I have this habit of overthinking of the mechanics of my setting and worldbuilding, Im more stuck on how travelling alternate realities would work in my setting. Ive started more questioning on "what would it be like travelling in it?" and "How does the user know which reality they are heading?" and many others and its really flustering and I have been bogged down by so many questions. Has anyone really got stuck in making a setting up? Is this another case of Worldbuilding Sickness?
Personally I think it's important stuff to figure out, in fact I'd say absolutely necessary, but you don't have to do it before you start writing. The way I like to proceed is to go ahead and start a rough draft before you have everything figured out. You could just put in place-holders, like 'They Zark through into the other reality', and ideas very well might suggest themselves as you write. They usually do. My other approach is to write a lot about the story and the characters before I start the rough draft. Yeah, the usual, figuring out character traits and situations for the story etc, but I also like to scribble up some little test scenes just to see if my ideas are working and how well the characters are working with each other. I'ts sort of like rehearsing or doing a read-through for a movie before actual filming starts, so they can make sure the main characters have the chemistry they need, and that the best friend and the enemy work well etc. Once you've got something like this written you read it a few times and ideas will pop up.
You and me both. Sometimes I think what I really want to do is not write whole stories but just world-build. Maybe hand them off to other people to write the fascinating characters etc. Anyway clearly I have no advice for you, just commiserating.
Like everyone says, do as much as is needed. But what is considered needed? In my story, I'm going so far as to create the histories of major nations on an entire planet going as far back as Pangea. Many of these nations won't be major players in the plot, but I need them defined. Why? Just in case. Just in case I need them for the plot later, I'll already know what they were doing and where, based on who they are supposed to be. I did not, however, go so far as to describe the architecture for all of my nations; because I didn't need them.
Actually, this sounds like stuff that you should be thinking about. If dimensional travel is what the story is about, or even just a prominent subject it brings up, you want to know how it works. That's not overthinking it, that's being appropriately prudent. Not only does it help you stay consistent and avoid plot holes, but it also gives you a better understanding of how the setting works in general. The same thing applies to magic in fantasy stories, or technology in sci-fi. These things matter because they define the setting in very broad sense. Worldbuilder's Disease is more about getting too into the worldbuilding to bother writing the actual story, or using it as an excuse to avoid it. Because, see, worldbuilding feels like being productive, but is less daunting than trying to write a story people are supposed to read. This is how you get people who've been "working on their novel" for years but haven't even completed a basic draft. Asking questions is good, because the more answers you find the better you'll understand your story. Plus, your readers will be asking the same things.
A good test to see if you've gone too far is to ask yourself how relevant is it to the story. Using your reality travel as an example, how it feels to travel between realities using whatever conduit you're using to do it is incredibly relevant to the experience of the reader who will be exploring the world through your character. However, the history of how reality travelling came to be and a history lesson on who created it is not at all relevant. The laws of how it works are relevant but laws made by governing bodies about how, when, why and by who it can be used are mostly irrelevant except when those laws hamper the ability of the character to do whatever they're doing. Sci-fi worlds generally need to have a much more in-depth world building process because you're working with things that don't yet exist and thus have no rules already in place to govern them.
I'd say that's a good question to ask: What would it be like traveling in an alternate reality? However, a writer's job (yours) is to answer that question. So get beasting away on it. Figure out what it would be like. You will need to decide on some things, discard others. It's not going to happen by itself, I reckon. I think you only have worldbuilder's disease if you set out to write a novel or a series of novels, and can't get past the worldbuilding stage. If you just enjoy worldbuilding, however, go ahead and have a good time! Who knows. You might be motivated to use that 'world' as a source of stories at some point. If your goal is to write stories, though, you'll need to get on it. It's kind of like me building a dream home in my imagination, and imagining what it would be like to live there, summer and winter, and how I would furnish it, and where it would be located, and who I might be living there with, etc. That's fun to do, and yes, I do that quite often. But if I actually want to LIVE in that house, I will need to draw up blueprints, consult an architect, come up with the finance, buy the plot of land, etc. Dreaming up stuff isn't the same as building it.
Probably better to have a library of more details than is needed to effectively tell the story. It can be difficult to find a new fact for a plot twist than it is to remove one that doesn't work. When questions arise, answer them. If more questions than answers get into the mix, learning more about the world might be the ticket out of the thicket.
I've spent most of my life building my sci-fi world so I'm never going to say you can do too much world building.
There is nothing wrong with world building down to the very last detail, however, you must then decide what you want to put in your stories. My favourite book was created by a collaboration between many people who world built for a long time before they started writing. They even had artists producing detailed imagry of characters, races, landmarks, villages, cities and so on and so on. Not all of it went in to the initial books, but when it was needed it was there and they then had plenty more material to use on other books, of which there went on to be a couple of hundred i believe.
