Hit A Couple of Myth Nerves…
I Got Letters… Not Happy Letters…
Seems the other night when I said a writer was lost in the years of their own world building, and that they were doomed, I caused a little anger.
Well…. It seems my observation did not go over well with two writers who actually wrote me, which means there are more who did not.
It seems that my blanket statement that if you spend years doing nothing but world building from the critical side of your brain you are lost caused anger.
The myth is that you have to create your entire world, know every detail in it, before you dare write a word in that world. Fear of getting something wrong, I guess, even though they made up the world.
Now I have zero issue with writers writing in big, complex worlds. I do so, actually, but you create the worlds by writing in them, not doing spreadsheets and character sketches (with pictures from magazines) and things like that.
Now neither writer defending their fantastic world-building skills mentioned the name of a novel or short story they had written in that world. Sort of made my point.
Creating elaborate worlds ahead of writing functions in a number of ways…
1… Makes the writer feel like they are writing.
2… Calms the fear of writing.
3… Gives the writer a feeling of superiority over their coffee-shop peers.
4… Guarantees they will never fail in their writing because they will never write.
5… And last, but most importantly, they can tell their family they are writing and not have to actually show them anything.
My solution if you are a writer who has bought into the world-building myth, put it all away. Back up everything and get it on a few hard drives or in the clouds and get it off your computer completely.
Then sit down and write a short story that has nothing to do with your made-up world. In fact, make it in a different genre.
Publish the story and repeat for four or five years, learning how to be a better storyteller, building stories and novels that have nothing to do with your old world building at all. Then after five years, without looking at the world building, just delete it all and keep writing new stuff,
No one I have ever seen go down this myth trap of building huge worlds ahead of time before actually writing has managed to escape and become a full-time writer, let alone ever write much of anything in the world they built. Just too much pressure.
So I did not answer those two letters except here in public in this blog. Just nothing I could say to either one of them, sadly.
19 Comments
Emilia
You have a Study Along World Building Workshop this May, I’ve been looking forwards to it for months now. It would probably help authors stuck with worldbuilding.
As a reader I enjoy short stories and novellas which feel like the author was exploring their world and in some cases the magis sytem of their world. The Emperor’s Soul by Brandon Sanderson and The Last Surviving Gondola Widow by Kris came to mind.
I wrote a worldbuilding and magic system story long ago which received a Silver Honorary Mention from Writers of the Future. When I can I’m putting the story in a collection and the award will make a good advertizing tool.
dwsmith
Emilia,
Long ago cancelled I’m afraid. Study along classes are done with in-person classes and we have cancelled all in-person classes here in Vegas for 2026 and until this crap in the world settles down some. Anyone from outside this country would be nuts to come here this year. Hell, it’s nuts living here.
Emilia
I missed the cancellation. Unfortunately, you are very right about traveling to the US, last year people were warned against traveling to the US due to the events and things haven’t changed.
I have #24 Pop-Up… Science Fiction World Building and #29 Pop-Up… Epic Fantasy World Building, so I can listen to them again as a refresher. I’d recommend them to anyone else interesting in speculative worldbuilding.
Mike Zimmerman
My father ran a textile buisness back in the day and he always told me, “If the machine isn’t running, nothing’s getting done.” That really stuck with me. When I was a teenager I wrote a D&D module — still have it, handwritten with artwork — and that’s what this world-building-without-storytelling thing felt like, building a world devoid of living characters. A framework waiting for a story. Fiction writing is the opposite, you get the fun of the world AND the story, building it as you go. I’m finishing a crime novel set in a fictional playground resembling the city where I was born and I’ve stepped aside at times to write short stories featuring secondary characters from the novel because I wanted to get to know them a little bit. When I’m done I’ll have the novel and a handful of stories — AND the world.
Brad D. Sibbersen
Exactly this. Whenever I encounter one of these people, I’m like “You AREN’T writing stories. You’re designing an RPG.” [Reposted to correct my egregious typo.]
Glyn Salisbury
I agreed with what you said in the first, so well done Dean.
Alex Scott
I feel like a lot of this is just that everybody wants to be the next Tolkien. Everybody knows he had his own fictional world, with its own history and languages, which he drew on for Lord of the Rings. But it’s always worth remembering that Tolkien, worldbuilder extraordinaire, was constantly revising his world, which was more of a personal hobby. He was *more* than willing to adjust it to fit his story. There’s a lot about Middle-Earth that was invented as Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings–the Stewards of Gondor, the Riders of Rohan, Lothlorien, Saruman–as they became essential to the story, which he makes this clear in his letter to W.H. Auden.
So if even Tolkien was willing to be flexible, why shouldn’t anyone else?
dwsmith
Tolkien built his worlds to invent the languages. Nothing more. The fiction side turned out to be a bonus.
JonathanCR
Tolkien was writing stories in his world right from the start, though. The first elements of the Book of Lost Tales go back to his time fighting in WW1. And his world developed as he wrote himself into a corner and abandoned that work (the first of so many) to restart and revise. So it wasn’t just about the languages, though those are the most well known element of it – on the contrary, the way he wrote stories and devised the world in tandem is exactly supportive of the idea that devising the world first and writing the stories later is the wrong way to go about things. Tolkien saw himself, at least initially, as being in the business of creating a mythology, and that means stories.
Chong Go
It’s always caused shiver in me when I think about how much the Lord of the Rings resembles WW1 combat. From “beasts” that come out of the night to fights that corrupt your soul to wounds that will never heal, so much of what he writes is straight off the battlefield. If anything, I suspect his worldbuilding was toning things down and putting them in what must have seemed to him to be a Disney setting.
Brian Thomas Woods
I thought Writing into the Dark sounded like madness when I first heard you mentioning. But I decided you might have some experience in this area and took the course, deciding to just do what you instructed us to do.
Even if it sounded crazy to me.
It ended up being a very liberating revelation. Writing instantly became much more fun and interesting.
It’s amazing how much terrible advice there is out there.
I.m happy to have found people like you and Kris who tell it like it is.
Harvey Stanbrough
Brian, good on you.
I learned Heinlein’s Rules and WITD from Dean back in 2014. Like you, I was able to take a deep breath, believe, and try it for myself.
As a result, in the past 11 years I’ve written well over 300 short stories (and around 30 collections) plus over 120 novels and 10 novellas. All written into the dark. And the key thing is, the excitement of this amazing non-technique never goes away.
Keep pushing that conscious voice down and keep writing into the dark. It never gets old.
Michael W Lucas
Confession: I have extensive notes on my big made-up worlds. I take the notes after the day’s writing.
The notes aren’t for me, though. They’re for my editors. Saves lots of trouble during edits.
dwsmith
I do the same thing, Michael, but not for editors since I think they are a bogus part of this entire fiction art form. The notes are for me to save me scanning back through stories and such. So yes, I world build after I write it down in a story first.
Michael W Lucas
I only using a copy editor. She catches inconsistencies while she’s at it, so the notes cut out a round of questions.
Dev editors and all that? Nope.
(No, wait, I tell a lie. I also like the kind of editors that send checks.)
Marc Meaney
This is so right. When I sat down to write my Science Fantasy books I had a vague idea, a few characters (basically a boy, a girl, and an old man – no more than that) and I put the boy in a bad situation – one I had no idea how he would get out of, or what role the girl and old man would play.
I take Dean’s ‘write into the dark’ strategy to heart. And wow does it pay off.
Five books later I have this complex world, with tens of characters with rich backgrounds and loyalties (made for an epic climax to book 5 I tell you). All because I just sat and wrote 2000 words a day for months on end. No revision, no rewriting, just looping through the last 1000 words if I got stuck – all great advice from Dean.
Thanks man.
Except now I have to build a dictonary to hold the invented language (build word by word only as I needed it for the days writing) – but can I resist the temptation to do the retro-after-the writing world building? It’s hard. But the next book calls – I want to learn what happens next more than I want to catalog what I already know.
The dictonary can go hang, along with the undrawn maps, the character sheets, and the plot outline I didn’t write (except for that crazy complex few climax chapters in book 5), and the previous 1000 years of history I don’t need to think about.
Listen to Dean – he’s right!
Maybe I will do that dictionary though… hmmm… That’s a book right?
dwsmith
Super, Marc. Sooo cool…
And wait until you have a bunch more books. What a pain it would be if you did the dictionary too soon and then had to always change it. Ughhh… Write more books, then when the series feels concrete, do the extra book for fun.
Well done and thanks for sharing.
Jason M
Agreed Dean, but lemme point out that a massively-built complex world could be used for things other than writing. The people who do 5 years of world-building might be better off applying that to a mystery room, for example, which is a business and not only a piece of IP.
Kris Rusch
I keep a glossary as I write so I don’t have to search for terms. And yeah, sometimes I have to revise, but I do it on the fly (usually because the original spelling is weird or onorous.)