Can't let go of worldbuilding.

I have a special case of worldbuilder's disease. See, the universal (and correct) advice for writers just starting out is to 'vomit' up their first draft without a care for quality. Simply write, write, write and the process will give you more insight than any amount of planning could. The issue here for me is that the worldbuilding feels almost like the point. It's not that I'm more interested in my world than my story, it's that I need a big, complex world to put it in. I feel aimless with just characters. Characters have feelings, opinions, desires - so what? Soap operas put me to sleep. The interaction between characters and a big, intricate world is what I love.

Now this isn't like those situations where a writer makes conlangs for each of his dozen fictional cultures before putting the first word on paper. I actually feel like I have the opposite of worldbuilder's disease - I'm raring to just get the thing started already, but I know that when I spin it out into something more complex the story will collapse in on itself - and I can't settle on even the basics. Something that seems brilliant one day will seem idiotic another. A plot thread will turn out to be impossible to mesh with another without one of them seeming gratuitous.

Do I just need someone to bounce ideas off of? Do I just have regular worldbuilder's disease? What's wrong with me?

 

There's nothing universal (or universally correct) about the advice to vomit up a first draft. If that approach works for you, great, but if it doesn't work for you, there are lots of other options.

In terms of whether you need to get started writing? How long have you been world-building for? If you're impatient, are there individual scenes you could write that you're pretty sure are going to be relevant? Can you start writing and keep world-building as you go?

 

Not for every story, but for new writers. There's an old tale about a ceramics teacher grading half his class on quality and the other half on quantity. The work produced by the 'quantity' group turned out to be of much higher quality than the group that was purportedly focused on it (the moral being that exploring and getting your mistakes out of the way teaches you more than all the theorizing in the world). I would not, however, suggest that a professional sculptor create a piece of art for a client with such a strategy.

Many months. But like I said, it's not as though I've even built anything. I just can't decide what to do. Maybe we could call this worldbuilder's block?

No, nothing so concrete. Just ideas of scenes, but they heavily depend on the setting in which they're placed.

To some extent, I'll have to do this. But I don't think I have enough to actually get started (at least without the fear that I'll eventually decide to scrap it - it's happened before, and nothing drains my motivation like the idea that I'm working on something doomed to fail).

 

I think this is your big stumbling block.

World building does matter; you need the setting feel like something that's living and breathing and that it's a real place. But...

A setting is built up of the people inside it. That's all a city is. The product of people who live and work and love and die within it's bounds. They leave behind buildings and societies and institutions and crimes and all kind of things, but it was people who created the whole landscape.

And in fictional terms this means that you need to stop thinking about the world and start thinking about the characters and the story. You can't build a world and then hope to find interesting things to do with it. You need an interesting thing to do and then build a world that fits that.

I'd suggest that's why you keep having moments where it feels like everything you did yesterday is stupid and doesn't fit. Because you don't have something to wrap all of this around. You don't know why the things you're building really matter; what will be important to the story and what will be off in the background and what won't even be mentioned.

You say that soap opera drama bores you; but the thing is that all stories are human stories about human struggles. Broken down every story is just a series of soap operas, but the sum of those stories is something far greater than that. Julius Ceaser's life was in many respects a soap opera. Born to a well regarded family that had fallen on hard times, as a young man he was a rebel and a romantic who set trends. He was famed for sleeping with married women, including the sister of Cato. He was kidnapped by pirates and amused himself by writing poetry while the ransom was sent, when he left he promised the pirates he'd come back and crucify them all, and he did. His grandfather was killed in the last civil war. The greatest scandal in Rome was when his wife's lover was caught dressed as a woman trying to sneak in to see her. He got into politics and to succeed he owed money and favors to dodgy people, he had to go abroad to raise the money to pay them back. Even as a general he fought on the front lines to inspire his men. And finally he marches on Rome and becomes Ceaser. All these little dramas that together create one of the most epic stories that has ever happened.

You could spend forever developing Rome as a setting and you'd never find this incredible story in the middle of it. Because you'd be writing about baths and forums and Senate politics, when this scarlet thread of history is right there waiting to be told.

Find your stories Ceaser. Find the story that you want to tell. A human story, about human struggle; and then wrap that in the setting and let the story tell you what elements this world needs to work. What makes your story special is the story, not the setting.

 

I agree with LostThePlot. Deciding a bit of plot and characters goals shows could point you to some areas in the world to focus on. To start the story from the worldbuilding, maybe you could pick a few areas in your world that you're most interested in (law, class issues, war, nature, trade, culture, history, the school system, etc) and see what kind of story and characters could come from that.

Just don't get stressed out about how you "should" write your story. Like BayView said, there are few pieces of advice that absolutely works for everyone, so don't bother with stuff you feel wouldn't work for you at this point. Good luck!

 

Yes exactly. Think about the bits of your world that are really interesting to you and start thinking about the stories that are inside that. It could be the politicking inside the Senate or the college of mages, it could be the military history of great generals, it could be a peasant uprising, it could anything at all. But these are all human stories. Why does this guy want to be in charge? Why is this guy fighting a war? What made all these people decide now it was too much?

Whatever you want to do, there's so much there, so many people striving and fighting and yearning to be free. It's those who you want to focus on.

Edit - Wrecked by autocorrect. How the hell does my phone not have a problem with cardiothoracic surgeon and then turn mages into mates?

 

But Caesar is enmeshed in the extremely detailed world of the ancient Mediterranean. Examining your descriptions of Caesar:

"Born to a well regarded family that had fallen on hard times,"

What does this mean? This setting must clearly have an aristocracy, which I need to provide a basic outline of, which requires a general political outline as well. What do "hard times" mean? Loss of wealth? Privileges? Land? Hereditary office? If they aren't well-regarded anymore, their marriage prospects must have fallen off. So I have to sketch out the betrothal system to boot.

"as a young man he was a rebel and a romantic who set trends"

What were young men expected to do in this setting and what would set one apart as a "rebel" and "romantic?"

"His grandfather was killed in the last civil war."

There are civil wars in the setting? So I need to work out grounds for civil strife in Roman society.

"The greatest scandal in Rome was when his wife's lover was caught dressed as a woman trying to sneak in to see her."

That just seems like pointless drama. How does it further the main story?

"He got into politics and to succeed he owed money and favors to dodgy people, he had to go abroad to raise the money to pay them back."

Cool, now I just need to detail Roman politics, show the layer of corruption beneath it (probably introducing a boatload of characters) and then show the outside world, what Rome is doing there and how Caesar is able to exploit the situation for money, and bring it all together into one coherent whole.

"Even as a general he fought on the front lines to inspire his men."

No problem - just sketch out how the whole military operates and keep it all self-consistent.

"And finally he marches on Rome and becomes Ceaser."

The fall of the Republic was actually caused by hugely complex sociopolitical factors (why would soldiers follow their commander against the state?) that you can get an overview of here. It wasn't just Caesar's great personality.

I mean, I could do all this... but make it interesting and original enough to read? No sir. That's a huge investment of time and energy.

 

If you're not actually building settings and instead leaping between ideas, then your not world building. Pick one, develop it. Then, start writing in it.

 

But how much of all of this would you tell in Ceaser's story? You'd just tell what needs to be told. It's enough to say "there is an aristocracy". You don't need to know the intricacies of the optimates and the popularii. He's an aristocrat in hard times, a he'll raiser who ends up in politics. The same story as George W Bush, in fact.

What matters are these human elements. The why matters so much more than the what. What makes stories engaging is these human factors; the loves and passions and deaths and opportunities. You can tell almost any story in almost any setting. You tweak things a bit, you move points of emphasis, but you can set a book about backstabbing and politicking just as well set amongst high school girls as you can set in the government of some far future.

As you start telling the story you'll see what elements you need to bring into this world. And that's the key to good story telling. You only include what the story needs to tell it. The reader doesn't need to know the intricacies of this world's school system; it doesn't matter if they have guild schools or apprenticeships or a well developed secondary school system. If it becomes important then you fill them in. But if it doesn't, it doesn't matter. Oh but every character in this world has been through their educational system! Sure, but it's enough to say they are educated.

A whole society is irreducibly complex. There are thousands or millions of people bouncing off each other in ways that you couldn't even hope to put across. You can't build this whole world, no matter what you do because every single person in it has a life that's unique and specific and interesting in some small way.

Your book gets 100k words to tell it's story. That's so much less than you might think. My first drafts run in at 250k, even as contemporary books with zero world building. Your book only has space for the things that matter to the story, and those are the things that impact the characters of this story in a specific way. At best you're going to get one or two big elements of your setting across in one book. No more. For the rest, the reader doesn't need to know exactly. Broad strokes is all it takes. The reader will go with you, as long as the people in this world are worth reading about.

 

But to write intelligent or successful characters, I have to be able to show how they exploit their surroundings in ways other people don't - and there has to be an explanation for that that doesn't make the whole world look stupid. I'm writing a high fantasy with lots of races with different abilities, plus I want to separate two plot threads chronologically.

 

Maybe for your first book, you should try simplifying? You don't have to do everything in one novel. My first attempt at a novel I had a ton of ideas I wanted to include- but it was too many. I ended up ditching the entire thing.

One thing that helped me was trying to find a one sentence summary. If you can't give someone the gist of your book in one sentence, there may be too much going on. For example, mine is: "A time traveler and a widow set out to get a mountain."

I have a ton of worldbuilding going on that you don't get a glimpse of behind that sentence. But the audience doesn't even have to know everything behind it. As for why your characters are the ones doing the thing, could be as simple as 'right place right time'. What works for me is just writing the story and letting the world fall in place as I go, could try that approach.

 

Mouthwash -

You're not going to like this ... I've been in the same situation for about 20 years. Just enjoy building your world and mythos, explore and compare to the real world, and write something else in the meantime.

This is what I do. I just write bits and pieces of dialogue, descriptions of cities and culture. Write bits of the narrative I want here and there. Over all though I understand very well that no matter what I do the world I have created is a living world and I can explore it endlessly. Once you've fleshed it out enough the whole things, all the conflictying threads, will slowly but surely weave together and your story will emerge.

I am pretty sure I remember reading somewhere that Tolkiens wrote an incredible amount of stuff that was never meant for publication. In this respect just do what you enjoy doing, keep building and don't worry about when and how you're going to write your narrative. Instead, for practice, just write something completely different and don't break the joy of exploring your own creative nature.

I get obsessed over every little detail in my world, geography, diet, natural laws, economics, political systems, langauges, technology, psychology, etc.,. Bulding my world has led me down a road where I;ve learnt an incredible amount about the "real" world.

If this advice fails then just write something incoherent and trashy. At least you'll then know what not to write, or if you're lucky find some basic structure with which to thread together the disparities within the complexity of your world/story.

 

This is not true at all. The number one thing you need to do to write intelligent or successful characters is to actually write. And it seems like you're making excuses for yourself not to write. It's okay. It's your time and your unwritten novel. It seems like you've surrounded yourself with rules like this one and the one about a first draft being vomit. I always tell people if they set out to write crap, that's probably what they are going to get. But, seriously, stop putting this off if it's actually something you want to do. If not, simply carry on as you were.

 

To echo @badgerjelly I've been worldbuilding this one setting of mine for about ten years. Not consistently, to be fair - I work on it now and again, sometimes only in bits and pieces, sometimes single-mindedly for a few months at a time. I know it's going to be a really, really, really long time before I actually write any books set in it, but I'm quite happy to keep picking at it and improving it, because I love the process. I've got other projects I'm more focused on actually writing at some point before I shuffle off - maybe you could try a similar system? Somewhat more simple worlds or stories set in the real world to scratch the writing itch while you keep something else on the backburner to scratch the worldbuilding itch?

That said, if worldbuilding is what you really want to do and characters bore you, maybe writing novels isn't what you should be pursuing. Designing an rpg or other game might be more suited to your interests.

I also believe rather firmly that any time you 'can't' do something, writing-wise, it's a block you've only set up for yourself, and can only overcome yourself. I used to feel like I couldn't start writing my sf series because the world wasn't built up enough, but the reality is I could start writing it tomorrow - I just want to keep creating the world, both because I like it and because I honestly think that the stories will be much better if they have this world behind and in them. I had to realize that. It seems like you may be having trouble with deciding what you want out of the project, but that's something you have to determine for yourself. You have to focus in on what that thing is and make some decisions.

Something that I always come back to, in both plotting and worldbuilding, is the thought "Well, I can always change it later". Make a decision and run with it for now, and if you don't like it, you can always change it - it's really not that important. But before you change your mind, do run with it - do something with it, make something new with it, build off of it. Make more decisions.

Because I've been working on my sf world for so so long, since I was barely a teenager, some of the core concepts were really lazy or just not well-thought-out. For the longest time I handwaved the concept of having artificial gravity on ships because I just didn't want to deal with it, so I said okay I'm not going to explain it outside of "there's an artificial gravity generator on the ship" so it can be cut off or damaged for Drama. That's it. And that's how it was for years, and I designed this main ship and it's the set where the main characters live and a lot of shit happens there, and then one day I said "nah, that's dumb; that's not very sci-fi" and I decided to give the ship a spinning habitation ring instead. Had to redesign the entire thing, this entire set where all that shit happens, to be a ring instead - plus there's the sections outside of the ring, and all the scenes that're supposed to happen there either have to be moved or they happen in 0g now.

But here the thing: redesigning the ship and re-imagining those scenes is way less work to do right now than if years ago I'd dithered over how the ship has artificial gravity. I committed to something and that let me generate a ton of other ideas and content that happen on this ship, and reworking this detail isn't that big of a deal in the grand scheme. It only affects the rest of the world inasmuch as I want to let it. So this setting doesn't have magical gravity generators anymore - it's not the end of the world. It just means I have to alter the rest of the ships, not destroy them and start over entirely.

You have to commit to this shit to get anything done, but it's not like it's set in stone. You can always change it later. Placeholders are fine. Honestly, I love changing stuff and seeing how the rest of my world changes by extension. It's fun as hell. But you need some kind of semi-functional world, first.


* Very late, very tired, have a headache - apologies for any typos or general nonsense.

 

You're thinking too much. Let me return some advice you gave me awhile back:

Start out with short stories. They're very limited in focus, so they might help you flesh out smaller parts of the world a piece at a time.

 

You seem to have the disease called "Where should I start?".
Give a go to the World Buildig Leviathan shared by @Wreybies in the resources section : https://www.writingforums.org/resources/world-building-leviathan.238/

 

Sometimes I think we need a subsection of the forum dedicated to "just write." For a forum of largely aspiring novelists, many of which are at the beginning stage, I think "just writing" is probably the single most important piece of advice. It's so important, that if someone doesn't agree with it, we even need to have separate threads explaining why.

 

It doesn't matter how complex your world is if it doesn't have an interesting human drama attached to it. That's the number one goal of all fiction writing. I wouldn't want to read a story filled to the brim with details on fake political events, histories and customs if there are no compelling characters. I believe one can't be a writer if all they do is compile lore and draw maps. That's just the way I view it. Writers tell stories.

 

I think you need to scrap your entire world and just start over. Because I think it sounds like, is that you have a world that's completely incompatable with the story you're trying to tell. The world is probably interfering in some way with the pace of the story.

I too have a story that needs to be put into a big, complex world. But I found it's too easy to have spectacle eclipse the story. If I think of something, then I'm tempted to in some way try and incorporate it and that's not a practical way to do a story because guess what? Not everyone cares.

So I have a story that's set in this kingdom that has eight principalities that make up this one kingdom. And the idea in my head is to make each and every single one of these principalities have their own culture, look, and feel. Otherwise, they'll all just feel like the same place with a different coat of paint. I wanted the audience to feel like they're going to a vastly different place when the main character enters a principality, particularly their capital cities.

Sounds grand? Well, that's because it is. It's not a unique idea. It's just a big one. So now I have to come up with eight small kingdoms with cities and villages and the likes, right? Wrong.

Here's the thing. In the first part of the book, only three of these areas are even important: The city where the character is originally from, the city where she now lives, and the city where her sister lives. Out of those three areas, she only travels to two of them in the first part of the story. So that means, five of eight cities, aren't even worth thinking about. For this entire first part, I have no decisions about what the other five cities are going to be like. I haven't written out their history. I don't know if they're poor, rich or whatever. Sometimes I don't even have their names. I don't have a clue as I'm writing those first ten chapters.

The two cities she visits are going to have a majority of my attention. I'm going to go deep into their look and feel. I'm going to tell you where their cathedral and castles are. What their citizens eat. Whether they have a wall or not. Do they have a lot of craftsmen? Are they more agricultural? As for the city she's from, I'm just going to do some notes, getting an idea on what kind of place it has to be to shape her into who she is, but that's about it. If I come with a surge of inspiration for another city, I'll write it down but I'm not going to refocus where my attention isn't needed. For example, as I'm writing the actual story (not building the world, writing the actual story, as in the actual things my MC is doing,) I realized that there needs to be a place that's equivalent to Vatican City. Okay, no problem. I'll just pick one of those five cities I haven't gotten to yet and behold! that's now my fantasy world's equivalent of the Vatican. Now, that's sorted out, let's go back to the story.

So when do I get to those other parts of the world? When do I actually build my character's hometown and the world's equivalent of the Vatican? Well, that depends on when MC gets there. She doesn't get to Vatican City until halfway through the book so that's when I'll get to it. It turned out that when I finally finished the book, she only ended up traveling to five of the eight areas. That means one I know has some mines, another I know is near the sea and has a harbor, and the third I only literally know it exists. After 110,000 words, that's all I know about those three cities the character never visits because that's all that's important about them.

Am I ever afraid that I'll put in something that will contradict something else? Sure. But that's what rewrites are for. If you look at what my world looks like in draft two, it's quite a bit different from draft ten.

A couple things I found not to worry about. I don't worry about putting every single concept I have in my head on paper. That's how you collapse your story. I wrote an entire fictional language. Guess how much of it appears in my book? All of five sentences. I created it when I got this copy of "The Magic Fish" in the original dialect it was written in and thought "Wow, that would make a great fantasy language" and then spent three months creating it and hardly used it. It just didn't work for most of the story. Oh well. If it doesn't work, it gets the ax.

I also wasn't afraid to say things like, "That's how it is" and leave it at that. Why did my character speak all five words of this language that I hardly used? Because she didn't want her enemies to know what she was saying to her sister. How did she and her sister know this language? Because they had nannies from the mountain region where that language was spoken. Plot convenience anyone? Absolutely! But I don't give a damn. It still logically works in context of the story so I'm keeping it. I don't need to build a long explanation.

 

I had a similar problem when I started out, but not as bad I guess. Still, my experience may help.
When the people I talk to ask me about 'how to write a novel', or more accurately, 'how to get to the point where saying that i'm writing a novel isn't absurd', I always have 3 things to say.
The first is that you cannot be afraid to start over. I couldn't find the voice I wanted to write in; my first first draft was trying to be too funny; the second, too much like Tolkien for my skill level. Finally, I settled for something that sounded more conversational; a man, telling a story about his job and the people he works with. This always surprises the people I talk to, although I'm sure by now you've realized this.
Second, general overviews of society WILL work until you need the details. I have a list of facts about my races and the Constellar Imperium that rules the galaxy. Ten Constellates who make the decisions; their names and genders. I stated that they each have two aides, a personal and political one. From there, it goes into the military. Three Grand Commanders who work together to organize the galactic fleets, and their names. I state that there are a number of sector admirals, and name the two I'll be most likely dealing with. I have a BRIEF overview of how power goes until it gets to spaceships.

For races, I say what society I'm basing them off of. The Chouk'mir are tribal with a relatively recent technological spin, the Thorans are as closely based on Sparta as I can manage without actually looking anything up. For their governments, I state who's in charge of the species and what form of government they have; I didn't bother giving that person a name. If you tell your reader a race is feudal, they'll understand. Mention an aristocracy, they'll know that there's probably people under the aristocracy who aren't as fortunate. Trust your readers.
For those in the back: trust your readers. They'll understand things they have frames of reference for; the likelihood that your system of government is entirely foreign to them is slim to none.​

Three, this writing thing is hard. I didn't realize how hard, but I'm pushing through and that makes me proud of myself. I've got 30k more words than most people have.

 

Because I kind of forgot to add my point, one more thing.

The only thing the readers will need to know are things your MC knows and cares about. Re: my above post--sure, there's a metric fucktonne of interpersonal and interracial politics in the Constellature. But my main character just flies a ship. He doesn't know; he doesn't care. The ins and outs of interplanetary trade are things he simply doesn't think about, and therefore I, as the author, don't need to agonize over them before I've gotten the novel written. If, at some point, someone he's talking to makes a comment about how incredibly fucking hard it is to get [made up substance] to a planet because of [politics or pirates or whatever], then that becomes a thing I know, a thing the MC knows. But until then, it's not something you have to agonize over.

 

This is actually very untrue. Creating a world full of landscapes, places, cities, rules, etc and then planting a story into that is a very valid way of both world building and making a story. It's more of a top-down story building method, where you start with the world and work down to the characters, but it's still a completely valid way of storytelling.

 

If you can pull it off. If someone is literally not writing a story because they can't figure out how because they way they built the world doesn't allow for a story, then they're not pulling it off.

 

It's not really very hard to pull off. I mean, if your world somehow 'doesn't allow for a story', then you did something really wrong, lol.