We’re still in Discovery. Your idea is magnificent. But who’s going to join your adventure? And where is that happening? Why is that happening?
Where — Setting is one of the most important story elements found in fiction. Setting establishes the location and time period of your story. You might maintain a single setting for an entire story, or you might move between multiple.
And with settings comes the controversial “world-building”.
World-building is the process of creating the worlds for our stories. The physical, social, political, and cultural spaces we live, work, and play in are all examples of worlds. We build those worlds every day, unintentionally, through our interactions with others. When created intentionally, world-building — changing the parameters — becomes a powerful tool both for creating art and for shaping our futures.
You can have heavy world-building or just the light version. You will have world-building even when you’re writing a realist story set in present New York City. Because your protagonist will live in a certain social ecosystem in the middle of the well-known city. You’ll have to build that ecosystem to make your story a credible and fully-immersive experience.
You can build that ecosystem in incredible detail and all your readers will smell, taste, and hear it. Or you can just say it’s Brooklyn 2022 and some of your readers will know immediately what you mean. Others will have to imagine it and supplement it with what they already know from other books and movies. Either way, it’s still called world-building. The heavy or the light version.
Now, if you’re writing a fantasy or a science fiction story, things change. Your world-building should rise up to the challenge. You need to know your world’s political system, the opposing factions, the social structure, some cultural traits, some history of the place, and some day-to-day elements, like food, drinks, fashion, how the city is organized, and so on.
Again, if you’re writing fantasy, medieval Western Europe has been overdone. Because of that, there are a lot of cliches. It’s better you know your stuff, or in other words, read extensively before committing to writing anything. See what’s been done to exhaustion and avoid it. Or come up with a twist.
For some inspiration on the twist see Brandon Sanderson’s “The Starlight Archive” series.
Same with science fiction. For instance, space opera and galactic empires have been done a lot. What’s new that you can bring to the table? What’s your twist? See for instance John Scalzi’s “The Collapsing Empire”. That’s a nice 45 degrees twist on your regular galactic empires. Or read Ann Leckie’s “Ancillary” series. It changed the way we viewed this beaten path.
There are two extremes on world-building — not nearly enough, and too much.
Not nearly enough will put your readers in an uncomfortable situation where they cannot visualize your world, they cannot feel it and therefore they will get bored.
Too much of it will put you in an awkward situation where you will have hundreds of pages on your world-building and no page of your actual novel.
What can we do in such a case?