Thinking about trying my hand at some genre work. I'm looking into science fiction/fancy type short stories. To write these, is it advisable to create the world before the story? Or can you just sort of write and see where it goes? I usually take the approach of just writing with little or no planning, but I'm going to want my story to make sense. Some one told me that I really had to pre-plan out my world or the story likely won't make sense. I don't know if I believe that. I wanted to see what you guys think and do? Thanks for your insight.
The Fantastical elements of my stories are pre-planned at the general concept stage. As my stories develop, I'll plug in finer details. To give you kind of an idea, I use the same symbolism palette in my works. In my works, a spider symbolizes someone who has committed a murder/suicide. So when you see one of my characters have nightmares about being transformed into a giant spider, we know what this character's end is going to be. Plan everything out? No. I come with up with a very general idea and build on it as my stories develop. (I should note that all my stories take place in a single shared universe.)
I've recently finished a science fiction short story (about 4000K). I took my idea and wrote a story draft (just put it on paper as it flowed). I broke that down into a scene list and from that list identified my world building needs. I then did the research and world building from that. I'm a very organic writer, so, once I began writing the first draft I did a develop ideas that 'pop' up. Then, in the edit I cut out of a lot of stuff. In a 4000K story you only can only say so much.
I think you probably need the broad brushstrokes of the world figured out before you begin - Like, is there magic in your world, or non-human creatures, are you in space, is there a massive central gov't or anarchy, etc. But I'd leave the details to figure out as you go - more fun that way, and you can be sure the world is serving the story, rather than the story serving the world.
I worldbuild retroactively and in-between. That is, I always begin with a very vague idea, and elaborate on that. Worldbuilding comes in little bits and pieces. Such is my process, but then again, I'm not an exemplar of getting shit done.
But did you at least know it was a fantasy novel before you started, or did that part just come about as you went, as well? Like, did you know nothing about the world you were going to populate?
Well, I knew there was magic. That was about it. I hadn't even figured out what kind of magic / how it would work.
When I started the Highly Flavored Novel, I mostly had a visual: - Ocean. - Rocky land. - Locals wearing brightly colored cottons. - A not-too-big, not-too-small town with mostly stone architecture. - Docks. - A girl with red hair. - Not modern tech. (A briefer description: "The Welsh on Capri.") And the fact that I didn't do any research on real-world places meant, by process of elimination, that I was doing fantasy--in the sense of an alternative world, not dragons and magic. As I created things, I just remembered them and forced them to be consistent with previously created things. The novel isn't done, so I can't say whether this will work out. But if it fails, I don't think that my failure to pre-plan the world will be the cause.
I don't think there's one answer that's true for everyone. I find it helps a lot to do a bit of world-building first - major characters, settings, how the world works - and then the detail gets filled in as I write. But then, I've always been fairly heavily at the planning end of the spectrum, even for entirely non-fantastical stories. I struggle to move if I don't know where I'm going, and I find it far easier to create a world that feels deep if I've already got an idea about what's going on in it, even if my characters haven't encountered any of that stuff yet. @izzybot sounds like the complete opposite, and that approach evidently worked fine for her. If your normal style of writing is to just write and see where it goes, I'd probably start with that. If you find you need to do some world-building to make it coherent, then do some world-building and revise.
I'm a very big believer on writing a draft of the story as it pours from my imagination. No research, planning or prep, just get the idea down on paper. Once that is done I'm ready to do my planning and prepping for the 1st draft. Since my fantasy series is a reworking of my 'Forgotten Realms' series, world building was major here. I had to replace an established setting with one of my own creating. Also, since the story line revolves around gods and the creation of the world, I had to do a lot of world development to flesh out the various plot lines. The world is like a character in your story, just how big a part does it play? The more prominent the role, the more developed it needs to be.
I did a lot of world building for my world before hand, but mainly because I had the idea for that world for many months before hand, and I planed on writing more than one story/novel/whatever in that world. However, even with as much planning as I did, I've still done a bunch of world building during the writing of my current WIP, and I'm only on chapter two!
I'm discovering that, for me, planning is really 'planting'. Most of what I come up with are really seeds that grow as I write. Some are what I expected them to be while others grow into something totally unexpected. To me, seeing what grows is one of the things that makes writing so exciting.
I don't write fantasy or sci-fi, so I'm just 'pantsing' my reply here! But I think planning and creating a world beforehand if you're writing speculative fiction, is like researching beforehand if you're writing about the real world. The risk, if you don't, is that you can make things far too easy for your characters. Unless there are rules and or natural laws that exist, your characters can basically do anything they want whenever they want. Nothing is impossible. Impossibilities tend to make the best stories, in my opinion. Sloppy pre-planning can result in some pretty silly inconsistencies as well. For example, if you decide that, in your world, people always come back from death, then death won't matter, will it? Death will simply be an inconvenience, like missing a bus. (Which can bring up some interesting story ideas.) However, if several of your characters die early on and their relatives mourn them, etc, before you come up with this concept, the story isn't going to make sense. While you don't need to work out every single detail beforehand ...some authors do, some don't ...I suspect you should come up with some basic 'rules' for your world before you start. If your world contains inconsistencies within it, your readers are likely to notice.
I don't care what genre you write, I think some pre-planning is essential, especially if you are going to "world build". As @jannert said, it keeps you from making silly inconsistent mistakes. However, you also have to let your world unfold as your story progresses, so too much pre-planning could easily stifle that. Be careful in your world building though. I find it hard to read stories where the author has made their new world so different from ours that it gets rather tiresome. For example, when they change all the proper nouns to words that , though using our letters, look like gibberish. Makes it hard to remember who's who. And feels like I stumble over them as I read. Any new world should be relate-able to ours, or at least that's my opinion.
Ooh, yes. Names. I want to be able to pronounce names. If I can't, I struggle to get involved with the characters. Preserve me from names with too many x's in them! Okay, Xerxes. But it took me a long time to stop thinking ...why didn't they just call him Zerksees?
I agree, a lot of my earlier writings came be for the planet I use was fleshed out. It was just a place where thing's happen. But as I wrote, the world I use began to take shape with the earlier roughs creating the foundations. Nations, people, events, history, etc. @OP think of it as an rpg, where at first you know nothing about the world around you but as you explore (i.e. write). You discover more and more about the world, it's people, culture, more, etc. My world has gone through many revisions with lore and histories constantly being updated.
I don't mean to imply that I planned. That--the rocky oceanside town, the market with brightly cotton-clad natives interspersed with foreigners, in sight of the docks--was just the image that appeared to come in one gulp. There are bits that I can pick out as being related to a roleplaying setting I created long ago, but that setting was near-desert inland and with an utterly different government and society, so it's really just the rocks and the cotton and the red hair that crossed over.
To me, world-building and plotting are two separate things. With plotting you're laying out arcs/scenes/MRUs in the bigger story. That's Motivation/Reaction Units. Basically stimulus/response with reason and feeling. It's where your characters express themselves. (Already off track . . . look up Swain. This is the book it's from. By the cover it looks like one of those fly-by-night cash-ins. It's not. He's very wise.) The depth you go in plotting depends on your technique and you as an author. I always nail down arcs and scenes completely and then detail a few units within that are interesting to me (and that I don't want to forget). I play the rest by feel. It's like jazz, where you have your lead sheet showing the chordings but you provide the elaborations. World-building is more broad. It could be backstory and motivations that never appear. Tolkien would be the extreme example of it. The focus is primarily setting, then actor relationships, and lastly plot. The thing is, you don't have to get to the plot. You can just build histories and motivations, make sure they're aligned, and then dump your characters into it. Personally, I like control. (I always know the plot but give it leeway). On page 1, I'm already setting everything in place for the major conflicts, the inevitable disasters threatening to ruin the MC. But you could just set the lay of the land and decide what the different actors are after. That would be world-building, and it would be plotless until your characters arrived and made something of it. At least they'd have a home to live in, and you could see what happened. I know some people like writing that way. It would work in fantasy/sci-fi too.
I'd say have the broad strokes ready beforehand but let the details develop as (and where) needed. I find it easier to fit the world to the story rather than the story to the world, which, now that I think about it, is similar to how I deal with characters. Kind of like story X needs to take place in world Y with characters Z. X, in theory, is the driving engine while Y and Z are negotiable, if that makes any sense.
You don't need to worldbuild beforehand, but I think it makes things easier. For one, you can keep the speculative elements that figure into your plot line straight and have those notes ready to reference as you go. It helps eliminate plot holes before they even come up. You also don't have to stop and create people/place naming schemes if you take care of that in the very beginning. On that note, starting with religion if your story is in a secondary world is pretty helpful. From names to profanity to symbols, religious references tend to permeate cultures. Depending on the specific genre or subgenre, you may not need much worldbuilding at all. My first published story was set in the real world with only one speculative element (the antagonist), and I just read a story last night in one of the top-tier genre magazines that was very lean on worldbuilding as well (just enough to make it a fantasy rather than a western).
I was talking out my world and some loose ideas for a story with my significant other last night. They basically laughed at everything. And it's super hard to make all the pieces fit and have it make sense. Know what I mean? My SO thinks I might not be cut out for genre. But the aliens just landed...
I would say that if you peg yourself as a discovery writer then your world will come as the protagonist goes through the story. I know that I want my story to take place in a medieval fantasy setting with fantastical creatures and different races in it but that's about it. I find that expanding your world will come when it is necessary for the protagonist. Brandon Sanderson did a wonderful lecture where he described world-building as an iceberg. Most of it is underneath the ocean where you know that it's there but it isn't shown. The parts above the ocean are what you convey to the reader. In your case, according to Brandon Sanderson, you will only know as much as the reader as you progress through the plot, this is above the ocean. Once your first draft is complete you are then able to fill out what is underneath the ocean to make your world feel more alive. But you should never have the whole iceberg above the water.
