What is it?
Definition: world building disease is contracted by many writers who fall victim to the selfish pleasures derived from the development of their own world. The creation of back story far beyond the interest of any casual reader.
Symptoms:
- A neglect of writing the novel in favour of writing about the world and its history.
- Information dumping upon a reader.
- Obsession with irrelevant facts.
Cure: Write the story!
World Building Vs Story Telling
This could be seen as a counter-productive article to post on a blog dedicated to the art of World Building. After all I am here to promote the practices of world building and to encourage you to design more, and in turn I hope this blog will become a stable part of your world building adventure.
However, I also believe in providing an honest and balanced view on what I promote and write about. I want to be part of The Third Tribe as presented by Sonia Simone of Copyblogger. That means no sleazy marketing or over exaggerated results. http://www.copyblogger.com/two-tribes/
Who will Read?
As I am only just starting out in the world of blogging myself I can only guess as to who will read my articles on here. However, I will make an educated guess that most people will be either fantasy/sci-fi writers, cartographers or Games/Dungeon Masters and RPG Players. For this reason I believe it is important that you get a balance between your world building and actually writing. As at the end of the day I know the main reason I build fantastic worlds is so I can tell even greater stories.
For Dungeon Masters this means you need to get the balance between world building and creating the campaigns for your players and then playing it with them. Cartographers, well I guess you’re kind of off the hook a little, though I bet you would love to write a few stories yourself?
If you’re not any of the people I cruelly stereotyped above then I do apologise, I love you really. Let me know who or what you are and I can add you to the list of stereotypes and then no one is left out of my pigeon holes. They are quite cosy, honest.
The Next Step
If you’re serious about World Building then I want you to click through to the Writing Excuses Podcast and listen to the podcast on World Building Disease. They explain it far better than I could and provide excellent tips on overcoming it. It’s only “15 minutes long, because you’re in a hurry and they are not that smart” – I hope they don’t mind me promoting that amazing slogan here.
http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/06/01/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-1-world-building-history/
For those of you who don’t know: Writing Excuses is written by Brandon Sanderson (Mistborn, The Wheel of Time ), Howard Tayler (Schlock Mercenary) and Dan Wells (I am NOT a Serial Killer) and I highly recommend listening to all of their podcasts.
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