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I’ve had discussions with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle on this subject, and they’ve pointed me to other writings on the matter. For those authors who do a l

I’ve had discussions with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle on this subject, and they’ve pointed me to other writings on the matter. For those authors who do a lot of world-building, the reader never sees 90-99% of the world that is built. The purpose of doing that world building is to have a scaffold on which the story can be hung, and which will help keep the story self-consistent. As a reader, you don’t need to know why a character had a particular relationship with their parents in a certain way, or what the nature of that relationship was. However, the nature of that relationship might drive a number of critical choices that the character would make, and therefore drive the story in a particular direction. I know that for my own characters I’ve created for role-playing games, I can get quite creative in their backstory, and write many pages on the subject. Most of that will never, ever show up in any game that I play, but I can also guarantee that all of it will inform choices that the character makes as we go through the campaign.

throwanem 5y ago
Well, yeah, absolutely. Not that I imagine myself in a league anywhere even near that of Niven and Pournelle, but nobody sees most of the work I did in figuring out what would be plausible on the Earth of 170mya, either. But I've also encountered, and I suspect you probably have too, stories in which the work of worldbuilding was far too obvious, to the detriment of the story. That's really all I'm speaking against here, although I grant I didn't do a very good job making that clear in my prior comment.
- bradknowles 5y ago
  Worldbuilding AS the story definitely does not work. If you’re going to do worldbuilding at all, then you have to have a story and a plot that will hang on that worldbuilding as the surface visible material over the structure provided — or the skin over the bones. And that skin still requires some flesh that occurs between those two extremes. IMO, the Silmarillion made for good worldbuilding. But not so good as an actual story.

throwanem 5y ago

Well, yeah, absolutely. Not that I imagine myself in a league anywhere even near that of Niven and Pournelle, but nobody sees most of the work I did in figuring out what would be plausible on the Earth of 170mya, either. But I've also encountered, and I suspect you probably have too, stories in which the work of worldbuilding was far too obvious, to the detriment of the story. That's really all I'm speaking against here, although I grant I didn't do a very good job making that clear in my prior comment.

bradknowles 5y ago
Worldbuilding AS the story definitely does not work. If you’re going to do worldbuilding at all, then you have to have a story and a plot that will hang on that worldbuilding as the surface visible material over the structure provided — or the skin over the bones. And that skin still requires some flesh that occurs between those two extremes. IMO, the Silmarillion made for good worldbuilding. But not so good as an actual story.