# Stories containing too much World-building



## Incanus (Sep 19, 2014)

Inspired by the 'why world-building matters' thread--

I was honestly wondering if too much world-building is an actual problem, or really only a theoretical one.

I'm a slow, slow reader, but steady.  I've read at least a couple hundred fantasy books in my time, and I can't recall that this issue was ever a problem.  (I'll leave what I deem the most common problem for another time, another thread.)

Can anyone point me to a fantasy book, or series, (professionally published) that contains world details that are detrimental to the story, that bury the other elements, or are at least distracting?

I think it would be interesting to read such a book, but I don't know of any.


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## Jabrosky (Sep 19, 2014)

I believe the "too much world-building" complaint has less to do with finished books than the writing process. Usually what people say is that certain writers are spending too much time tweaking the minutiae of their setting and not enough actually writing the story proper. If you think about it, this same concern could be expressed about any method of preliminary planning. A writer could just as easily spend too much time detailing their character profile sheets or plot outline as they could the setting.

Of course, exactly what constitutes "too much" will vary from writer to writer.


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## T.Allen.Smith (Sep 19, 2014)

I agree Jabrosky & I'll add one thing. The other problem with massive world building comes when writers feel a need to force aspects of the world into a story because they're cool or unique, even though it may be irrelevant to the story. 

It's largely subjective, I suppose. Still, I think the vast majority of world building doesn't make the story proper, while still lending the story a feeling of depth. 

As long as it's not keeping you from doing actual writing, & the writer isn't forcing details, I'm not sure you can call any world building overdone. It's as much a choice as any other stylistic decision. 

As a reader, I enjoy both ends of the spectrum. As a writer, I'm more of a minimalist. Neither is right or wrong.


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## Devor (Sep 19, 2014)

I've seen people complain about excessive worldbuilding with examples that seemed pretty valid, but I won't talk about books I haven't read.

A lot of works benefit on the whole from their worldbuilding, but there are certainly _instances_ where it's excessive, even in the works of Tolkein, GRRM, Rowling, Lewis or others.

One thing to consider is that a lot of books do not get professionally published, and excessive or poorly executed worldbuilding might be a reason why.  As a lot of writers here are self-publishing, or pre-published, it's a problem that people here might be prone to, even if you don't see it much in the books you're reading.


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## Incanus (Sep 19, 2014)

T.Allen.Smith said:


> The other problem with massive world building comes when writers feel a need to force aspects of the world into a story because they're cool or unique, even though it may be irrelevant to the story.



And this is my point.  I keep running into assertions of this nature, but cannot find a single book that this is happening in.  Surely there must be one or two of these kinds of books that generate such sentiments?

I fully acknowledge that we all have differing thresholds concerning this sort of thing, and that I'm somewhere in the 'more tolerant' spectrum.  That said, I'm ready, willing, and able to add a book to my collection that contains 'too much world-building'.  If only I could find one...


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## Incanus (Sep 19, 2014)

Devor said:


> A lot of works benefit on the whole from their worldbuilding, but there are certainly _instances_ where it's excessive, even in the works of Tolkein, GRRM, Rowling, Lewis or others.
> 
> One thing to consider is that a lot of books do not get professionally published, and excessive or poorly executed worldbuilding might be a reason why.  As a lot of writers here are self-publishing, or pre-published, it's a problem that people here might be prone to, even if you don't see it much in the books you're reading.



Hmmm.  Bringing up Lewis I suppose referrences Narnia (correct me if I'm wrong).  Over-world-building?  I like the books, but Narnia's pretty threadbare by my standards.

I admire and respect Rowling, I think she's a naturally gifted storyteller.  But, she didn't invent England!  I've only read the first HP book, but I've seen all the movies.  Maybe I'm missing something, but the only 'world' I saw was a single school (I guess there are at least three though, judging from the fourth story).  One of the reasons I haven't yet pursued these further was lack of a fantasy world.  I will get to them one day, though.

Your last point echoes Jabrosky's post, and so far, I think this is the most plausible source of the 'too much world-building' concept.  It is a matter of process, not results.  The result I'm trying to achieve will require prodigious world-building on my part.


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## Guy (Sep 19, 2014)

It's almost entirely subjective. My own opinion is, as a general guideline, when an author has to have a separate appendix to explain aspects of the world, he didn't properly integrate the world into the story, which might be a result of spending more effort on building the world than immersing the reader in that world.


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## T.Allen.Smith (Sep 19, 2014)

Incanus said:


> And this is my point.  I keep running into assertions of this nature, but cannot find a single book that this is happening in.  Surely there must be one or two of these kinds of books that generate such sentiments?



I see it when writers ask me to read/critique their unpublished drafts.      

I can't really think of anything, off the top of my head, that's been published and received the benefit of professional editing.


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## Feo Takahari (Sep 20, 2014)

T.Allen.Smith said:


> I agree Jabrosky & I'll add one thing. The other problem with massive world building comes when writers feel a need to force aspects of the world into a story because they're cool or unique, even though it may be irrelevant to the story.



This might be semantics, but when I see writers overdesigning, it usually isn't what I would call "worldbuilding." It's more a matter of building a character, or sometimes a species--they're cool, and wise, and everyone trusts them, and they can mouth off to authority figures without consequence, and they have all sorts of awesome powers . . .

If you're thinking "Mary Sue," there's a lot of overlap, but not all Mary Sues are overdesigned, and not all overdesigned characters are Mary Sues. (If you're a mature adult and you're used to seeing weird and creepy stuff on the Internet, try looking up a race of creatures called "chakats"--they can serve as a Mary Sue race, but their fundamental bizarreness comes from being overdesigned to have every trait the author liked.)

Anyway, I've never seen an author who overdesigned at the worldbuilding stage and had that leak into the final product. My impression is that they never actually finish--they show up on Mythic Scribes to iron out worldbuilding, get bored and frustrated when they eventually try to write the actual story, and move on to ironing out worldbuilding for an entirely new setting, eventually vanishing from the site without so much as a completed short story to their name.


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## Bortasz (Sep 20, 2014)

I'm specific reader. I hate big descriptions. 

Especial Tolkien like description. Honestly if you cut of descriptions of nature we will have 1 book instead of 3. 

If you make description of ANYTHING in you book it should be in the moment that this matter. Best example Weber and Harrington series. 

Big battle takes action but suddenly you have wall of text describing weapon. But this description is necessary to give you knowledge how bad situation is.

So if there can be to many of world building in you story? Yes. Especial when it is boring as hell.


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## Mythopoet (Sep 20, 2014)

Bortasz said:


> I'm specific reader. I hate big descriptions.



I would put amount of description in a completely different category from amount of worldbuilding. They are two very different things.


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## Bortasz (Sep 20, 2014)

Mythopoet said:


> I would put amount of description in a completely different category from amount of worldbuilding. They are two very different things.



From a reader point of view I don't see difference. Description's are in majority world building for readers.


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## Mythopoet (Sep 20, 2014)

Bortasz said:


> From a reader point of view I don't see difference. Description's are in majority world building for readers.



As a reader, my least favorite kind of description is when the author describes character action in ridiculously painstaking detail.


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## Svrtnsse (Sep 20, 2014)

Bortasz said:


> From a reader point of view I don't see difference. Description's are in majority world building for readers.



Description is largely a result of the writer's approach to writing. It's about how they want their story to read and about what they want to communicate to the reader. Describing an ordinary sunset or the leafs on an ordinary tree doesn't have anything to do with the world the writer has created, it's just setting the scene for the story. You can do this without any world building whatsoever.

If however, you're using the term "world building" as interchangeable with "setting the scene", then you'd be in the right, but then you'd also have to include a whole lot of other things, such as characters and their emotions and interactions.


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## Steerpike (Sep 20, 2014)

Incanus said:


> And this is my point.  I keep running into assertions of this nature, but cannot find a single book that this is happening in.  Surely there must be one or two of these kinds of books that generate such sentiments?



Professionally-published books have editors who are supposed to handle things like that before the book gets into the hands of the poor reader who will have to suffer through it.

Too much world-building (e.g. coloring the map) is a problem during the writing process, where the author never gets around to actually writing the story, and in a lot of amateur or beginning fantasy, where the writer thinks "Hey, I spent all this time building the world and now the reader is going to damn well hear about it!"


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## Steerpike (Sep 20, 2014)

Mythopoet said:


> I would put amount of description in a completely different category from amount of worldbuilding. They are two very different things.



Yeah, world-building may be a subset of description (i.e. some description is world-building), but they aren't the same thing. Unless, I suppose, you can find a book where all description is world-building, which I haven't seen.


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## FatCat (Sep 20, 2014)

I started the thread in the intentions of provoking thought of aspiring  writers, not a critique of published fantasy. Excessive world-building, in my opinion, is the kind of practice that either stops the writing process by means of over-working details that muddy-up the story-arch, or focusing so much on setting that you forget why you created that setting, and for what purpose (the story) it serves. You've asked for published citations of this thought, but that's the point, they're not published. I posted this on a site of amateur fantasy writers with the focus on who that audience was, and to hopefully get some discussion on the nature of world building vs. story telling. It appears, from that thread, that I failed to get my point across.


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## ThinkerX (Sep 21, 2014)

> I started the thread in the intentions of provoking thought of aspiring writers, not a critique of published fantasy. Excessive world-building, in my opinion, is the kind of practice that either stops the writing process by means of over-working details that muddy-up the story-arch, or focusing so much on setting that you forget why you created that setting, and for what purpose (the story) it serves. You've asked for published citations of this thought, but that's the point, they're not published. I posted this on a site of amateur fantasy writers with the focus on who that audience was, and to hopefully get some discussion on the nature of world building vs. story telling. It appears, from that thread, that I failed to get my point across.



In that instance, I am guilty as charged.  Decades ago, I spent far, far too much time on worldbuilding - far more than on actual story writing.  And looking through the remnants of my old efforts, many of those fragments are clogged with worldbuilding descriptions.   Even now, I have to really clamp down on the info-dumps, editing them out of final drafts, or at least scaling them down.  I spend time trying to work worldbuilding into the sequence of events without distracting from the story.  That can be real hard.  

 I see prologues and first chapters and first chapters in Showcase that are info-dumps.


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## Incanus (Sep 21, 2014)

All right.  I'm totally on board with the idea that this subject pertains to us writers who are beginning, or are in the middle of, projects of this nature.  Ultimately then, it is the narration which draws on world-building (among many other things) that needs to be handled correctly, not the world-building in and of itself.

I have to wonder, though, why it matters to anyone here, or elsewhere, whether I take three weeks to world-build, or five years, before I start writing?  I want to be clear that I ask this with full knowledge of the pitfalls of procrastination or of being over-pedantic.

I'm very, very glad Tolkien either never received this kind of advice, or chose to ignore it.  The very existence of the LOTR appendices shows that he at least acknowledged that there is a demarcation, and that not all could, or should, be included in the main narrative.


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## Feo Takahari (Sep 21, 2014)

When Tolkien began developing his world, he was already a practiced writer. He had the skills to write and complete a story from start to finish. Making a world is fine and dandy, but at some point, you need to practice and improve the skills involved in actually writing, or your story will be as awkward as everyone's first story.


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## Svrtnsse (Sep 21, 2014)

Incanus said:


> I have to wonder, though, why it matters to anyone here, or elsewhere, whether I take three weeks to world-build, or five years, before I start writing?



Unless I want to read your finished story it doesn't matter one bit to me how much time you spend building the setting for it. The original thread about world-building was intended to point out the potential negative consequences of spending too much time worrying about the world and not enough on the setting. The discussion might have gone a slightly different way, but at the moment that's how I understand it.

The reason for highlighting these potential issues and creating a discussion about them was to make aspiring authors here on the site aware of them. 

As ThinkerX pointed out, the issue with giving the world too much space in the story isn't all that uncommon here on the forums. It's something that happens, especially to new(/young?) and inexperienced writers. So creating a discussion around it may serve to highlight the issue and make someone think a little extra. Maybe they'll decide that the complete history of the entire world isn't relevant to the reader of a story about just one of it's inhabitants.

I don't think anyone tries to tell anyone how much time they should spend on world building. I think the message is to not let the world get in the way of the story - if completing the story is the goal.


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## Incanus (Sep 22, 2014)

Feo Takahari said:


> When Tolkien began developing his world, he was already a practiced writer. He had the skills to write and complete a story from start to finish.



I don't think this is strictly true.  He started work on what would become the Silmarillion about 20 years before starting Lord of the Rings, and not with the plan of writing novels set in it.  At the time he was not a practiced writer--he wasn't interested in current novels and hadn't written or published any (I think he published a few poems in the early, early days though).  He was a language professor, and not a novelist.  He was not making his world for the purposes of novel writing, which is one reason I think it is so unlike anything else, and unlikely to be duplicated.  It was a labor of love, and the finished work (along with its myriad flaws) is a testament to that.


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## Incanus (Sep 22, 2014)

Svrtnsse said:


> Unless I want to read your finished story it doesn't matter one bit to me how much time you spend building the setting for it. The original thread about world-building was intended to point out the potential negative consequences of spending too much time worrying about the world and not enough on the setting. The discussion might have gone a slightly different way, but at the moment that's how I understand it.
> 
> The reason for highlighting these potential issues and creating a discussion about them was to make aspiring authors here on the site aware of them.
> 
> ...




Well said, Svrtnsse (wonder how to pronounce that screen-name (?!?)).

Might the final lesson here be something like:  don't neglect world-building, for there are many opportunies in this stage to create the proper conditions for the theme and point of your story; conversely, don't continue world-building for the sake of world-building, when there's a story that needs telling.  

This is a good point, something for every writer of fantasy to consciously consider, but I think there is a far more common mistake made by aspiring writers, and professionals alike, but that's a topic for another thread...


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## Jabrosky (Sep 22, 2014)

Incanus said:


> I don't think this is strictly true.  He started work on what would become the Silmarillion about 20 years before starting Lord of the Rings, and not with the plan of writing novels set in it.  At the time he was not a practiced writer--he wasn't interested in current novels and hadn't written or published any (I think he published a few poems in the early, early days though).  He was a language professor, and not a novelist.  He was not making his world for the purposes of novel writing, which is one reason I think it is so unlike anything else, and unlikely to be duplicated.  It was a labor of love, and the finished work (along with its myriad flaws) is a testament to that.


That approach to world-building actually sounds very appealing to me, and I can relate to it in a certain sense. While I usually world-build with the expectation that I'll write something set in that world, I have to say world-building for its own sake can be terrific fun.

Returning to the question of how much a writer should world-build, I wonder if the scope of a setting might have an effect on how much building one actually does. Judging from most maps of Middle Earth out there, Tolkien seems to have concentrated his interest on the region geographically equivalent to Europe. If he had attempted to develop his African or Asian analogs to the same depth as his European sector, do you think he would have overwhelmed himself in the end?


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## Incanus (Sep 22, 2014)

Jabrosky said:


> If he had attempted to develop his African or Asian analogs to the same depth as his European sector, do you think he would have overwhelmed himself in the end?



Most likely!  Maybe a word on his original intentions is here called for:  He and his school-friends identified what they saw as a serious lack in English mythology--they noticed that the overwhelming amount of it was actually imported and adapted from mostly French, Norse, or other traditions; that there was very little 'truly english' myth.  They wanted to try to add to it, but then, all but one of these friends were killed in WWI.  He single-handely took up the torch, but I don't think he could have predicted the way it actually turned out.  It is for this reason that everything in Middle-earth is English-y.  And it makes a certain kind of sense--Greek myth is full of Greeks and greek-looking deities, Eygptian myth boasts Eyptians, etc, etc.


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## Ryan_Crown (Sep 23, 2014)

T.Allen.Smith said:


> I see it when writers ask me to read/critique their unpublished drafts.
> 
> I can't really think of anything, off the top of my head, that's been published and received the benefit of professional editing.



And I would imagine that "professional editing" is key, because one would hope that the instances where an author goes off track from the narrative to point out details of his world that don't further the story are something a good editor is going to help an author to get rid of.


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## Ryan_Crown (Sep 23, 2014)

Incanus said:


> This is a good point, something for every writer of fantasy to consciously consider, but I think there is a far more common mistake made by aspiring writers, and professionals alike, but that's a topic for another thread...



As an aspiring writer, I'm curious about this more common mistake -- should you decide to start a new thread on said topic, I'd be very interested to read it.


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## ThinkerX (Sep 24, 2014)

> I can't really think of anything, off the top of my head, that's been published and received the benefit of professional editing.



Upon reflection...

...Erikson (Malazan series) does drop a lot of worldbuilding material into parts of his stories.  Episode that sticks in mind was the captive academic who recited several pages worth of history. 

Likewise, Sanderson, in his newest series (Stormlight Archives), also dropped in quite a bit of worldbuilding, mostly of a biological nature which I found tedious.

I have also read some SF books (Bova?) where he managed to include his character notes as separate chapters.

However, these are both best selling authors who operate under a different set of rules than newbies.  

I have read a couple other SF works that not only went heavy into worldbuilding during the story, but included appendixes afterwards going into yet more detail.    However, this was because the authors were not merely telling a story, but describing the science behind the story.


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## WilliamD (Sep 24, 2014)

I believe world building is very important, before i begin any Fantasy Story, I build the world from scratch, details are everything. But there could be such a thing as to much. Just depends on how you're doing it and what exactly you're trying to create.


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