This is something I've struggled with myself. Worldbuilding can be frustrating, but it can also be very fun and addicting. I've spent the past year developing a world, and I still have some things to figure out about it. When I first started out, my story essentially took place in the real world. After realizing that the setting limited me too much, I decided to make an alternate Earth, which was similar to ours, but had a very different history. In general, I think the best way to go about it is to set up the basics first. For example... How is it different from the real world (magic, technology, aliens, different physics)? What are the various nations (you don't have to come up with all of them, just the most important ones in the context of your story), and how do they relate to each other? What's the basic history of your world? How do the characters interact with the world (where did they grow up, what's their opinion of their hometown, where are they living now)? After you come up with that, just keep gradually expanding until you have something that satisfies you. As for not being satisfied with ideas, I'm afraid that just takes time. I look back on my past ideas with shame (and I'm sure I'll eventually look by on some of my current ones the same way). If something isn't working, think about why it isn't working, and how you can change it. Of course, this can mean changing other things to (character's backstory being one of them) which can be annoying, but it's just part of the process, and the results are well worth it. Again, this is something I still struggle with (and I doubt it ever fully goes away), so don't take my word as gospel. Hope I was able to help.
Read the thread man. I didn't say that it wasn't a valid form of story telling to world build first. At all. Someone posted saying that they had spent months on world building that felt like it would be never ending; that he could keep building forever and not actually write a story. My advice to him was to stop world building and write a damn story; and that if he thought about his world building in a different way (a world as a product of past stories) then it might give him some ideas about where to start, and indeed give him more concrete ideas about the world he's trying to build. To put it another way: The OP: "Help me for the love of god I can't seem to stop world building!" Me: "Just stop world building and write a story man." You: "Oh so you're saying world building isn't a valid approach?"
I dunno man, your post reads to me like you were pretty clearly saying "You need to build the story and not build a world expecting a story to fit into it". If I somehow got the wrong message out of it, then I apologize I guess but re-reading your post it looks to me like you weren't giving him specific advice at all and were saying in broad terms you can't make a world and then try putting a story in it.
I said, to someone who felt blocked by world building too much, that they should approach it from the other end and think about the people in the world they are trying to make; think of the stories that created the society instead of trying to make the society first. But that was to someone who was struggling to make progress and who needed a change of tack.
Yes, it is for some people. And no you don't have to do something very wrong to get stuck. It's called spectacle eclipsing story and it happens all the time. It's when an author has their basic story, and a disproportionate world, they often feel eager to use the story to show off this world. That's when the story gets to a lot of padding. Or it can consist of moments as opposed to actual scenes.
Mouthwash, you can conceivably keep world-building for the rest of your life and never be finished creating a comprehensive look at the world you want to write in. Maybe that's cool if you want to create a campaign setting for a role-playing game, but it's an overload for a single book. You really only need surface-level histories and descriptions for most things you're worried about. Don't get sucked in to telling us the barber's full ancestral history when we really only need to know he gave the king a bad haircut. Look at it this way: have you ever read a story that kept going on about the ingenious method a space-faring civilization uses to communicate over vast distances? Like, the author just keeps giving you more detail about the two women who invented it, their parent's financial woes, the scorn they faced that was engineered by competing telecommunication companies, their personal insecurities over their budding romance? And you get this whole chapter about these telecomm geniuses and you can only think to yourself "yeah, that's great, but can I get back to my story about space pirates battling the stellar octopus invasion?" If you have a library of encyclopediae about your world, you're probably going to try and shoehorn as much of that in as possible and you run the risk of it becoming uninteresting or distracting for the reader. Start with the details you know will be included in the story. Then, when the need arises, work on the next set of details, extrapolating as much as you can from what you've already got, but do it as you go.
Then that's not an example of someone making a world that isn't fit for a story, that's an example of someone wanting to show too much of their world off without letting the story organically breath. I agree that it's possible to focus too much on wanting to expunge as much lore as possible and show off all the neat ideas you have, but again, that's not a world that can't contain a story. It's a story that wants to show too much at once.
Golems. What would they be made of? If they had different functions like scouting, warfare, cleaning? (They have joints, so the material doesn't have to bend.)
Well, traditionally you have golems made of clay. Some stories have done things like metal golems or golems made from organic matter (like flesh or whatever). I imagine if you used golems for war, they'd probably be made out of metal. Maybe something darker, like 'flesh golems' plated with armor.
I've heard 'golem' used in a general sense to describe an otherwise-lifeless but magically animated man-shaped (although not necessarily man-sized) construct. I'm imagining the automatons from Greek mythology (specifically the Greek automatons), or other man-shaped creatures of clay or metal. If you're going to have golems in your story that aren't 'typical' golems (i.e. made of clay and animated by a magicked scroll in their mouth, I think), I'd put some thought into why they've chosen golems; what about golems makes them ideal, and how would you logically improve upon the original idea if there were no theoretical limits. EDIT:: note about automatoi: they were, in fact, mechanical, rather than magical, but I feel like it's still a similar concept in this context. In another context, they might not be so similar. Although I'm somewhat confused about this. This is the first post about golems, right? I'm not missing something?
Well, I'm also thinking about qualities like brittleness, heat tolerance, permeability, etc. Scouts might get caught in rain or snow, fighters deal with everything from halberds to flaming pitch. Yep. I'm a random person.
