Characters Make the World Go Round

[Rhondazvous]

The quickest way to get me to put your book down and go wash the dishes is to spend several pages, or even several paragraphs describing the world the character is in. The second quickest way is to have a space ship full of characters griping about how evil the galactic empire is.



I’ll be honest with you guys. I don’t know a thing about world building. That’s why I was surprised when a reviewer complimented the world building in my novel. I hadn’t been thinking about building a world. Instead, I showed my characters responding to the world they lived in.



In any given scene my point of view character is the character who has the most at stake in that scene. So, if something doesn’t have an effect on the character, I leave it out. Because no two characters are alike, when your reader sees the world through the characters eyes, no two worlds will be alike.

 

[Orc Knight]

Not overly sure what you're getting at. I love doing world building, but a lot of it's going to be left out for the sake of the story anyways. And at the very least you had to at least construct the facade of a living world of sorts and kept the setting and continuity pretty well to have someone bring it up. There's never a necessity to go real deep into it, but as long as you have it in general don't contradict yourself with events and timing, should be good.

After all, there's a pretty good chance that there are few people who want to know who offed some king a thousand years ago unless it plays into the plot, but it can be important to the writer themselves.

 

[Rhondazvous]

Not overly sure what you're getting at. I love doing world building, but a lot of it's going to be left out for the sake of the story anyways. And at the very least you had to at least construct the facade of a living world of sorts and kept the setting and continuity pretty well to have someone bring it up. There's never a necessity to go real deep into it, but as long as you have it in general don't contradict yourself with events and timing, should be good.

After all, there's a pretty good chance that there are few people who want to know who offed some king a thousand years ago unless it plays into the plot, but it can be important to the writer themselves.

If I were writing just for myself as an exercise in invention, I’d play around with different descriptions that I might work into a story. But when writing an actual story, I work everything into the arc of the point of view character. What is she doing? what is he feeling? Where are they going and what’s going to happen to them when they get there. In all that is plenty of opportunity to describe their world as it affects them. In other words, I don’t stop the action to describe a world sans the people in that world



I’m not saying it can’t be done or even that it shouldn’t be done. I’m just saying what I like as a reader, and what I do as a writer.

 

[pmmg]

But the galactic empire is actually pretty darn evil...

You gotta do what works for you. Some styles and stories lend themselves more to needing and not needing a lot of world building. So, I find I cannot just simply agree of disagree. I would ask though, that just cause the characters dont know, does not mean there are not events and forces they are unaware of that could/should affect the story, and being aware enough of those that they creep in at the edges would likely add to the greater sense of the world and immersion of the reader.

Course, you have said people are complimenting you on your world building, so.... just accept, and let them think you were really on it.

 

[Finchbearer]

You will have to have had an idea of your world before you set an entire story in it, which, even unknowingly, is world building.