[Yukito]

Even though I saw people here with cool created worlds, how much worldbuilding do you folks do in general?

Do you folks work on everything so you can base a story off of it? Or just minimal so it can acomodate a single story? Is it a original world or a modification of our real world?

I have my own created world called Echaria, which has about five known nations, with a main one that mostly shows up in my stories.

Echaria itself was developed as a dual nation world(Buckinstone and Porkus). It was mainly developed to accomodate the first book in my The Blakes series. Only after the first book that I started working on Buckinstone's laws, main history and extra data.

I had only created two sets of laws, criminal and esports law(it's big on esports) during the first book. Currently, it has six sets of laws, lots of locations(if you remember Mt. Maltane which is mentioned in stories #2 and #3 of Sexy Tales[use the link in my signature to find my story collection here on RU]) and other things. Took some time to create everything and it is still expanding as I write the series.

[EnabranTain]

For me, I’d say there’s no consistent way I do it.
Firstly, if the story is set in the normal modern world, then world building isn’t necessary apart from maybe establishing a fictional town, for example. So world building mostly applies to any story with some kind of hyper-reality, supernatural elements, or fantasy / sci-fi setting.

If I know I’m only doing one short story, I generally just wing it, details can be added as needed, and in depth explanations would just bog things down.
The only thing to avoid here is having too much: “oh by the way, let me explain this thing real quick right before it’s relevant”.
If the audience needs to be familiar with something that is not obvious or understood from context, then you should go back and establish it earlier in the text.

This leads to the fact that the farther from reality the story is and the more intricate the plot, the more world building has to be done up front. Otherwise the reader is likely to get lost.

How much you do, and where you include it in the story will depend on these kinds of considerations.

[Yukito]

Yeah, setting in the real world, only needs a few things to be established.

In case of a futuristic story like mine, more worldbuilding is needed.

But, I think that only facts that are really needed should be mentioned in the text itself, like a basic description of the world and some law regarding the day to day living.
The thing is, only I, the author, know the truth to the created world.

[EnabranTain]

A little while ago there was similar question posed and I'll reiterate the advice I got from recently re-reading Steven King's book On Writing. He was talking more about editing and said you simply remove anything that isn't the story. In this context, I'd say that world building needs to be done for anything that is part of the story. If it's not something that  will be relevant or come up in the story then it can be left out.

[DiscipleN]

Although respect to Steven King, my experience is different. Strong world building, where applicable, helps me to be more creative when I write the story. You-all probably know that constraints encourage creativity. Think of word-building as a set of constraints, and you'll know what I'm saying.

[EnabranTain]

Although respect to Steven King, my experience is different. Strong world building, where applicable, helps me to be more creative when I write the story. You-all probably know that constraints encourage creativity. Think of word-building as a set of constraints, and you'll know what I'm saying.

I agree. There's a difference between world building that you do for yourself, to understand the environment and your characters - give them and yourself constraints, as you say - and the descriptive text you give the reader to understand that world. When I was talking about "world building" above, I was referring only to how much description the reader needs to be given. Your own understanding of your fictitious world will run much deeper, naturally.

[Yukito]

Although respect to Steven King, my experience is different. Strong world building, where applicable, helps me to be more creative when I write the story. You-all probably know that constraints encourage creativity. Think of word-building as a set of constraints, and you'll know what I'm saying.

I agree. There's a difference between world building that you do for yourself, to understand the environment and your characters - give them and yourself constraints, as you say - and the descriptive text you give the reader to understand that world. When I was talking about "world building" above, I was referring only to how much description the reader needs to be given. Your own understanding of your fictitious world will run much deeper, naturally.

That's the kind of worldbuilding I do. For myself, I try to do a lot of worldbuilding, but only explain a little bit of it in a story, and only when necessary.

[LtBroccoli]

The world building depends on the type of story and how connected to reality it needs to be.  Most of my stories take place in the same universe, in the same fictional city that's an amalgamation of several places I've been to and lived.  That way, I can reuse locations, characters, storylines, and histories.  However, if I'm just doing a one-off or something completely different, I'll throw more in or add the things that make it different.  For example, I have an idea for a series involving mind-control that takes place more or less in the regular world but is just slightly different in that a handful of telepaths run around the world doing what they feel like.

There's a line I heard about world building a while back.  Only explain what you need to when you need to.  If it's a sci-fi story and aliens living on Earth is pretty common, there's no reason to open the story with the couple hundred years of history about first contact when all we need to know is that the main character likes it when Grillax talks dirty to her during sex because Grillax's howls remind her of a werewolf.  We only need to find out about Grillax's history when it is necessary.

[Yukito]

The world building depends on the type of story and how connected to reality it needs to be.  Most of my stories take place in the same universe, in the same fictional city that's an amalgamation of several places I've been to and lived.  That way, I can reuse locations, characters, storylines, and histories.  However, if I'm just doing a one-off or something completely different, I'll throw more in or add the things that make it different.  For example, I have an idea for a series involving mind-control that takes place more or less in the regular world but is just slightly different in that a handful of telepaths run around the world doing what they feel like.

There's a line I heard about world building a while back.  Only explain what you need to when you need to.  If it's a sci-fi story and aliens living on Earth is pretty common, there's no reason to open the story with the couple hundred years of history about first contact when all we need to know is that the main character likes it when Grillax talks dirty to her during sex because Grillax's howls remind her of a werewolf.  We only need to find out about Grillax's history when it is necessary.

Yeah, to the reader, you should only explain what you need. But for yourself, it's good to have the world built. Having a stack of characters, locations and things I can reuse is quite nice.

[[Bubbles]]

My world building started as an accident. I started one story and when I had another idea for a story that was in a similar setting I realized I could connect the two by just making the settings the same. Then as I introduced or got rid of characters, they were either spun off into one shots or another series... it's really gotten quite outta control

World-building is a little like character-building. You want it there where it supports, folds into, and enriches the story; you don't want to go so far that it becomes its own tangent and distracts or takes away from the narrative.

Regarding "support", it's sometimes what the reader doesn't see that makes the world vivid and real. Imagine, for example, that there are five different castes in the world of your creation, and your story engages that Lia's caste regarded as so wretched and Waat's so exalted that he can, and does, rape her in the middle of the street and no one, including poor Lia's family, thinks to intervene.

Now, it is genuinely wonderful that you, the author, know what every caste is called, how they inter-relate, the kinds of work each does, the resentments that exist between them, which districts of the city-state they live in, the most prominent families of each caste, and so on, and so on.

Do you need to include all that detail in the story? Should you put all that detail into the story?

Hell, no! Much less should you extrude and contort your story to pack in all that detail.

Having that detail, however, even if it's only in some little file folder tucked into the back of your own mind, can help make your writing stronger and more confident. The world feels more real because you, the writer, know how it works, the various gears and cogs whirring away in the background while the focus of your action takes place.

From there, the writer can pick and choose what enriches the particular "slice of life" they're choosing to reveal to the reader. Going back to the earlier example, the biggest hindrance for Waat is that raping (which he, delusionally, considers "seducing") a young woman of Lia's caste is considered stooping; he chooses to do this thing in the midst of Lia's caste because it makes it less likely that word of his dalliance with a lower caste will follow him. Lia's father, looking on, remembers a similar event that happened to his sister and wonders if things will ever change; he looks on in a combination of fascination and embarrassment, wanting to look away, telling himself that he's only waiting for the moment that he can help her, but horrified to find that he's aroused. Other members of Lia's caste try to continue their business, knowing that failing to get their work done will bring trouble to the neighborhood as surely as trying to intervene.

I don't need to know that Waat's caste deals in spices, but it might be an interesting detail that his fingers smell of cardamom and cinnamon. Lia isn't going to be thinking about the amount of money Waat's caste brings into the city-state, but she might fleetingly wonder what it might be like to live such a privileged life. Let the reader recognize that there is life beyond the piece of action that they get to see, and the story will have life beyond the confines of the narrative.

It is fun and useful for an author to be able to "interrogate" a setting or a character and realize that the answers come easily, slotting together with precision in a way that suggests the place or the person has life. Just don't imagine that that life becomes richer for being scrutinized under a microscope. When it comes to what gets onto the page, less is often more.

I do far more world building in My private Stories for specific Members than I do here on the Forum........



Tony V.                   

[Badman]

Even though I saw people here with cool created worlds, how much worldbuilding do you folks do in general?

Do you folks work on everything so you can base a story off of it? Or just minimal so it can acomodate a single story? Is it a original world or a modification of our real world?

I have my own created world called Echaria, which has about five known nations, with a main one that mostly shows up in my stories.

Echaria itself was developed as a dual nation world(Buckinstone and Porkus). It was mainly developed to accomodate the first book in my The Blakes series. Only after the first book that I started working on Buckinstone's laws, main history and extra data.

I had only created two sets of laws, criminal and esports law(it's big on esports) during the first book. Currently, it has six sets of laws, lots of locations(if you remember Mt. Maltane which is mentioned in stories #2 and #3 of Sexy Tales[use the link in my signature to find my story collection here on RU]) and other things. Took some time to create everything and it is still expanding as I write the series.

I try to keep it to a minimum unless it is relevant to the characters or the plot and avoid long expositions. I find multiple weird names, tribes, countries and factions can soon distract, blur and confuse. Allowing the characters and reader to discover new things in small bites keeps things flowing and builds associations that help flesh out a world. Often a subtle word or idea, like an artists sketch, can let the readers imagination and interpretation build the world for you.

If you are writing a novel then dive in deeper but keep notes for continuity. Saves having to reread pages and pages to find a single reference or conversation again.       

[Yukito]

Even though I saw people here with cool created worlds, how much worldbuilding do you folks do in general?

Do you folks work on everything so you can base a story off of it? Or just minimal so it can acomodate a single story? Is it a original world or a modification of our real world?

I have my own created world called Echaria, which has about five known nations, with a main one that mostly shows up in my stories.

Echaria itself was developed as a dual nation world(Buckinstone and Porkus). It was mainly developed to accomodate the first book in my The Blakes series. Only after the first book that I started working on Buckinstone's laws, main history and extra data.

I had only created two sets of laws, criminal and esports law(it's big on esports) during the first book. Currently, it has six sets of laws, lots of locations(if you remember Mt. Maltane which is mentioned in stories #2 and #3 of Sexy Tales[use the link in my signature to find my story collection here on RU]) and other things. Took some time to create everything and it is still expanding as I write the series.

I try to keep it to a minimum unless it is relevant to the characters or the plot and avoid long expositions. I find multiple weird names, tribes, countries and factions can soon distract, blur and confuse. Allowing the characters and reader to discover new things in small bites keeps things flowing and builds associations that help flesh out a world. Often a subtle word or idea, like an artists sketch, can let the readers imagination and interpretation build the world for you.

If you are writing a novel then dive in deeper but keep notes for continuity. Saves having to reread pages and pages to find a single reference or conversation again.       

Yeah, I usually try to expose little tidbits of the universe as needed, never too much. Only to situate the reader like introducing a environment. Some dungeon masters do a long intro to situate the players. The bulk of information is kept by me as a guide to the universe I created. I plan to sometime revise all the info I have and condense it into a PDF book or something like that. Due to it changing constantly, it isn't easy to do right now.

You can easily get dragged for months upon months of researching if you want to build a thoroughly detailed world. This is something I would only do if I got paid well enough to quit my current job! Lol.

Seriously, it's best to have a summary background and make sure your story won't have any contradiction. E.g. The story I'm rewriting includes a group of Soviet soldiers in 1918, two of whom are homosexuals. And they are hiding it very carefully, and that's when I did a bit of research because I needed to know what punishment homosexuals could face in USSR back then... A few years in jail (with hellish abuses). That's why.

That story revolves around three Imperial grand duchesses who are moved from Tobolsk to Ekaterinburg in a boat trip, during which they get gang-raped by their guards and the sadistic Kommisar along with the guard's Captain who happens to be a seasoned rapist. The story entitled "The Rape Of a Countess" is part of this larger story -- female members of the retinue were raped as well by the vodka-drinking guards who couldn't resist the temptation of humiliating the fallen nobles and satisfying their primal lusts without consequences.

Since I want that guard's Captain to be a veteran of WW1 promoted from the ranks after the October Revolution, then I'll have him as an enlisted member in the Russian Imperial army when he became a rapist... When? This is where I have to do another bit of research...

There's the Brusilov offensive in summer 1916... Upon reading some accounts, I found that at one point, a Russian force in pursuit of retreating Austrians inadvertently entered Romania in the Bukovina region. I could have my character in that region as a Sergeant leading a squad as part of a reconnaissance platoon that stumbles into a castle inhabited by an unsuspecting noble family with lovely daughters. That's one possibility. Maybe the Count would have an Italian wife and there are Italian family members who happen to be there visiting at the wrong time -- it's June, a more pleasant time to travel. The Brusilov offensive completely took the Austrians by surprise, so I have the clear possibility of soldiers encountering civilians, which of course has the potential for a brutal rape story. Romanians clearly didn't expect to have Russians knocking at their door!

That story features historical characters and it naturally involves more research than your typical tale, but I'll do it chapter by chapter. I've already rewritten the first chapter, where you only see the three grand duchesses--Anastasia, Tatiana and Olga (Maria is already in Ekaterinburg with the former czar and the former Empress). I'll need to do some research about their retinue--the servants and the ladies-in-waiting who also made that trip from Tobolsk. I unfortunately will not be able to publish this story here because of Anastasia's age and there's no separating them-- having the young Tsarévitch moved elsewhere on that boat is already complex enough without having to move Anastasia as well.

This is but one example of how I build the world little by little around a story.