There are other kinds of worldbuilding besides the deep-background variety I was talking about last post, to wit, the immediate-background sort and the in-story sort. The immediate-background worldbuilding, like deep worldbuilding, is stuff that not everyone needs to do in advance. It’s very similar to the deep-worldbuilding in that it’s about making decisions, but most [...]
March 17, 2013 – 10:13 am
A couple of weeks ago, I finally figured out one of the several reasons I’ve been having so much difficulty booting up The New Thing. It’s because for my last eight to ten books, I haven’t had to do any deep worldbuilding, because all of them came with that part ready-made. The Frontier Magic books, [...]
September 2, 2012 – 2:50 pm
I’ve had house guests for the past five days (my cousin stayed with me; my Dad stayed with my sister), and in the process of doing all the show-the-out-of-town-family-around stuff, doing the blog got kind of behind. Which is why I’m late and a bit disconnected with this. Yesterday, we went to the State Fair. [...]
Wiscon was fun but, for me, low-key – I caught a nasty cold the week before, and was still recovering, so I ended up napping a whole lot more than usual and skipping a lot of the parties. But I got to see a bunch of friends and I picked up a couple of books [...]
October 26, 2011 – 6:13 am
This was supposed to go up Sunday; apparently being out of town glitched my brain and I managed to get it written but not posted. Sorry about that. We now return to our regular posting schedule. I’m in Tulsa at the moment, at the Nimrod conference, and yesterday they had me do a session on [...]
September 21, 2011 – 6:15 am
I’ve been doing role-playing games off and on since the mid-1970s, when I was first introduced to the concept of D&D style tabletop games. The group I gamed with wasn’t big on number-crunching and stats; we were more about the improvised story-telling. At least five of us ended up inventing and running our own gaming [...]
September 7, 2011 – 6:07 am
Writers who set their stories in the real world, whether modern or historical, have a double advantage over those of us who alter reality/history to suit our own ends, or who make up our own versions from whole cloth. The first advantage is that they can look up whatever details they need – architecture, dress, [...]
December 29, 2010 – 7:50 am
The flip side of forgetting about the implications of all the things one puts into one’s worldbuilding is becoming obsessed with getting every detail just so. It is a great way not to produce a lot of finished writing. Overbuilding an imaginary world is a problem that is closely related to over-researching. They have similar pitfalls [...]
December 26, 2010 – 10:34 am
Merry Christmas, everybody, and happy whatever-you-celebrate-at-this-time-of-year! My Dad and youngest sister are here for Christmas this weekend, so I’m doing the big Christmas dinner thing, with full tree (and happy cats eyeing ornaments whenever they aren’t on someone’s lap getting petted). Which means this will be a little short. And now that we have that [...]
December 22, 2010 – 9:07 am
Back in the day, I spent a couple of years as gamesmaster for what would now be called an RPG that I basically made up myself, based around the background I was using in my Lyra series. Paper-and-pencil gaming was fairly popular then, at least in my social circles, so there were quite a few [...]
A few days ago, Beth my exercise buddy mentioned that she’d been rereading some of Connie Willis’ time-travel stories, and it inspired her to ask me a question: If you could go back in time to do historical research, what time and place would you pick? I mulled it over for a few days before [...]
I seem to have acquired a reputation as some sort of worldbuilding maven, probably based on the Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions I came up with as a personal crutch during my middle career. I don’t actually think the reputation is deserved – really, it should belong to someone who does a much better job of worldbuilding [...]
January 30, 2010 – 1:50 pm
Worldbuilding in some sense is a requirement for all writers. The people and places in fiction may have analogs in real life, but a writer in the U.S. cannot depend on every reader (or even most readers) being familiar with the Lincoln Park area of Chicago or the lower east side of Manhattan, much less the [...]