This week: World-Building As Procrastination Edited by: Jeff  
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"Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it."
— Lloyd Alexander
About The Editor: Greetings! My name is Jeff and I'm your guest editor for this issue of the official Fantasy Newsletter! I've been a member of Writing.com since 2003, and have edited more than 400 newsletters across the site during that time. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me via email or the handy feedback field at the bottom of this newsletter! 
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World-Building As Procrastination
Writing can be really hard sometimes, and we all have our favorite forms of procrastination. Some of us find errands to run or things to do around the house. Others of us suddenly remember something we've been meaning to do for a long time and suddenly need to get around to it. Me? My favorite form of procrastination is research and development, because it helps me convince myself that I'm still "writing" when, in fact, I'm not really making meaningful progress in my goal of writing a story.
The seductive part about this type of procrastination is that it is so easy to convince yourself that you're being productive. Especially if you're writing in a genre like fantasy, there are so many elements of a secondary world to figure out! What's the geography like? How about the sociopolitical aspects of the world? What is religion like in your world? What languages do people speak? Is magic common or rare? Are there fantastical creatures or areas of the world that could be explored? What's the history of this place you've made up entirely in your own imagination and now need to make come alive on the page?
What's even more sinister about this form of procrastination is that you can argue that it does incrementally improve your writing by providing context and understanding that allow you to more fully realize the world you're writing about. But the question is whether it's worth the time you're spending doing it, and if that time spent is at the cost of the greater goal.
If you are concurrently working on world-building and also getting your words/pages done, that's one thing. But if you're putting off getting your words/pages done under the rationale that you just need to develop the world just a little bit more, you might be procrastinating ... especially if the words/pages are being put off for more than a few days or weeks at a time. Or if you're developing world-building that you know is only going to have a peripheral impact on your story. Like, say, spending dozens of hours developing an entire religious system when you're not currently anticipating that your story or characters will talk about religion with more than a passing reference.
The other adverse effect of procrastinating through world-building is then having a plethora of world-building information that you have spend considerable time developing ... and then feeling like you have to include it in your story even if the story doesn't call for it because you worked so hard on it. One of the great pitfalls of fantasy fiction is when an author is so in love with the secondary world setting they've created, that they don't want to (or feel they don't need to) edit things down and instead just write sprawling and unnecessary detail that detract from the narrative. Some fantasy readers do like to read thousand-page tomes with every minor detail spelled out an explained in intricate detail, but I'd argue that more readers prefer that character and story don't get derailed or take a backseat to details of the setting.
World-building is a crucial part of fantasy writing (and the part that many of us who are fans of the genre love the most!). But it can be a very fine line between world-building that creates a more immersive experience by fleshing out the world, and world-building that's being self-indulgent or used to avoid the hard work of actually telling an engaging story with compelling characters. Whenever you're looking at world-building and your writing process, it's worth asking the following two questions of yourself:
1. Is this world-building necessary to tell my story?
2. Am I spending an appropriate amount of time on it, based on how big of a role it will play in the story?
If the answer to both of the above questions is 'yes' then happy world-building! If the answer to either of those questions is 'no' or 'probably not' then it might be worth revisiting the amount of time you're spending on that aspect of the world-building and investing it somewhere more productive to your writing goals.
Until next time,
Jeff
If you're interested in checking out my work:
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EXCERPT: All would be decided by this fight said many. A few saw the truth of the matter. It was no small war they faced, but the end of a way of life. Far out even to the edge of the world they would talk of this as only men who remember the past can, as something that had been fated, but it was always up to men. The dark magic that was coming had already quailed the hearts of many, leading astray the weak. All souls were to be run to ground by the fates. And to resist without any wisdom tempted but more trouble.
EXCERPT: “Let’s go on a really special adventure today,” Sparklehorn suggested to her friend Brenda Bunny.
“I love any adventures!” Brenda cheered.
“Don’t you want to know where we’re going?” Sparklehorn asked.
“Doesn’t matter, I know it will be fun!” Brenda began hopping around in bunny zoomies at the idea.
“I’ll tell you anyway. We’ve been invited to the never-ending birthday party! It’s only a twenty-four-hour invitation, because in order to invite every creature, some must leave!”
EXCERPT: She was longer from snout to tail than any of her kind had ever been. That was a problem. It was NOT her worst problem. She was called “Hot Lips” for a reason. Every time she opened her mouth, a plume of heat billowed around it. A simple yawn once burned acres of forest, so she was forbidden to stay. She lived a lonely life on a solidified cloud that orbited the planet.
EXCERPT: In the year 242, Salmon Rubenstein, a professor at CAT Tech and former head of NASA was working on developing both a warp drive and wormhole technologies. He makes an urgent appeal to the UN NASA agency which had taken over the various fledging national space programs as part of their goals of finally establishing a real-world government after the horrors of World War 111 and the short-lived nuclear winter that ended the global climate change but still threatened to usher in a new ice age.
EXCERPT: In the vastness of the universe, a single small change can rewrite the very fabric of reality. Even something as small as two atoms colliding in just the right way at just the right time can cause unpredictable changes with far reaching consequences. This is actually how new realities are born, the changes actually rewriting history itself so that everyone within this new reality sees the changes as the norm. It just so happened that such an event was actually happening, and the people of Earth were about to be changed forever in the blink of an eye.
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Feedback from "Fantasy Newsletter (March 27, 2024)" about the under-appreciated standalone:
Thank you for this! I love fantasy, but finding a good standalone novel is so hard! Just give me one story, and I'm a happy reader. While some people like series - and that's their prerogative - when I need a scorecard to keep track of characters, then a series is too convoluted and too long. Discworld is a little different because not every book shares characters, and the order for reading many of them does not matter - they merely share a world. It's not like Wheel Of Time where you need to read them in order. Nope. No series. Standalones all the way.
Up until recently, I have written standalone stories only. Now I am hashing out a short story trilogy of about 6k words each for an exclusive activity of the only group I am part of. I can't wait until I itemize them and see how they do! Thanks of the NL!
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Fantasy: September 11, 2024 Issue [#12739]
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