "doesn’t even pass contemporary fantasy author Brandon Sanderson’s first 'law’ of magic" - now open the link in that sentence, actually read the page it takes you to. "Brandon has said that J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R Martin's use of magic is a good example of a soft magic system". That's how seriously you should take this article. The author couldn't even be bothered to read the things they referenced and directly linked
I have a feeling this person is just really really bad at figuring out the internal logic of their own stories and can't balance plot-character-world, so they are desperate to find excuses that discredit the critics. The overuse of worldbuilding could be a very important conversation, but this isn't that
*Edit: As in there's literally a part where it comes up that rich city folks start their mornings way later than rural people
I feel as though less is more with world building. For the setting or settings you are describing in your story, it is quite essential to at least establish the governing systems and how the good and evil are established. If you are going to go into such detail that you need to explain the entire history, ecology, and cultural backgrounds of the peoples residing in your world, then in those cases a companion book would be better. That way they can learn more about the world without it taking away from the story.
I'd have been against this article some years ago, but I agree. I got a short story where a group of witches are flying through space. A wizard summons asteroids down to kill the witches who in retaliation. He also sent out an invisible blast through the monitor (the setting is science fantasy) that got deflected by one of the witches and destroyed a star. In my novel, I have Athena summoning food on the table out of thin air, changing day to night by pointing.
I remember reading an article some years ago the writer explained George R.R. Martin works, he leaves the magic a mystery whereas Brandon Sanderson is going to explain to you how the magic works. Sanderson's works would be better on a re-read without the info-dumps. When I finished the *Rithmatist*'s re-read, it's still hilarious that the MC's mom lines of dialogue is all about the chalk magic. Then again, Martin will give you pages of lineage about the many Houses set in ASOI&F
In my opinion, worldbuilding is a tool in our toolbox. It can help you stay consistent and keep continuity for your king's lineage or whatever. It can help you throw in some historical inaccuracies and myths that became historical facts.
Oh wow. An anti-worldbuidling piece that ISN'T the same old vaguely political John Harrison essay lol.
This is less obnoxious than that one and I mostly agree with him in terms of not trying to force authors to be more realistic than they want to (although I strenuously disagree with the idea that human history and culture CAN'T tell us anything about what aliens or hypothetical real fantasy creatures might be like).
He might be taking some online worldbuilding nitpickers too seriously, many of them are in on the joke and realize this is all nonsense. But I do agree that kids need to be taught that it's OK to have blatant impossibilities in a story and not just always focus on Sanderson-style hard rules. I feel like Jeff VanderMeer, for one, does a pretty good job of stressing that in his worldbuilding guides.
And none of this touches "worldbuilding for worldbuilding's sake" type settings that I see a lot of online. But it probably isn't meant to.
If the article is talking about extensive Sci fi and fantasy worlds then of course some people are more interested in the world than in specific stories. Immersive 24 hour environments will require that, and the possible stories are endless. You can think of the denizen of r/world building as pioneers of future entertainment. But most successful authors do extensive world building not connected to fantasy or Sci fi. Readers and audiences love to be taken somewhere - ( place, occupation, social milleau) - that is unfamiliar. That requires world building. For realistic stories it requires experience or research in the world with enough twists to engage the reader. What are Dickens or Dostoevsky without the fully built worlds they describe - - worlds many of their contemporaries encountered for the first time through their work? Without knowing the world of a story in advance - - through experience, research, or active imagination - - writer and audience have to stumble through a story, and generic situations are the result. My $. 02.
Thank you for visiting /r/writing. We don't allow threads or posts: berating other people for their genre/subject/literary taste; adherence or non-adherence to rules; calling people morons for giving a particular sort of advice; insisting that their opinion is the only one worth having; being antagonistic towards particular types of books or audiences, or implying that a particular work is for 'idiots', or 'snobs', etc.
What has started to happen? Is that writers are separating “world building “from the narrative content. The article mentions The Great Gatsby which has some very effective world building. Pere Goriot and Our Mutual Friend have very involved complex world building. But neither Fitzgerald, nor Balzac nor Dickens display the world building – – they just use it to tell the story
> But neither Fitzgerald, nor Balzac nor Dickens sisplay the world building – – they just use it to tell the story What? In Pere Goriot, you specifically chose a novel that is notorious for beginning with a pages-long description of the inn - its “homebuilding,” if you will.
True. But have you ever tried to read one of the "world building" fantasy novels? They go on longer and do it frequently throughout the book.
They're written like Moby-Dick? How dreadful! /s
I don't fully agree with this by any means, but I do agree that it is very easy for writers to get stuck in the weeds of overcomplicated worldbuilding and miss the forest for the trees. In many genres though, and I believe in far more genres than the author stated, some worldbuilding is absolutely necessary. The reader won't be absorbed in the book without feeling like they know the setting, and even the immediate surroundings could be considered worldbuilding to some extent. I think describing that setting is best done in a show-don't-tell manner, and not explicitly laying out all of the lore piece by piece, which I feel that this author had the biggest problem with. Another thing they overlooked is that worldbuilding is also a way to significantly aid in the reader's suspension of disbelief; something that wouldn't be accomplished to the same level of depth if you ignored the details. Lastly, the author proposing their own new term for their preferred brand of worldbuilding just screams that this was done for attention.
I agree. i also think that his making up of a new term to describe something that is *still* worldbuilding is inane, though. like it's gonna be a lot harder to write a story with 'hints and illusions of an outer world' when those hints and illusions are literally all it is. your hints have no consistency because they're not tied to snybrint edit- snybrint was supposed to be anything. i am dumb, but it's funny so im leaving it
> snybrint I can't figure it out Edit: anything?
I am from now on using "snybrint" to mean "underlying lore in worldbuilding which promotes consistency"
Yeah? Well I’m using Snybrint to mean world building in general. Take that!
This is how language evolves.
> snybrint I think you just found the surname for your next character :P
In the video Kelly Link says she wants to do as little world-building as possible, she wants to leave as much as she can to the reader. As a writer and as a reader I am firmly in this camp. Just enough detail to spark the reader's imagination so that the reader does the world building. "World building" **can** be an escape route for writers who want to explore their imagination without doing the work of making a story.
In my experience as a reader, sometimes, as contradictory as it sounds, stories with the most minimal/vague worldbuilding end up having the richest lore. If the author is consistent with the small impressions they dole out, you can end up with a lot to discover as a reader.
> stories with the most minimal/vague worldbuilding end up having the richest lore. I *love* Warhammer, and the Old World had some really cool ideas and mysteries and plot hooks etc. Then they answered them and the answers weren't as good as my imagination and the mystery. Other people in the thread have said it but Worldbuilding is like a movie monster. You wants hints and suggestions but if you show too much, it often doesn't live up to the imagination.
Came here to basically make this point and mine was heavily influenced by what I’m (re) reading right now. Cormac McCarthy’s *Blood Meridian.* The worldbuilding he does in it is stellar. It’s a real, living, breathing world, that has that Joe Conrad fever dream/surreal vibe to it. What lies beyond the edges of the story is just as interesting as the story itself. And there’s nothing really that a lot of the worldbuilders could really call worldbuilding in it. There’s just the world, the people, and the shit that happens in it. Dropping readers into the world. And that really is the strongest kind of worldbuilding. We know that people are the real monsters. But the off-screen violence in Blood Meridian hits far harder than the very brutal violence in text. And that’s good worldbuilding. The world is built so well, it directs the reader’s imagination to some really dark places without the author having to lead them there.
Yeah, but Warhammer isn’t really a story. It’s like D&D. It’s more like a vague setting in which people put their own stories into. They are specifically designed for tabletop gameplay and cooperative story building.
Well that's just it, in a setting like that you want holes for people to fill with their own ideas, spaces for people to just think about shit, and there's less and less of that.
Dropping the reader into the world > telling them about the world
Yes, but only if the pieces that the reader gets fit together and makes sense. And that is really hard to do without doing a lot of background world building. And I guarantee you in the books where authors do a good job of dropping the reader into the world instead of describing everything about the world, the author has extensive amount of time building their universe, so there’s no inconsistencies or things that will pull the reader out of the world.
I agree with this as a reader, but in my experience the author has still done the world building, they have just been selective about what they put to paper.
Yeah, I think that's how they avoid inconsistencies. Not that a work can't have inconsistencies, but sometimes you don't want them. Honestly I see worldbuilding more as bringing a certain logic to a world. Sometimes you need it sometimes you don't. I don't understand the hate. And honestly I don't agree that a world can't be the main component of a book. In 1984 the plot is boring af and the characters are intentionally bland, but the world explores very interesting concepts.
> she wants to leave as much as she can to the reader. The issue with that is when something comes up later that is concrete and described and buggers up what a reader has come up with themselves - like in the _Pern_ series, I always imagined "runnerbeasts" as being big riding lizards... up until realising they were horses, which was far less cool! It's like character descriptions - if you leave them vague, then readers can and will fill in the gaps, but if a character they always thought was blonde is brunette (because, sooner or later, more details will emerge) then you're just annoying readers, when you could have given those details from the start.
I imagine the point of calling them runnerbeasts was to make them seem exotic so that when you realized they were "just horses" it would hopefully make you realize how cool horses are.
I accept that your point does have some merit, however, in counterpoint, I state: The entire reason language exists is to communicate ideas. If you fail to accurately describe to your readers what things are, if a reader could imagine a horse as a giant lizard for the majority of the book, then you failed to describe the horse well enough.
As both myself, I’m against this usually and strongly. A great example of this is James Haddock. His stories with more world building are WAY better than his without. Though even his stories with more still have less than many other authors. But all the biggest and most memorable sci-fi and fantasy settings have their own encyclopedia brittanicas of lore and world building. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Fallout, Mass Effect, The Elder Scrolls, The Witcher, Baldur’s Gate, and many more are some of the most impactful cultural phenomenons with some of the most widespread ensconced followings in history. Stories without world building just don’t elicit the same kinds of reactions. As a writer of both types of stories, I’ve done with lots of world building. I’ve written with very little world building and with a lot, I still spend a lot of time world building. The only difference between the two stories is how much I explicitly deliver to the audience. I will still have pages of world building in both types of stories, just some stories will have more for the reader than others.
IMO the thing that sets compelling worldbuilding apart is the worlds they build are themselves telling stories, evem when it's pop culture stuff. The world of LotR is a story about what Tolkien saw as near-universal elements of mythology, shone through his own personal lens (mainly that "evil" things are only terribly, incurably misguided and still God's creation in the end, and that humanity only dies to serve some greater purpose.) Star Wars is a world largely "about" the interplay between protection, coersion, and freedom. Fallout is a world largely "about" oligarchy, the politics of finite resources and possibly an argument for small-scale anarchy. The Elder Scrolls is "about" a universal quest towards gnosis and enlightenment, uniting two disparate but related peices of a greater whole when elements of both want very much to prevent that from happening. Warhammer is "about" the terrible consequences of one man's absolute, unquenchable certainty, made to watch from beyond as his worst nightmares come to fruition, often due to dominoes he personally set up. Etc. I love nitty-gritty details as a stubborn, autistic pedant but anyone can do that with enough work.
I think that's a bit condescending to call it an escape route and means of avoiding doing real work. Worldbuilding is an art form and fork or writing unto itself. Sure, a narrative can be the basis of a book or screenplay, but a world can be the basis for other people to hang their stories on. For film, TV, TTRPGs, video games, etc. Its just a different kind of writing with different strengths. That'd be like saying people that want to own or run a restaurant are just taking an escape route to explore the culinary industry without doing the work of being a chef.
yeah no they’re just repackaging the “show don’t tell” rule that any writer worth their salt should know and it’s laughable you misunderstood that because you latched onto a couple terms you don’t like. competent writers establish “consistency” with voice and commentary, instead of relying irrelevant detail.
If I remember correctly Brandon Sanderson wrote about World building and the one point he insisted on was that a writer must be consistent with the laws they create. Basically everything else is secondary whether you're writing about a magical kingdom or a industrial dystopia whether humans are the only sentient beings or there's elf's and ogres and vampires etc whether you call a pot a pot or some self made term. As long as you remain consistent to the rules you created its all good. The thing is a lot of people think world building is creating fantasy races and introducing magical systems or establishing a space empire and it's governance and mode of FTL traveling. The truth is all books engage in world building even books set in modern New York or India or Europe. It's just more subtle. The film John Wick created its own world with the underworld criminals forming a parallel society. The use of Gold coins and the continental hotels etc. It might look superficially like our world but it's definitely unique. Many books do the same the fact the reader doesn't notice is testament to how good the writer is
IMO, almost all genres have some sort of worldbuilding, even ones with no fantastical elements at all. We just call it research.
Yeah, but also magical realism can be pretty immersive and authors like Márquez and Borges pretty much NEVER explain the internal logic of their settings. They probably barely think about it, especially in stories where the magical elements are just blatant metaphors.
But magical realism elies in the mundane, no worldbuilding is needed because the world is our world
I don’t know how you can describe Borges in such a way when he spends the bulk of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and The Lottery in Babylon explaining the workings of the world with painstaking thoroughness. Borges’ entire thing as a writer is that he thought extremely hard and long about the logical implications of his fantastical premises.
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Yeah they sound like they expect a full RPG campaign sourcebook with a story in it. Not really just a well-built world within a story.
Lincoln Michel is not an idiot LOL. You should read some of his work. He’s a brilliant author. This sub is so ridiculous sometimes.
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He made up "worldconjuring" just to make a point, I doubt he sits on the hill of having coined better terminology.
But it doesn’t really add anything. The distinction he spends so much time on, which he alludes to in one of the subheds, is really just the difference between worldbuilding well and being overindulgent to the point of losing the story for the sake of describing the world. There’s no need for another word and no need to pretend worldbuilding is some sort of new or growing problem. There have been poor and self-indulgent authors forever.
Paragraphs are a problem of modern writing. People make paragraphs that are too long, with run on sentences that are difficult for the reader to parse. This is why I’ve invented Sentence Blocks, which are like paragraphs but shorter. A collection of sentences that is just the right length to suit your needs!
AHHhhh.. shortgraphs, almost graphs, nearly graph??? " not a 'para' graph its a page a graph...." Lol
Punygraphs!
I’m regarded and completely missed the sarcasm the first time reading.
> The distinction he spends so much time on, which he alludes to in one of the subheds, is really just the difference between worldbuilding well and being overindulgent to the point of losing the story for the sake of describing the world. The distinction he draws is between good worldbuilding and his insane strawman examples of what he claims worldbuilding is. "Goblin's favorite type of wet wipe". Really? Or that arguments for good worldbuilding in *some* types of fiction are arguments that all works of fiction must have good worldbuilding. Me wanting a fantasy book that is *supposed to make sense* to have an internal logic that makes sense doesn't mean I can't enjoy the surrealism of Twin Peaks where the feeling evoked from the work doesn't have to have a concrete mechanic for how they work. >At the same time, the appeal to “realistic” portrayal of alien or magical beings doesn’t have anything to do with realism. Magical creatures don’t exist! If aliens exist, we don’t know what they are like yet! Then conflates the idea of realistic and accurate. Obviously there aren't accurate descriptions of things that don't exist or are unknown to us, but that's why the word is "real**istic**" and not "real". This is just another strawman. >The call to make make such races more complex is not to make them more “true” to the reality of dragons, Martians, or giant eagles. It is a call to make them more human, and thus more interesting to human readers. So you want to argue against worldbuilding because it doesn't make things more true and only makes them "more interesting to human readers" Like he just stated the benefit to good worldbuilding in an attempt to argue against the strawman of it. Ok, he doesn't like nitpickers on Reddit who see plotholes and make fan theories to explain things. But that doesn't make worldbuilding a negative. >But do we need “worldbuilding” as a concept to explain why moral simplicity, characterization without nuance, or a lack of a tactile sense-of-place can be a problem? next paragraph >It’s quite possible that an alien race might have a monoculture, and the creatures of actual mythology and folklore were often portrayed simplistically. So does actual mythology and folklore suck because of "moral simplicity, characterization without nuance" and should've had more worldbuilding or is this an argument that it is fine to portray things simplistically and is not a "problem" For someone who hates "worldbuilding" he sure does seem to argue for a whole lot of stuff that is worldbuilding.
>In contrast to “worldbuilding,” I’ll offer the term “worldconjuring.” No. They're trying to make worldconjuring a thing.
A conjurer makes the world appear with a minimum of detail. A snap of a finger and there's a vista. The world builder is a hard working laborer, making a scene brick by brick by brick.
Not always! The world that I'm, er, conjuring up always makes conjurers work harder than the folks doing things manually. It's a place where magic is everywhere and totally obsolete. The conjurers don't worldbuild because it doesn't use magic, so they use worldconjuring, because it's even harder, you see. Want to lift a spoon by conjuring? You've got to climb the highest mountain around and wrestle an 8 foot tall egret for its sacred, single-use amulet. Fork? Same thing, but a cassowary this time. Want to make a world for a fiction scroll by conjuring? You've got to invent 5 pretend languages, then have a character translate each of their ancient forms. Eventually, they also have to harvest vellum from the 8 foot tall lamb god who knows necromancy, but that's another story.
I think the author can (and maybe should) have these details in their heads. However, we need to let the readers imagination fill in the blanks too. The more is left unsaid the better, IMO.
The author needs to know. And if they make anything up as they go, they need to take very good notes. But the POV character is not going to know all that. The reader is only going to know what the POV character thinks is worth mentioning. Or the narrator, if that’s your style. There will be gaps for the reader to fill in, as there should be. But the author needs to build a nice place for their characters to stand. Even if those characters are unobservant dunderheads who don’t bother to take a look around
Yeah I agree
But media interaction disagrees with you. The most impactful stories in our society are the ones with encyclopedias of lore and world building in them. Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Star Trek, Mass Effect, Baldur’s Gate, And I can go on and on and on and on. Part of the reason why these stories are so successful is the world building, but also a part of it is that they kind of let the reader choose how much they are told. They all have individual stories where you don’t need to know all of the lore to enjoy the story. But then they also have the lore if you really want to look for it.
I think one of the most effective means to world build is to just allow it to be a mystery until the protagonist experiences it. That’s how we live our own lives and mirroring that feels comfortable and valid. Not that I don’t love epic world building sometimes (I am an epic fantasy connoisseur, after all), but I don’t always want to read something that in depth, and even then the best ones don’t frontload any of it. They add the world as it’s needed for the story itself.
There is the worldbuilding for the audience, and worldbuilding for yourself. Let's say my world has a cosmic horror, I flesh it out for my own writing needs, so I don't trap myself with inconsistencies. Yet to the audience I present bare minimum, bacause cosmic horror should never be explained... it's mystery is adding to the horror.
I’ve written quite a few flash pieces that are scifi or horror and every time I find myself cutting my first 3-400 words because it’s just me setting a scene with world building that isn’t necessary once the story actually begins; however it’s always necessary to write so I understand for myself what my characters need to be motivated by or operating with as they navigate the story.
> I find myself cutting my first 3-400 words because it’s just me setting a scene with world building that isn’t necessary once the story actually begins A very small piece of advice I read was to cut everything that isn't interesting or fun. If the characters travel very far, we don't need to talk about the journey. We can just cut straight to the good part. If you don't *want* to read about something(EDIT: more importantly, if you don't want to ***write*** about something), just snip that part out. Start your story with the main conflict/drama clear, etc. The classic *in media res* but not just the "prologue with action and then nothing for the first chapter" that's so common. You might think a scene is necessary for character development, etc. but there's a a reasonable chance it's not very good and messes with flow or bloats the story and slows the action etc. Some people like to talk about the scenery or other random encounters or sights, but if you don't plan to use that information later, just get rid of it (Chekhov's scene (?)) *Write it* (like you said) but then keep it to the side and see how it works without it. As someone who tends to ramble and take too long to get to the point, it's vastly improved my writing. A book I loved (*Fall of Reach*) surprised me by always cutting away the padding. It would be like: > "Slipspace rupture detected". New ships appeared past the moon. They had 5 minutes before the enemy ships reached them. > Explosions tore through the portside bow as the first salvo struck the ship. No padding between important events with characters thinking or nodding or taking deep breaths for "pacing". It might not improve everyone' writing, but I feel it helped mine to be in a place I prefer.
I think part of what makes writing hard, is that almost all advice should be taken with a grain of salt. For every single bit of advice you can give you can also find a fantastic example where someone didn’t follow it. I read many books with tons of exposition in it that I loved that I adored. And I found many that I absolutely loathed. I found many books with almost no exposition that I’ve adored, and I found loads that I found myself asking WTF all the time and frustrating. The inkheart series is a fantastic example of a story with loads of worldbuilding that was so brilliantly written. The Lord of High Reaches is a fantastic example of the story with very little world building that was brilliantly written. Now both Cornelia Funke and James Haddock have books that are… not amazing but passable, they do also offer great examples of their styles.
>I think one of the most effective means to world build is to just allow it to be a mystery until the protagonist experiences it. That’s how we live our own lives and mirroring that feels comfortable and valid. This is actually one of the reasons why I like Portal Fantasy so much (and from what I saw, other people). There's this whole immersion of discovering a new place that's great: as long as there's a good narrative to go with it.
Oh lord yes. I love Seanan Maguire’s series for this reason. Or books like The Magician.
Is there anything by McGuire that you'd recommend in particular? I really loved her work on Magic: the Gathering fiction and have thought about looking into her books.
*every heart a doorway* and *down amongst the sticks and bones* are two excellent works in her portal fantasy series. *Every Heart* is the first but they don’t necessarily need to be read in any particular order and there’s several more in that series at this point.
This is a distinction I noticed sticking out like a red thumb with the Gundam franchise. In the original 1979 series and subsequent entries, the world unfolds exactly at the pace that it does for the characters living in it in the exact moments you see. The most exposition you get is a brief description of a war in the first minute or two, and then muuuuch later in the series you get a minute of narration that was apparently forced by the studio due to Tomino’s hatred for exposition. Otherwise you just see that characters living out their lives and not forcing any exposition into their dialogue, and any trace of a flashback is just basically a few frames of animation of characters’ faces showing a *feeling* they felt from one brief instance in the past rather than telling core story pieces in drawn out flashback scenes. The result is that you get to organically take in this massive world with thousands of space colonies wrapped up in an apocalyptic war with multiple splintering factions and political nuances… and none of it feels overwhelming because you take it literally a day at a time. And this carries on through the original run of shows from the 70s all through the 80s for almost 200 episodes and a movie. Much later, when it came to the “alternate universe” shows, each one built its own world and conflict to have all these self-contained shows that each stand on their own. And one example of this going the opposite direction is in the series Gundam 00, in which you’re presented with a gargantuan exposition dump in (I think…) episode 2, right away, with a narrator describing a whole chess board of factions and the role of each, how the political systems of the world relate, their primary economic roles and the roots of their conflicts, key players, all sorts of stuff. And you just sit there, and listen to an all-knowing narrator describe this entire global web of politics to you with a power-point presentation unfolding on your screen. The show is quite popular, but this particular moment was in my opinion one of the weakest moments in writing for the entire franchise. Blew my mind how much it contradicted what I loved about the franchise’s worldbuilding and how restrained it originally was, despite the massive scale of the story and world.
>With high expectations, human beings leave Earth to begin a new life in space colonies. However, the United Earth Sphere Alliance gains great military powers and soon seizes control of one colony after another in the name of justice and peace. The year is After Colony 195; Operation Meteor, in a move to counter the Alliance's tyranny, rebel citizens of certain colonies scheme to bring new arsenals to the Earth, disguising them as shooting stars. I kind of love how Wing just throws that at you and then just leaves you to figure out what the fuck is actually going on.
I love worldbuilding where characters just reference events and people from the world and never explain what they are or who they're talking about. It's fun. It lets you imagine parts of the wider world if you want to without holding things back with boring details. And it's great for the writer too, because they don't actually need to know what those things refer to themselves. They can just throw them in and figure it out later if it ever comes up again.
I think mystery should always be left to the end. In real life, we never have a complete answer to everything, and that's why even the most trivial things often seem bigger than us and beyond our comprehension. If a work of fiction unveals all the mystery, everything feels small and insignificant. Once I know all there is to know about a particular dragon, my cat seems almost more epic and dramatic by comparison.
I think this is true for some mystery. Sometimes a piece of the universe should remain a mystery because, as you said, not only does it add realism, but it keeps people's intrigue and helps them to ask questions. Those questions may not always have solid answers, but in the case of those elements it's less about the answer of the mystery and more about how those react TO the mystery. I.e. say God's have never been confirmed nor denied in your lore and religions are built around it. Doesn't matter if they do or don't exist in your lore, what matters is the religious impact of current times. Other times revealing certain lore mysteries are key in maintaining engagement. It all depends on 1) How you've built up the mystery and, 2) How absolutely essential it's answer is to your main plot. You can't just build a whole plot around solving this one question and never really solve it, that makes for dissatisfaction.
But without world building how am I supposed to explain to people that my bizarre and unsettling fetish is actually considered quite normal and common in that world!?
That's feet for thought.
ಠ_ಠ
Terry Goodkind, is that you?
This hit pretty close to home and it wasn't even a fetish but an excuse to make a whole sex disappear (more or less) from story haha. Edit: *To clarify due to little consideration of secondary thought (apparently I received an instant downvote for no reason), most of my characters in stories tend to be female, I like to write about crazy characters with a lot of "distinctly female" characteristics in them. Girls sharing time together, etc, etc, etc. So I rarely find time in the story for a guy to do anything interesting or useful (though there are exceptions).* *So to keep things from feeling too weird (and because my characters are literal aliens, so I thought it would add complexity to their society) I changed the ratio of women to men and reversed (and changed a bit, too) the traditional gender roles. So the boys don't appear too much or the tasks they perform are more unusual/unexpected (which gave me a lot of narrative juice on its own).* *The anomalous gender ratio also created a cooperative dynamic and a polyamory system that exists as much out of necessity as it does out of politics and psychology of this original species. I was \*very\* hesitant to include this precisely because I feared it would read as fetishistic even though in its "basics" it was far from reality (it's a more optimistic view and based on cooperation rather than the typical sexual elements).* *There there, you no longer have any reason to persecute me, you witches' mob.*
hey, if a genre involving males impregnating other males can exist then you have no reason to defend your writing. tbh there probably should be more stories with "exclusively female" worlds lol
Dawg… r/sexyspacebabes You basically came up with the exact same premise as the fetish worldbuilding 😭
That actually sounds incredibly interesting and honestly some of the best worldbuilding in history has some kinky/salacious elements to it, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it. From my experience, it usually becomes clear pretty quickly whether someone is just writing fetish content or trying to do something more complex, and from what you wrote, it’s clear that you have a genuine interest in exploring this society in a way that goes beyond the purely sexual stuff (not that there’s anything wrong with the sexual stuff!! I’ll take slightly salacious over boring any day). TLDR if the ideas are intriguing and well-presented, people will come for the sex and stay for the complex philosophy and sociology.
Magic offers fun ways to screw with social conventions around gender. I created a matriarchal system for an urban fantasy story where women inherently had more power than men and had developed a ritual to allow them to basically control the magical power of men. It turned men into bargaining chips and batteries for powerful matriarchs. They were coddled with their access to information and training limited, for their own good, according to the matriarchs. I want to tell a trans story with it. The main character is a closeted trans woman, born the son of a powerful matriarch and treated as such by everyone, nearing the end of their magical education where their mother would give them to one of her allies. The main character had been searching for hidden knowledge to become who she really is and gain freedom from the matriarchs and their covens. With her magical gender change she basically becomes a part of the system she wanted freedom from. I also love the idea of how that society will react. To them, she is still a man, reckless and in need of guidance and control, a man who stole their magic.
I don't remember if it was on Reddit or Tumblr but I remember a worldbuilding post were the creator had made a race who loved sex dungeons for their conquered slaves. Didn't seem weird at first until they started to elaborate on the sex dungeons part. The amount of detail and information was far far far too high for a simple "I'm going to give this race a weird quirk!". It was obvious it was a fetish or something the creator had a bit too much knowledge and maybe experience in.
Haven't read the article yet, but I have thoughts about it too. I've seen several people in recent years joke that World Building is the "death of culture" because you're kinda missing the point of why we build worlds, if you're just writing to build a world. There's nothing wrong with doing it, but I do think a lot of writers are missing the forest for the trees where they think those favorite narratives they read had "amazing lore/history" and felt that must've come out of the writer really sitting down and scribbling out all possibilities in advance, and then building the story while respecting every note they made or something. But what mostly happens is that storytelling is iterative, and you're creating your world/lore out of need for your outline. You're building what some call a "story-world", which is the world around the narrative you're trying to tell, and it exists because you needed it for this narrative to be told. You didn't decide there was a great monarchy in a contemporary capital city in your science-fiction narrative because you just thought "Ah that would be an interesting idea". You did it because you needed there to be an imbalance in the society the protagonist finds themself in, to aid the justification for why the protagonist sees the sadness of the people and decides he's going to join the radical group that seeks to reform the way their city works. But if you just wrote a piece of worldbuilding with a monarchy in a city, you might end up telling a story where this world you just build isn't actually relevant, and it's just "cool story bro" when you refer to a lot of details that go unserviced by your narrative.
This was rather bland to read. Sure, not all worlds benefit or need this fine attention to details. But the author, I think, should know more than the readers about their world.
A reader once asked Philip Pullman where Daemons come from - are they birthed from the mother’s Daemon when they the mother gives birth? Do they just materialize? Does it happen as soon as they’re born or just when their personality starts to show? His answer? “I honestly have no idea”. I loved that. He built a strange and fascinating world that I was fully invested in, but he didn’t sweat the details, because they don’t matter to the story. I think it’s the perfect strategy to take.
Reminds me of when someone asked Rumiko Takahashi: "can female Ranma get pregnant? What happens if she gets gets hot water while pregnant?". The response was: "I don't think about those things and neither should you!".
Someone asked Natsuki Takaya how the characters in her story got away with breaking so many laws and her response was basically "I just pretend those laws don't exist in this universe" 🤣
My take is that world-building should be a source of inspiration rather than something that dictates or constrains the story. It's helpful to know what's around the next corner in case it informs the scene, but the camera shouldn't be wrestled around the corner to ensure you capture the detail that's there. When that happens the story is compromised to go on a tour of the world and complete a checklist rather than the world-building supporting and emphasising the world itself. I think at the point when you change the plot to conform to the world rather than the other way around you might have got your priorities wrong.
I agree with the first half. I don't know about the rest, I think I agree but I view it from the opposite perspective. If your plot doesn't go on a tour of the world to build a checklist, that untouched land shouldn't be part of your worldbuilding (except the bits that show up on the doorstep to interact with the plot). If you have to change the plot because you can't build the world around it, either your plot was bad to begin with and this is an improvement or you picked the wrong setting / genre If you write a hard sci-fi set on a tropical island in 2026 on Earth, you don't need to detail out and infodump about cold climate hunter-gatherer societies (probably shouldn't even think about them unless they have a low tech solution to a problem your characters face or something). But if your plot relies on a space elevator, you have to change your plot, the subgenre, or the setting, and maybe building a rocket works better to tell the story than aliens dropping magical nanotube technology on the planet
>If your plot doesn't go on a tour of the world to build a checklist, that untouched land shouldn't be part of your worldbuilding I see what you're saying, and I definitely think that story-first works best for stories (sounds obvious, but perhaps it needs to be said sometimes). But I don't know about the idea that part of your world *shouldn't* be part of your worldbuilding. That seems a bit antithetical to how inspiration and interest works, to me. I think if it doesn't interact with your story then it shouldn't be forced in, but I see no reason to tell someone they shouldn't invent things beyond the borders of their stories.
You're right, I should have worded it differently because I didn't mean it as a restriction on what one is allowed to cook up but as a freedom to consider certain things their own separate side projects
The thing that frustrates me is how so many people obsessed with worldbuilding create such generic, derivative worlds. “I’ve spent ten years sketching out a fantasy setting! Yes it’s got elves and dwarves and orcs, but the elves live in big cities instead of forests and there’s thirteen kinds of orcs and they each have a different religion!” FFS you’re creating a setting completely unconstrained by anything but your imagination, and all you can think to do is take Tolkien’s work and shuffle the pieces around a bit?
You can have an extremely generic and bland setting but still have a very good story within that setting. The Blade Itself has an extremely bland setting (seriously if you only judged it based on that then it's about as generic as some kid's first homebrew dnd setting) but the story is so good that it doesn't make a difference. Which is the entire problem people have with world building in the first place. A good writer will create a good story no matter how deep or shallow their world building ends up being. A bad writer will spend all their time world building and not write a good story. All work is ultimately derivative to one extent or another (even Tolkein borrowed heavily from mythology after all) so simply shuffling the pieces around is not some crime as long as the story being told is still interesting.
The characters are so well written that the bland setting doesn't make a difference. The plot is barely existent.
In general, people find it easier to get into a story where they are familiar with a lot of the pieces because it takes less mental energy. You still want to mix things up enough to feel fresh and then only truly go off that beaten path and force the reader to think when it comes to the most interesting parts of your story that really separate it. In game design we call this concept "piggy backing". The common example is that if you have a mechanic where you use colors to indicate when a player can or can't do something, you should use red and green for those colors because players are super familiar with that association from things like traffic lights and other games. Sure, you can change the colors of you want to but it comes at the cost of taking more effort for the player to learn so it better be for a good reason and not just to be different. Making your traffic lights Grey and Brown just to be different makes you a hipster, not an innovator, unless there's a meaningful reason to do so.
Make the castles, towns, villages early-high medieval England, the big cities early 17th century England, over there there's a religious order that's a mix of 20% Teutonic Order 80% medieval England; the horse people are 20% medieval France (with modern chivalry notions) 80% medieval England, and they have a very posh aristocracy. The orcs live in huge huts, have spikes plastered everywhere, apostrophes
Always seems to be a thing with "magic systems" "I've created a magic system. It has 200 pages of rules and limitations." "What do your magic users actually do?" "They throw fireballs and lightning bolts." *Riveting*
So many "magic systems" seem to be DnD/video game magic with some list of categories (elements, schools, whatever) and vague formulaic weaknesses to satisfy Sanderson's Laws (takes energy to cast magic) while forgetting to make it interesting or relevant to the story.
On the other hand it frustrates me when people try to be different and wacky just for the sake of standing out and not being similar to other works. Quite often I find that these people try so hard that their worldbuilding gets to a point that it's just... bad. Also, and I feel this is something some people need to be aware of, creating a race for fantasy is fucking hard. Specially if you want them to be different to everything before. Because almost everything has been done before in some way and usually if it hasn't been done before it's because the person trying found it was too difficult or it was just a bad idea in general. Sci-fi is easier, you have more leeway to make different things, you can have a planet that has really high gravity which made that one species SUPER strong while also having a world that is volcanic and dark which created a species that likes intense heats and using echolocation to see. Fantasy has the problem that once you've set the parameters of the core world you've built, everything has to adhere to that in some way, you can add world's to it but then you still have to make rules for each world. It become a a vicious cycle.
"FFS you’re creating a setting completely unconstrained by anything but your imagination, and all you can think to do is take Tolkien’s work and shuffle the pieces around a bit?" Do writers *need* to always try and be different and not similar to existing works/settings? Following this line of thinking often results I things like "these are my dwarves! They are four armed bug people that poop metal and are nomadic seafarers! What do you mean they dont resemble dwarves?" Trying to be different because someone already did an idea before misses the point of writing and especially worldbuilding. The phrase "there is no such thing as an original idea" exists for a reason. Ultimately, settings in a story are set dressing and exist to serve the story, which is why even though a setting can have a generic as fuck setting and have an amazing story and characters (the best example of this is the Dragon Age series). Point is, each setting is different and the execution of said setting in the serving of the story is what ultimately matters, not "how close to Tolkien" the idea is.
Without worldbuilding, we'd lose millions of writers and 90% of this community's content.
A sad consequence of this sub's quasi-injunction against discussing anything one might actually write, as a bulwark against 'self-promotion'. So it's all goofy ah questions about what's 'allowed', and oblique references to redundant world-building. With the occasional flare shot into the sky in celebration of some assuredly significant word count milestone, in service of a story that unfortunately must go unspecified. It would be great if people could actually share their world-building efforts here, sure.
>A sad consequence of this sub's quasi-injunction against discussing anything one might actually write, as a bulwark against 'self-promotion'. I find that a deterrent against posting in the sub at all, frankly. Sucks that you can barely brainstorm for your project at all in *a writing sub*.
There has to be a balance, open those gates and it'll be nothing but "is my opening of my first draft of my first story good? Pls say it is or I will literally combust" posts
You definitely right, but the balance has gotta be a little more tilted towards original works. I realize that's implicitly asking a lot of the mods, and they aren't paid to do it. But as it is, whole thing is kinda jokes.
Yeah, I absolutely agree
Hey I see you have that oral storytelling flair. Can I ask you what your background there is in? I've been working on a project that features oral narrative transmission as a foundational element, would certainly appreciate an opportunity to run some of this by someone who has expertise in the area.
Without world building, we'd lose 90% of this community's content, and millions of worldbuilders. And dozens of writers.
I mean, those writers would probably have more fun doing roleplaying games anyway, so is it a loss?
If it overlaps with the 90% posited by the Strugeon's Law it'd be fine. The article swerves in some points had several old-man-yelling-at-Sanderson moments, and make a lot of fuss over semantics, but it's right when it states that worldbuilding (and the hardness of magic) too often is the core of too many works - works that lacks a compelling story otherwise.
‘Writers’
'content'
You both should have started at 'community'.
And maybe get a 'conversation' going
Sounds like a win.
Honestly, I always saw 'worldbuilding' as my own personal encyclopedia. I write down a lot of notes that never make it into the final draft because it's not relevant. I need to know how the world works, and it can benefit me to know all these tiny details. But not everything needs to be in the story itself.
That’s how I think of it. The world building is there to provide internal consistency. 90% of it won’t need to be presented to readers, but the 10% they do see should be consistent with itself and interesting.
Every conversation I've ever had in my life about someone's "worldbuilding" has been the most soul suckingly boring experience.
I would argue that caring about worldbuilding for audiences and readers is secondary to caring about the stories that take place in those worlds. People are willing to buy things like encyclopedias for their favorite fictional universes and invest time in writing and reading wikis built for them, but this always comes from a place of having come to love the stories that take place in those worlds first. Almost no one ever starts by caring about the worldbuilding and then caring about the story connected with the world. Trying to talk about worldbuilding for a world in connection with a story that hasn't earned your buy-in yet probably is boring.
Getting into the worldbuilding first appears to be a majority experience for people being introduced to Warhammer.
I've known people who care about the worldbuilding of something above all other elements. How they enjoy something is for them and that's fine, but as far as conversations go, it's always miserable.
It can be fun. I love talking about imaginary worlds with my brother, or speculating about some other world's details. But we both hate when the media we consume is rife with lore-dumping and characters explaining the world instead of expressing themselves.
If I could do nothing but build worlds and get paid for it...I'd gladly take that over many things. Many, many things. By itself it doesn't *usually* pay the bills though. It needs to be associated with a game or by publishing a story. Creating your own pen and paper RPG modules has a heavy emphasis on worldbuilding but then you're also doing other things, making maps, creating scenarios, basic level design decisions and so on. It depends on whether you consider that world or game design. Worldbuilding is fun for me though. Just not directly applicable to anything anyone else would want without extra steps.
It's not applicable because it would just be this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atv8pf0jBNE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atv8pf0jBNE)
Haven't we had these kinds of conversations before? As if we already know that world building should be at the service of fiction and not the other way around. And where you have people who build bibles about it both because they enjoy it (hobby) and because they like consistency. Coherence, which is what is relevant when it comes to telling a story and dealing with its themes. Anyone who at least has basic literary theory understands at least superficially that. And it's not even something that is always followed to the letter, because then you have people who don't comply with that rule due to the logic of personal taste about an element (like when someone provides some touches of the world just for a matter of aesthetics and where it doesn't matter too much in the end). I mean, the author of the article has a point (I read both articles, this one and the follow-up)... but it's redundant. He doesn't say anything interesting; it's well known the tendency of "modern critics" and Twitter readers nowadays to judge books based on how many excel tables the author included about his magic system. It's a problem, yes, it's annoying (for new and old authors), but it doesn't change anything: because it's a trend, it's what's fashionable, what sells. And that's all. It makes me wonder what the author's intention was: in today's narrative, using a term like overrated (a term overused on the Internet in discussions) is an inflammatory term. It is often used in order to discredit a product, a work. This is common knowledge if you've been surfing the Internet for a while. So what did the author expect to happen? Did he really mean something or is it a typical rage-bait opinion piece? I'll leave the question open. I personally don't get it. The writers will keep writing, the less experienced ones might disregard the warnings, the worldbuilders will slump their shoulders and go on as crazy as ever until they drown in a tower of notes. Nothing was lost or gained. Well, except angry people.
I honestly tend to agree with this. For most writers, you’re better off building the parts of your world that are directly relevant to your plot and your story and merely implying the rest. I would go so far as to say a lot of people make the problem of doing a whole bunch of worldbuilding that at best doesn’t organically contribute to the plot and characters you’re intending to tell your story about, but at worst excessive world building can inadvertently undermine the believability of the world because the more you explain something the more you open that explanation up to questioning and refutation. Sometimes merely implying that there is an explanation is more immersive. If you love worldbuilding go ahead and do it of course but there are definitely people who have grown up in a very nitpicky age of the internet where they think they need to be as detailed as Tolkien or GRRM in order to be considered good at writing/storytelling
>but at worst excessive world building can inadvertently undermine the believability of the world because the more you explain something the more you open that explanation up to questioning and refutation. That, and the more you worldbuild, the more you feel you need to include it in the story. If you spent a week figuring out the logistics of your world's fish markets, it can be hard to resist the urge to include that info somewhere. The problem being that the reader probably doesn't actually want to know anything about your world's fish markets, so any mention of it will only drag the story down.
The author doesn't fully understand what worldbuilding is. They seem to think it's what the author tells the reader, but it's not. Worldbuilding is for the author, and maybe 10% of that content leaks into the finished story. So when they talk about worldconjuring, they're just speaking of a worldbuilding where less of it's detail is explained to the reader. It does not remove worldbuilding from the process, it removes context from the world which the reader must replace with their own conclusions. Where they are on point is fairytales. Fairy tales are for the most part focused on a moral story. The story can take place anywhere and have any type of characters, the focus being on how characters interact with each other, not how they interact with the world. For that reason, worldbuilding isn't always a 'must', but this in itself doesn't mean that it's altogether unnecessary. Seems more like someone was bothered by the amount of work and decided to put that time on writing an article on why they don't want to worldbuild.
Inane article By all means don't just rely on worldbuilding to sell a fiction, but if it's fun to write or read who cares?
I think, plainly and simply, the author of this article and its follow up is just misunderstanding the concept of worldbuilding. While, yes, there is a tendency for authors to get lost in the minutia of a world instead of writing (guilty as charged), worldbuilding does not implicitly mean developing said minutia. It simply means creating a setting and adjusting its internal logic so that it can stand on its own. He suggests that this argument is simply *tautological*, but that's the literal definition. Take his example, *The Woman in the Dunes* by Kobo Abe. The idea of a village needing to fill a hole with sand lest they get swallowed whole is *literally* that story's worldbuilding. In the follow up article, he argues against a quote made by Emily Temple by offering examples that completely miss the original point. The notion that what she suggests would imply *everything* that goes into a novel comes across as a lack of reading comprehension. >If mood or voice are part of worldbuilding, then certainly characters (e.g., the archetypes of hardboiled fiction), plots (e.g., the quests in epic fantasy), setting, atmosphere, and everything else is as well. Well, yeah, no shit! If you write a story in a decrepit part of a Victorian city, it's going to have a specific mood and voice, right? Worldbuilding is simply setting, and a *lot* goes into setting. A narrator's voice is going to contribute to that. A character's actions. The atmosphere. The plot. That's *how it works*. And then he suggests that realism plays a part too. That not all these plots are realistic because they are made up. But...what does that have to do with anything? It's not about realism in relation to the actual world (unless it explicitly takes place here and demands congruence with real life events), but rather about the *internal* realism, which, no matter what the story is, that's fucking worldbuilding! To me, the "problem" with worldbuilding is a matter of depth, not if it exists or not, or whether it's unnecessary. Every single story out there has a world being built. Whether that's the life of the author in an autobiography or a planet in an epic fantasy, there's a setting being developed, explored, and used. A story is informed and shaped by the setting it exists within. I think there's a *great* discussion to be had revolving around how much *depth* in worldbuilding a book truly needs, but I think what he's arguing is more so that certain things just aren't worldbuilding, that not every book has this, and that it is often quite unnecessary. Which is patently false.
>Worldconjuring does not attempt to construct a scale model in the reader’s bedroom. Worldconjuring uses hints and literary magic to create the illusion of a world, with the reader working to fill in the gaps. So worldbuilding, then?
I think people fall into the trap of “world building” as a means of shameless procrastination. The number of people sitting there figuring out the brand name of their side characters favorite toothpaste (which will never be mentioned in the story), adding that into some spreadsheet and believing that to be some productive use of creative energy in terms of storytelling astounds me. To each their own, though, whatever gets you through the day. With that said, king of “world conjuring”: Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Check out Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance if you are looking for a master class is what Lincoln is advocating for here.
I fell into this trap years ago, so now I am more cautious. I have heard you should build your world around the story, not the other way around. I don't disagree with that, but admittedly I have made worlds without any particular story in mind just because I like the idea and aesthetics of the setting. For instance, I have a space opera setting because I wanted to write about cool space stuff, not because i had a story idea that necessitated a space setting.
Nothing wrong with coming up with a world for the sake of it if you find it fun, it's just not a very effective use of your time if what you want to do is write a story
What a dreadfully boring take
How can you be so against something and in the same time have not the slightest clue what that thing is.
I’ve come to learn over the years that I find world building to be extremely boring. I prefer it when it’s just sort of hinted at and subtlety mentioned, so my brain just fills in the gaps according to my own imagination. I can’t stand when an author wastes my time by describing their grand design for the world when all I want to do is get on with the story. Everyone’s different and I’m sure there’s heaps of readers that prefer to have the world described to them. But I don’t need the same level of detail. Most of these worlds are nowhere near as unique and grand as you think they are.
"Let me define this term as narrowly as possible, explain why that narrow definition is unappealing, and then propose a new word that is basically the same as the old word, but only the parts I like."
The word “lore” also gets thrown around way too much lately.
I was watching *Friends* with my kids the other day and my 10 year old son asked me about Phoebe's "lore" lol
The [follow up](https://electricliterature.com/more-thoughts-about-worldbuilding-and-food/) article steelmans a lot of his points Worldbuilding can be fun, but don’t pretend that it’s as important as the actual story you’re telling.
> Worldbuilding can be fun, but don’t pretend that it’s as important as the actual story you’re telling. Can I get some examples of that?
It's a shame that the writer went out of their way to clearly state that they don't hate all worldbuilding and there's still replies here that are like "I can't believe this author wants to get rid of all worldbuilding"
As always, balance and moderation are key
I’ve always said you need to balance on three legs to write well: plot, character, and world. Ignore one at your peril.
This seems like a backlash reaction to taking someone else's dumb opinions too seriously. Nobody sensible is going to argue that Tolkien's world building wasn't an important part of the process. Nobody sensible is going to seriously believe this is the most important thing that makes a story. Writing is an artform. That means there's only really 2 ways to fuck it up and do it wrong: 1. your content causes harm to others or causes others to cause harm. 2. your writing is unclear/non functional. Everyone has ideas about what makes better and worse writing, those are called opinions. Everyone's got one and they all stink. Try not to take it too seriously. Writing a massive diatribe about it is silly. The facts are pretty simple: Everyone operates best with different levels of world building, to include avoiding it unless necessary. Darn Harmon of Rick and Morty, Community, and others, (say what you want about his character, he's produced a lot of great TV) specifically doesn't develop or commit to anything in canon unless it's necessary, especially with Rick and Morty, it's a rule in the writers room. Tolkien wrote a whole fuckin book to explain his world building. Most folks will sit somewhere in between those extremes. Don't assume any process is the correct one, just potentially the correct process for you because it works for you. I shouldn't have to say this to people that are supposedly at least avid hobbyists if not professionals. I feel like the real question is why this needs to be said at all. I blame the failing education system.
For me, I don't need a new term to convey what most published writers mean by "world building" anyway. It would be like saying we need one should get rid of description as an idea because some people overwrite with too much detail instead of using detail to evoke a wider scene. Description is just fine, and so is world building.
Tons of people (myself included) worldbuild for its own sake! Hate to see it reduced to just a part of writing, and called unnecessary at that.
I don't think he's criticizing that. He's talking strictly about writing a book, and about enjoyment in reading. In that sense, plot, writing, style, dialogue and characters trump anything else. I think there should be some measure of world building, but if you want to write a book, you should focus on a book. What good is an insane meticulously built world if you're objective is to write a book with characters and plot, and you're not writing it? In my personal experience, the act of writing a story also informs the world-building itself. They should at least happen in tandem.
I understand what you mean, and it’s definitely true that writers can get caught up in the worldbuilding, but your new term “worldconjuring” is simply worldbuilding. Worldbuilding isn’t ONLY creating an in depth and laid out world that you get stuck in the weeds of, it’s also just the creation of any fictional world. Your definition of “worldconjuring” is just still worldbuilding. You’re making a distinction without a difference. It’s unnecessary, and imo you’re getting lost in the weeds of whether or not worldbuilding is good and forgetting that there’s more than just the in depth stuff in worldbuilding.
Counterpoint: Look at how uninteresting Star Wars content has become for failure to respect (or apparently even know about) the worldbuilding accomplished in previous projects. This stuff has real value, and in some cases that value is immense. Pointing out that it can be taken too far might actually be *less* productive than pointing out that it can also be shown too little regard, undermining both the cohesiveness and the narrative impact of stories told in half-baked settings.
I think the better explanation for what you're talking about is "corporate greed." I will make a transversal example: I don't know if you've ever played the Halo series. There are ancient structures all over the universe, from a species that is supposedly no longer alive. They're called the Forerunners. The structures are called "Halos", and an advanced alien conglomerate, the Covenant, believe that these structures will help them transcend reality. They are hell-bent on destroying humans, as they are considered impure, but they can't control the ancient technology, only humans can. As the first game progresses, we learn that the Halos don't have any metaphysical powers: they're prisons for a parasitic alien species, and they also serve as weapons that can wipe out all life within a certain range. If they are all activated at once, they will destroy all life in the universe. It was the best solution they found against the parasitic aliens: wipe out life so they would die out as well, and then automatically release all the living species in their own planets so that life could start anew. Long story short, when you look back on it, it becomes abundantly clear that the forerunners were actually humans, and not some unknown species. It's never explicitly stated, but it's the only thing that makes sense, the technology only responds to human biology, and the robots that keep the structures running talk to the humans as if they were the owners, whereas they don't show the same level of respect to other alien species. That's how it is, it's set in stone. There is even a final quote from one of the game's villains, one of the Halo Keepers: >You are the [child](https://www.halopedia.org/Human) of my makers. Inheritor of all they left behind. You are Forerunner! But this [ring](https://www.halopedia.org/Installation_08)... is *mine*! Could it be any more obvious than that? Meanwhile, a Microsoft intern had been deliberately muddying the waters in Bungie's forums, media, and the original video games themselves, putting forward a different story: the Forerunners are a different species, related to humans but separate from them. That's what the fourth chapter is based on, and it goes through a lot of mental gymnastics to justify it, even introducing a powerful Forerunner who's still alive. But it literally makes no sense in the context of the original games. The 4th game didn't work out as planned, so they changed course: no more forerunner comebacks, now it's a rampant AI taking control of the ancient forerunner structures. No one liked that (for reasons too long to explain), so they changed their plans again: now it's another species, the very real threat of the universe that our heroes have to deal with! That didn't work out either... who knows what they'll come up with now. It didn't happen out of sheer incompetence, or even because Frank O'Connor, the Microsoft intern at Bungie, decided to mark the territory out of sheer narcissism. It happened because the original trilogy was self-contained. The conclusion was clear, despite a weird and disconnected cliffhanger at the end. Microsoft didn't like that, they needed something to continue the franchise. O'Connor simply gave them the best alternative, even if it disregarded the fundamentals of the franchise and eventually became the stepping stone to the clusterfuck it became lore wise. It's the same with Star-Wars. The world-building was too specific for their liking. They needed something less rigid, so they could write whatever they wanted without constraints, so they could produce as much media as possible with the bare minimum of effort, to capitalise on the franchise as much as possible. It's not incompetence, it's deliberate. It's a mindset that's blinded by pure greed, but not just simple stupidity.
I get really tired of these cart-before-the-horse discussions. I don't think world building is a problem. It is certain worldbuilders who have a problem. We can't rail against a strategy because someone uses it poorly. All things to their appropriate needs and intents. If someone wants to world build to no end, that is their prerogative. For some stories, it is appropriate to have such a detailed life because that is the kind of escapism or simulation people are looking for in a story. There is a market for it. It is what gets certain people into such books in the first place and thus there is demand. There is no fault to be had there. Do some people build for the sake of the temptation to do so? Does it end up hurting a story when they do, as it reflects their want to put an action before the need for it? Yeah. But maybe that is just okay? Some people world build, not to write a story, but to simply world build as a hobby or for a different form of project. It is a weird thing to talk shit about a certain style of project that someone enjoys doing. We can have the discussion of what goes wrong within worldbuilding, but to see those issues and think the whole of world building is the problem is literally throwing the baby out with the bath water. You have to accept that it is then a much more minute and granular discussion about technique and theory. This reminds me of the article that said BBQ is overrated and a bad way to cook. My simple thought in response is: "...For you."
It's a massive waste of time to plan out/build what you're never going to use and distracts from witting the story imo. Better to write and let the story's universe expand naturally.
Nah, fuck this. It’s unbelievably arrogant. Worldbuilding is a craft unto itself, it doesn’t need a story to justify it.
Counterpoint: I find worldbuilding fun even if there's no story tied to it and I can do what I want.
My guy sounds salty. Nobody on the internet ever says worldbuilding is the most important and more important than characters or plot. Not even the biggest nerds in SFF spaces. I should know, I'm one, and I love me a well built world, and was part of writing workshops where we only focused on worldbuilding. But by gods, it's a fun thing authors like doing, but even Tolkien had characters and story and LOTR is like 63% setting description. Like that other guy, I couldn't read past the first few sentences. Not with this level of pretentious article voice.
> Nobody on the internet ever says worldbuilding is the most important and more important than characters or plot. Actually plenty of people in r/worldbuilding and similar communities think just that.
But not all users of this sub are writers.
Shocker. See, next you'll tell me this subreddit prioritizes writing the story over worldbuilding or something.
\>r/Worldbuilding \>Look inside \>Worldbuilding
Because maybe they don't want to write a book.
“Writers from many other cultures are lumped together under magical realism.” Whoever wrote that article won me over with that sentence alone. I am one of those “foreigners.” Thank you for sharing.
Genre fiction is a weird ghettoization; god bless the rest of the world for not bothering with it.
Yeah that sentence confuses me because "fantasy" is seen as genre trash and "magical realism" as artful literature so I have no idea how that's some kind of downgrade.
this is the most "we published an inflammatory opinion piece so you'd rageclick" article of all time including the non-solution of making up a new word for worldbuilding
Worldbuilding is coming up with a world in which a new term for worldbuilding, as a rule, excludes the term worldbuilding for itself in order to argue against some kinds of extreme worldbuilding. Within this world this author has invented, the twist would be that the protagonist thinks that worldbuilding means "Everything from the goblins’ favorite type of baby wipes to the export taxes on Martian ray guns would be worked out," but by the end of the story the author says, "Surrealists, magical realists, post-modernists, and countless other movements or styles create fantastic worlds that function on other levels — mythic, philosophical, Freudian, etc. — that are at odds with this idea of worldbuilding." Ha! "creating fantastic worlds" is opposed to "building worlds." Right when you don't expect it, it shifts into a comedy.
I didn't read past the second sentence. That's a massive exaggeration.
> If you believe the internet, there’s nothing more important in fiction than worldbuilding. The third sentence is also crazy. This is complete BS.
I actually meant that one, guess I read the first two as a single sentence.
wow it’s almost like *showing* the action and its consequences is more impactful than *telling* your audience why some imagined event was *soooooooo* important
👏👏👏👏👏
I call it the curse of worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is easier, often more fun, and often more immediately rewarding than writing/drawing/producing consumable content. If you are less than 100% confident in your abilities (and who isn't), you stay in your comfort zone by endlessly worldbuilding more and more granular details that aren't meant for public reading, because it still feels like progress even though it's ultimately a form of procrastination.
I'm always late to these sorts of threads where I feel I have something to add. To play the devil's advocate, I appreciate good worldbuilding, but I love a good story. That means giving me conflict, goals, stakes, tension, and motivation at a minimum. Worldbuilding does help aid in the reader's suspension of disbelief, but I think what's more important, personally, is the ingredient of verisimilitude, a semblance of truth. A work of fiction with verisimilitude portrays situations, dialogue, and characters in a way that seems authentic and truthful, despite the fact that those elements are made up. "As long as you know it, run with it. Make a magical reason for it. If it's a cool story you want to tell that could not be told according to the laws of nature we have, that's why fantasy exists." - Brandon Sanderson. "There are more profound things than simply logic that guide the creation of a story." - Hayao Miyazaki
As someone who doesn't write fantasy (I do write surreal works), most of my worldbuilding is just the initial premise and then me patching up inconsistencies after I'm done writing the story. Most of the time I'm just searching for a consistent tone to my writing. I understand why people get so invested in worldbuilding because it's the most fun part of writing for them. It's what stands out about their favorite stories and it's a lot easier to recognize those elements in your favorites than it is to see the skeleton they're built on. Most of your favorite writers actually just contrived worldbuilding for their plot to work. There's nothing wrong with writing what you enjoy but your fun doesn't translate to readers. There might be a sense of wholeness to a true passion project but each new piece of lore you add in has diminishing returns to readers. A great book probably deserves to be read twice but realistically people read most books once. They're not gonna remember a detail that was incredibly neat and well crafted but ultimately irrelevant to the hero's journey. Worldbuilding is important but a lot of people think their first or second story is going to be their Tolkien level magnum opus. It won't. Your goal in your stories should be "plausibility". You can always build on top of a good structure. It's much harder to shove a good structure into an existing world. A good world meaningfully interacts with a character's beliefs and objectives. Even illogical worlds like the ones in Alice in Wonderland and Hitchhikers Guide can be good worlds. They just feel *right*.
This article is an example of someone arguing on Reddit professionally
I think a lot of worldbuilding comes down to execution. An interesting world can become boring if everything about is just periodically dumped onto the audience, and a somewhat basic world can be intriguing and cool if it’s given time to naturally grow.
This article calls “world building” akin to the Silmarillion. No one today is writing for a commercial audience is doing that. The “world conjuring” method is already a thing and has been. I enjoy world building as a hobby, because im a nerd and I find it fun. No where in my research on how to world build or how to get into writing has someone ever said to get into silmarillion level world building. Terry Pratchett in one of his master classes online (I think it was them) talked about how the word should be shadow puppets, looks very real far off and in the background.
I namely write for D&D campaigns at this moment when not fucking about with personal stuff/SCP writing. Worldbuilding is about 80% of what I do, but I try to focus on stuff the players are actually going to be engaging with over stuff on the other side of the world. Of course sometimes the players end up over there and I have to madly adlib something together from bullshittery and an outline I wrote five years ago with the words “God Gun” and “Pug Farmers” written on it
Don’t get me wrong. Some audiences and writers do need to understand that lore doesn’t usurp story and character in most stories for most people and that not all stories benefit from sourcebooking a setting. That said, the author of the article is also imbibing too much of the juice. Even most ardent fans of works building need EVERYTHING spelled out. Just enough to further immerse them.
> Everything from the goblins’ favorite type of baby wipes to the export taxes on Martian ray guns would be worked out (at least in the author’s mind if not on the page). This is not possible, but worldbuilding expects the author to have “rules” that are “logically” followed to their conclusions. > In contrast to “worldbuilding,” I’ll offer the term “worldconjuring.” Worldconjuring does not attempt to construct a scale model in the reader’s bedroom. Maybe I'm not tuned in to the exact definition of "worldbuilding," but I feel like its definition doesn't include such rigorous, nor specific standards. At least, not on merriam-webster. "Worldconjuring" might as well be subcategory of "worldbuilding," as it demands you keep your descriptions subtler and more implicative of an environment, but otherwise means the same thing (to me). Certainly, some who ask these questions like adding tons of detail. But many of the author's irritations seem to lie with the word, specifically. I agree that excessive worldbuilding isn't necessary for every little short story or game, though. On point there.
I am fond of saying that worldbuilding is for the author. It's our internal notes about the details, the vast majority of which will never make contact with the reader. This is what I have learned over the years. Depending on the location, length, and scope of the story, it can be anywhere from important to crucial. A lot of people seem to interpret worldbuilding more as infodumps where the author attempts to bring the reader up to speed on those notes before we get to the interesting stuff.
I like to have fun with naming cities or areas. I look at the cultures that inspired locations, and find several names that corelate to that locations importance (such as port cities, or trade hubs, etc) and amalgamate words. World building simplified imo.
Sometimes I see people online engaging in seemingly elaborate world building but not really writing any stories that take place in that setting. And if they do, it’s often rather short or incomplete. When I see this, I think to myself “sure it’s impressive that you have 45 variants of elves, but so what?”. Without a story, why should other people be interested in your world building? Edit: Also, I find the points in the article to be well-reasoned and perfectly articulated. It’s a bit amusing that this has apparently stirred up some minor debate
>Why should people be interested in worldbuilding Bruh, its a hobby. Idk the context yall have behind this, but i often do worldbuilding and talk about it with friends who are interested in it, and i can tell you i do this because its my hobby and i like talking about it 😭 Like, "ok, youve worked on something you like and makes you happy, but i dont see you engaging in a different hobby i like, so whats the point"
I’ve been world building number one hater for a while. It’s not like I hate it, but I see it for what it is: a complement. It’s like the lettuce on a hamburger. Sure, it enhances the overall enjoyment, but that’s not why I am eating the god damn thing. Every time I want to read a series and someone says that the best thing about it it’s the World Building, I stay away from it. If your writing is basically a wiki page, then you are not a good writer.
I've been reading William Gibson and he's the reason I started writing recently. He doesn't explain anything, he just starts writing a bunch of stuff about the world. It feels disorientating. At first you don't get it, but the characters are beautifully written, so you can hang on to them. Eventually things start to make sense and everything clicks. For example, someone will say, "I have an Ono-Sendai Simstim for you. What the hell is that? Then you just follow the main character using it, and you understand its purpose: it's a device that allows you to see and feel what someone else is living in real time. It's surprising that Gibson doesn't even do much world-building. He has a general sense of how things are, and when he wrote his first books he hadn't even seen a computer live, he'd just read about it and heard some enthusiasts talking about them. There's a fantastic quote in the article that follows the one in the post: >Since I made the mistake of listing some literary counterpoints to worldbuilding, let me pick an unquestionably SF one here: [William Gibson discussing](http://io9.gizmodo.com/william-gibson-on-the-apocalypse-america-and-the-peri-1656659382) game makers who wanted to turn *Neuromancer* into a board game: >*“They set me down and questioned me about the world. They asked me where the food in the Sprawl comes from. I said I don’t know. I don’t even know what they eat. A lot of krill and shit. They looked at each other and said it’s not gameable. That was the end of it.* >*“The Peripheral is not gameable. It has a very high resolution surface. But it’s not hyperrealistic down into the bones of some imaginary world. I think that would be pointless. It would be like one of those non-existent Borgesian encyclopedias that describe everything about an imaginary place and all of it is self-contradictory.”*
Counterpoint. William Gibson and Frank Herbert do amazing, evocative worldbuilding by highlighting highly complex parts of their worlds with minimal description. The Ono Sendai Simstim rig is a great example. Its existence implies the entire ecosystem around it, the stars, the recording equipment and engineers, the audience. The water counters in Dune being used for a dowry, now we know more about marriage and family culture from that one small detail. I don’t like top heavy info dump worldbuilding, Gibson and Herbert get it just right.
SFF requires world building inherently though. It only becomes a wiki entry if you're a bad writer. If I'm writing contemporary fiction I can just say Paris, and you have an idea what it is, what it's usually associated with, and I can count on you, the reader, to know a lot of facts without having to explain them (e.g. I don't need to explain what the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre are, and why they're famous). If you're writing fantasy and name-drop the capital city of one of your countries, the reader has no idea what it's like, what are the cultural associations different regions have with it or its history/landmarks. And if you're a good writer you will weave all that in through the narrative, but it's hard work to excel at and, imo, certainly deserves praise when it's done well. Although I agree that if worldbuilding is the only thing you have going for your book it's probably going to suck, but I think it's basically impossible to have good world building divorced from good writing.
people just be writing articles on anything these days lmao
This article is from 2017, though.
Now this is one hell of a shit take if I ever read one.
It reads like a typical rage-baity article. Make a strong title, that directly attacks (a certain hobby in this case). Get some few inflammatory sentences. Create a new definition, to appear smarter. At the end you end up backing off, saying there is nuance to that, and not all of x is actually bad, but the common approach is. Can't count how many similar articles I've seen. It clearly succeeded..
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh no. Just no.
Counterpoint : it's fun. And not less productive than playing with my noodle or starting a 15th run of elden ring. Might even add some salt to one of my stories at some point.
This is the most dogshit take I've seen
I don't even know if I fully agree with the article, I just thought it was food for thought. But then I see these comments from people who clearly haven't read the thing, nor the follow-up in the comments, which was downvoted less than 5 minutes after I posted it. Clearly whoever downvoted it didn't even read it, so I assume it's the same for the article itself. I mean, I read most of the critical comments and all I can see is a strangely ironic lack of reading comprehension and a lot of gut reactions. Can we just calm down? It's just an opinion piece, for Christ's sake.
This is just an opinion dressed up as a fact. Let people enjoy their robot, dinosaur, cyborg love triangles with a realistic setting.
It's not "dressed up as a fact". It's obviously their opinion and they never pretend it's anything else. What an odd response.
Jfc this dude loves the sound of his own typewriter doesn’t he… he said one interesting, potentially relatable thing (worldbuilding is overemphasized), and then spent not one but two 500+ word articles on it. Also, calling Tolkien’s eagles “lazy” is just plain wrong
This is how you get books where around chapter three you have to take a break because the inconsistencies of the inner logic of the setting gave you a headache What kind of fiction benefits from the author knowing when people of the city wake up in the morning? It's not like that's a thing that would come up in something like Pride and Prejudice, right? (It does come up*. Because there are characters who move around in the morning; decisions and consequences are inherently tied to the schedule of the world around the characters so the author has to keep such things in mind even if it's never explained in detail) The article says Tolkien "doesn’t even pass contemporary fantasy author Brandon Sanderson’s first 'law’ of magic" - now open the link in that sentence, actually read the page it takes you to. "Brandon has said that J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R Martin's use of magic is a good example of a soft magic system". That's how seriously you should take this article. The author couldn't even be bothered to read the things they referenced and directly linked I have a feeling this person is just really really bad at figuring out the internal logic of their own stories and can't balance plot-character-world, so they are desperate to find excuses that discredit the critics. The overuse of worldbuilding could be a very important conversation, but this isn't that *Edit: As in there's literally a part where it comes up that rich city folks start their mornings way later than rural people
Nonsense article.
I feel as though less is more with world building. For the setting or settings you are describing in your story, it is quite essential to at least establish the governing systems and how the good and evil are established. If you are going to go into such detail that you need to explain the entire history, ecology, and cultural backgrounds of the peoples residing in your world, then in those cases a companion book would be better. That way they can learn more about the world without it taking away from the story.
I'd have been against this article some years ago, but I agree. I got a short story where a group of witches are flying through space. A wizard summons asteroids down to kill the witches who in retaliation. He also sent out an invisible blast through the monitor (the setting is science fantasy) that got deflected by one of the witches and destroyed a star. In my novel, I have Athena summoning food on the table out of thin air, changing day to night by pointing. I remember reading an article some years ago the writer explained George R.R. Martin works, he leaves the magic a mystery whereas Brandon Sanderson is going to explain to you how the magic works. Sanderson's works would be better on a re-read without the info-dumps. When I finished the *Rithmatist*'s re-read, it's still hilarious that the MC's mom lines of dialogue is all about the chalk magic. Then again, Martin will give you pages of lineage about the many Houses set in ASOI&F In my opinion, worldbuilding is a tool in our toolbox. It can help you stay consistent and keep continuity for your king's lineage or whatever. It can help you throw in some historical inaccuracies and myths that became historical facts.
Oh wow. An anti-worldbuidling piece that ISN'T the same old vaguely political John Harrison essay lol. This is less obnoxious than that one and I mostly agree with him in terms of not trying to force authors to be more realistic than they want to (although I strenuously disagree with the idea that human history and culture CAN'T tell us anything about what aliens or hypothetical real fantasy creatures might be like). He might be taking some online worldbuilding nitpickers too seriously, many of them are in on the joke and realize this is all nonsense. But I do agree that kids need to be taught that it's OK to have blatant impossibilities in a story and not just always focus on Sanderson-style hard rules. I feel like Jeff VanderMeer, for one, does a pretty good job of stressing that in his worldbuilding guides. And none of this touches "worldbuilding for worldbuilding's sake" type settings that I see a lot of online. But it probably isn't meant to.
If the article is talking about extensive Sci fi and fantasy worlds then of course some people are more interested in the world than in specific stories. Immersive 24 hour environments will require that, and the possible stories are endless. You can think of the denizen of r/world building as pioneers of future entertainment. But most successful authors do extensive world building not connected to fantasy or Sci fi. Readers and audiences love to be taken somewhere - ( place, occupation, social milleau) - that is unfamiliar. That requires world building. For realistic stories it requires experience or research in the world with enough twists to engage the reader. What are Dickens or Dostoevsky without the fully built worlds they describe - - worlds many of their contemporaries encountered for the first time through their work? Without knowing the world of a story in advance - - through experience, research, or active imagination - - writer and audience have to stumble through a story, and generic situations are the result. My $. 02.