For those of you who are writing stories based in a fantasy/scifi world that you have designed, how much detail is enough? On one hand, I want to have a good idea of the details to make sure that there are not any glaring holes or last minute ass pulls/major rewrites needed due to not planning/designing things out. On the other hand, I am the type that could procrastinate myself out of actually writing the story due to tweaking/focusing the world building aspects so much. How do you decide you have enough detail?
When the book urges you to move forward with it. When your characters scream inside your mind. When that scene haunts your sleepless nights. I sometimes develop new ideas and incorporate them as I write, it is tricky and requires a lot of rework. The greater the addition, the greater the burden of editing. At some point you must let go of changes and just get it done though. Harder said than done for me, as I am a big fan of world building.
Anything that's not explicitly stated in existing story should be kept away from your own notes when making the first draft. Otherwise you will make awkward jumps around an obstacle that doesn't exist yet. See writing as a game of poker, because a hand full of jokers is a lot easier to work with. Haven't mentioned what the friend's father worked with? Leave it open until you have a good idea for plot involving that detail. Subtle signs of the detail in prose can be added in the third draft if the first draft is the barebone structure.
Yeah, at this point I'm trying to give myself enough detail to work with, but keep a loose enough framework to not pigeonhole myself later on if I decide to take things in a certain direction.
When you're going down to detail that the readers will never read or care about, like how many calories a day people in region X can get based on the climate and rainfall...
What @Naomasa298 said. You can get away with a hell of a lot of world building detail, as long as you keep it relevant to stuff that's happening or needed at the time. I think i used this analogy just a couple weeks back. Go read the opening to The Hobbit. Tolkien starts off the book with an ENTIRE info dump about Bilbo's house. Talking about the door, the windows, stuff you would think is an utter waste of time - but the entire thing is informing you about the personality and character of hobbits, both individually as Bilbo and as a group of people. Obviously im not suggesting you do that for everything, but without a reason to put the info in, you're on a countdown timer of the reader not giving an Eff.
This is my experience, not suggesting it will work for you, but there might be something here. Look at each chapter and work out whats the balance. Tell, Show, Dialogue, World Building, Style (the extra special Thron Cylenchar bits). How the heck are you going to fit them all in? Assess each chapter and ask yourself what proportion of each element is there. The balance has to be good. You have to work it out on a chapter by chapter basis. Chapter 1, the final chapter, conclusion and turnaround/pivotal chapters are exceptions. For general chapters (the vast majority) I would only drop in top ups of world-building. If you have nailed your world building in chapter 1 then top-ups through the book are fine, however, a top-up will be no more than a couple of sentences per chapter. If you have to make exceptions you should be able to get away with it, but too much detail will kill a chapter IMO. The good news about chapter 1 is, it is the place for the majority of your world building! The bad news, there is no room for it in a chapter that has to do so many things already. Yikes!
I'm not sure if it will help, but you may want to look for a book: "Fantasy Mapmaker: How to Draw RPG Cities for Gamers And Fans" by Jared Blando. IMPACTUniverse.com, $24.99 (RPG = role playing games) That said, you need to be consistent in your world building. If you're going to have a castle in your fantasy world but it's set in a desert.....how exactly did you haul the stones/bricks to that location? River barges? Teleportation? Magic? There has to be a plausible explanation that works in your world for what you want to do, Or maybe you have a huge farming community somewhere in the middle of nowhere, providing fresh fruit and veggies to your population - there had better be a water source and sunlight for this huge garden....or some plausible explanation for it. I like the idea of planning things out so I don't end up writing that my prehistoric tribe enjoyed fresh fruits when they live at the north pole and it's freezing - how exactly do they get "fresh fruits"??? I did make that mistake in one role playing game years ago. I was playing my character for a few months before we all realized he didn't have a food supply. Sigh. At least I learned.....
I don't think that this is one of those things that has a straightforward answer. For one thing, it depends on your story. Some stories are just written out impulsively, while others are more constructed. But I'm biased. I really, really love worldbuilding, both in terms of writing and reading. I love a world that is full of detail, even if it means the plot is "more boring" as a result. However, when you get to the point that you find your world building more interesting than your story, then you've either done too much, or you need to write the story based on the history of your world first.
Something I have found is that world building can take over. If that is happening, it is likely you have not built your world thouroughly before begining your story. That will only end badly in my opinion. I dont deny the synergy or that they overlap in your first draft, but we must consider the reader, the story is for them not us. Write your world building first or at least seperate to your main draft. Get it all out of your system and then choose what parts you will include in your story. Honestly your story has to be balanced and not lob sided by any element such as world building.
I love small scale world-building, like creating a quirky city in a Fantasy/sci-fi land. It's when I have to create an entire world in depth, with those who lives their, other language, and a hard magic system that I find very tedious. I love awesome worlds and writers who have skill in writing them but I think most people read for the characters and the story. The world-building means nothing if you have flat characters and a cliche, poorly thought out plot, or it at least causes the book to lose points with a reader. I tend to figure out my plot first and decide what is necessary for the book. So, if it's a quest, where will my characters travel and what are those areas like. Who will they meet and the just the basics of what I'll need about those races. I try to keep it down to an hour of work a day or about a week. Then I write the story. I will go back later on and add extra details if I feel a race feels to flat, or if I think the atmosphere of a place just didn't get across. Some people can get very bogged down to the extent nothing gets down - that's too much. Sometimes I even free write my setting and I've found I notice no difference at all. It's not any better for having spent weeks/months working on it. Any languages that need creating I just create them after the book is written when I'm having a break. What way I don't have to create entire complicated language just translates what's actually being said. The characters and their journeys are what I like to read and write about. We write what we like to read.
What kind of story are you writing? I just read a fantasy romance where the story took place in a vague Europe medieval kingdom governed by a monarchy. To the north was blond people in furs, to the east was an Asian kingdom, and south was a dark people. The story had two locations: the capital city where the love interest is, and the village on the outskirts of said city where the protagonist lived. That was it. Really. And you know what? It did worked because this was a romance novel and my concern was the whens, and hows the protagonist hooked up with his love interest. I wanted to create a setting inspired by the 'Forgotten Realms' in my WIP. My MC's background is linked to a disaster that almost destroyed the world, so world building had to be fairly intensive. So, I wrote the story draft. Then, world built. Then, started the 1st draft, and as I wrote that I continued to world build. Here's an example of how they played off of each other: in the story draft my MC is accused of being a witch. As I wrote the 1st draft I came up with the slang 'ming' for mixed characters, or characters with mingled blood. I realized as I wrote that half breeds are vilify in the world setting, so now my character is accused of being a goblin 'ming'. In my opinion, the story should be a key element in world building.
It's too much when it gets in the way of you actually writing your story, and you start adding details that won't be even tangentially important. It's enough when the world building is relevant to the story you're telling and you can be reasonable sure you won't have to deal with inconsistencies. Beyond that, how much work you put into building your setting varies between writers. Personally, I tend to keep it to a minimum because I'm too lazy to be bothered and arrogant enough to assume it won't be a problem. Then there's people like Tolkien, who was practically more into world building than telling stories yet somehow still managed to write a bunch of books. This is a fairly common problem. I believe the pros call it "World Builder's Disease." (It can also be a symptom of lacking confidence, since you are stalling the writing process while still feeling like you are doing real work.)
I tend to add details in about the world when it's necessary to telling the story, rather than creating the details beforehand and finding places to add them in. For example, locations. I don't always create a map with the key locations laid 0ut. Rather, if I need the action to be somewhere as I'm writing, I create the location, and figure out the necessary details. Say the characters are currently a thousand miles inland and I need them to take a sea journey. OK, first off, I need a port. Secondly, I need to get them to said port. Riverboat maybe. Or an excuse for a fraught overland journey being harassed by the bad guys. Either one gives me an excuse to add in plot-driving encounters that I may not have thought of before. For example, I might bring forward a planned encounter and place it during this journey instead of where I had orignally planned it. Yeah, I'm a pantser.
I started the world building for my WIP with some specific goals in mind. One was to diversify the non-human races. It always struck me as odd that the humans in some fantasy stories would have diverse groups and factions, while the non-human would just be the...elves...dwarves...etc. At first I was wondering if I was putting too much work into the non-human races in my world, but this work has taken the story to the next level and really separates my setting from others. And, the work on the goblins has had a major impact for my MC, a major supporting character, and the story itself. While no reader will have an interest in a detail history of a region or its history, that level of detail gives the writer specificity when writing about characters. There's a difference between writing about a character from eastern Europe, and a character from Bosnia. Fantasy characters should have a similar amount of detail.
In my world, the longer-lived a race is, the more homogenous they tend to be. My rationale is that traditions and culture tend to survive much longer because the elders live longer to pass those traditions down to the next generations (a young elf could conceivably be learning about things from his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, who is still only middle-aged!).
But what about the science??? In all seriousness that could be relevant in a sci-fi with resource issues and bio-tech like The Windup Girl or a modern political thing with similar problems. @OP I think it does come down to purpose as others put. I don't think the use has to be important, stories aren't an exercise in brutalist simplicity and pragmatism; they deserve colour. But they do usually have some meaning behind details, where smaller things might at least have a small meaning. Maybe one bit of lore about like, elf ears, isn't very relevant but a character mentions it when talking to their elf love interest or something? Maybe the economy of your sci-fi moon colony isn't super important but a business character might mention something about how it worked, or maybe used their knowledge of it in a certain way that was plot relevant that leads to a little exposition? There's all sorts of ways details can sneak in without being "necessary" or centre-stage. I think pacing and presentation have a lot to do with it. If you tells someone details in a big paragraph or three it's much more likely to feel like a big exposition dump but if you drip-feed them little bits of the less important stuff at moments where it makes sense they won't notice it so conspicuously and it won't feel so hand-of-the-author. Don't blow your exposition load in the first chapter or one scene of a chapter if you can spread it out to multiple chapters or multiple scenes. Sometimes you might have a longer chunk of exposition, if it makes sense which is where it most needs to useful. You might disperse that throughout a scene though, and use a little showing to indicate things without relying on large chunks of narration. The uninterrupted chunks of narration are really the riskiet form of narration because it's obciously exposition and it makes the sense of detail more tedious if it has to has to be read all at once.
In a way, world-building is a lot like research. You want to know as much as you can about the 'world' before you set a story in it. And believe me, it's just as easy to get sucked in to the fun of researching a favourite period of history as it is to get sucked in to the fun of worldbuilding from scratch. But if all you're doing is constructing or learning about a world, you'll never get anything written. At some point you must let go of the preparation and just start telling the story! Consistency is important though, for both research AND worldbuilding. If you change something about your imaginary world, or your research unearths something about the real world you hadn't been taking into account, then learn to work those changes into the story so they make sense. Getting stuff wrong WILL happen, by the way. I guarantee it. However, learning to deal with this kind of minor setback and set things straight is part of writing. Better to correct a mistake when it happens, than be so frightened of making a mistake that you never actually get writing at all. Like so many other things, there is a balance to be struck between preliminary background work and creation. How you strike that balance is up to you. There is no such thing as 'too much time spent worldbuilding.' There's only, 'I spent so much time worldbuilding that I never wrote my story.' Tolkien apparently spent years and YEARS building Middle Earth, constructing its history and the races that inhabit that world ...he even constructed languages! And what came out of it? One trilogy and one stand-alone book. That's it. But hey. Did he waste his time beforehand? I'm certainly not going to say he did.
I believed Tolkien's world building was an excercised inspired by Lord Dunsany's 'The Gods of Pegana'. Tolkien did revised later editions of 'The Hobbit' to tie into the LotR series (in the original edition the ring of invisibility was just that...a magic ring). A better example might be Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series where he created a world of distinct factions and rich history for the purpose of a story about a protagonist who would unite said factions to fight an evil rising from the past.
It might have been. But then again, anybody's is, if they start worldbuilding without a specific story in mind. I suspect Lord of the Rings was more than an 'afterthought,' which sounds a tad frivolous, considering the scope of the story. Rather, his story evolved out of the worldbuilding, maybe? Is that what you meant? I imagine that sort of story evolution is quite common. Even for us who like to write historical novels. We get immersed in the period, then a story starts to take shape. That's how mine developed.
Yes, what I meant was, the story came about as a result of the worldbuilding - it wasn't the goal of it.
It seems writers sure love to world build. My advice, one book for your world-building the other for your reader. Maybe even use a little of your world-building for your reader. The reader does come first, no really they do.
