hmmm 0:28 in and i actually like this deliniation better than how i always viewed it being that worldbuilding was describing how the systems of your world work like magic or souls or some ambigous life energy or etc while lore was the history of the world. personally tho again, i think imma use the defenitions you put forward cause it better deliniates the 2 and gives the right vibes you mentioend to when you talk about the 'lore'
1:00 for me, im still in the beginning stages of writing my own story actually and i FIRMLY stand beside the take that making a good and well thought out world first is the most important thing from all the shows i have watched and taken the time to break down why they do or dont work for me and everyone else who has watched them with my biggest inspiration being one piece. full stop i believe firmly that if you make a well thought out world to the point that anyone could point anywhere on a map and you can give them the full breakdown of the culture, the politics, the buisness deals, the local geography and how that affects their relationships with the world, and etc. THAT is how you can than make an ACTUALLY REALLY GOOD story! i think this because if you know all those details, when you make ANY character, you dont have to find a contrived spot for them in the story and than if they become more important later because you decieded they needed to be for the story, you dont than haveta go back and retcon in story for that character first as instead, you simply make each and every character who might show up as if they were real people and people who could totally have an impact on the story later because even if your viewers/readers only ever meet them once, the history you make for that character to make them fit in their own personal journey they are going through in the world will be MORE than apparent. its much harder in some ways but it not only opens the door of possibilities to bring in whoever you want, whenever you want without having to find ways to justify it and MAKE them important, but it also makes your world feel REAL in the way brandon sanderson decribes the fully capitalized world 'REAL'. this REALness gives your world and its characters immersion that just wouldnt be possibile if this wasnt your first consideration and given that every type of story structure has been done at this point in human history of hundreds of thousands of years of story telling, theres no point in even trying to make a 'unique' story first anyways epsecially since if you have REAL characters in a REAL world, the story should be something that just comes about naturally from them going about their lives however they would maybe with also just a little bit of fate touched motivation to go in any given direction..... all in all, its worldbuilding first, characters second, and than story as the by far least important and only final touches type thing.
1:10 i HEAVILY disagree that story or world first is only 'a cosmetic difference' for my stated reasons but also because the only benefits i see to story first is 2 things with the first being its far easier (lazier) and secondly, it is far quicker so if you arent intended for more than a few hour viewing like a movie than this works out plenty well enough for a one of type movie. ultimately tho, story first makes all characters loose that REAL feeling and hurts immersion as it becomes WAY to easy to make the characters all simply fill roles needed for the story and leave their personal history so far out of consideration as you wouldnt even know what their history would be until you make the world anyways that either their history feels alien to the world they are in or like an afterthought whenever you get around to actually doing it because it would be. beyond that it makes the world that your characters likely now feel alien to if you made their history of their lives before the world, feel like a true theatre play backdrop rather than a real world to care about... the best example of this is the entirety of the dc and marvel comics. both of these have their characters stories first and than their characters histories and personalities second with the world is SO MUCH of an aftertthought that its just randomly set in the real world with retcon history changes constantly within the universes own history to add in not just new characters but entire orginizations, types of magic systems, historical events that apparently no one knew about before, and entire new races and cultures of people like how the mutants just kinda appeared one day in the public conciousness....... like it leads to stories that are so disjointed and disconnected that the only thing to latch onto is good and fun characters which is why thats THE ONLY thing fans of either talk about because the worlds and stories are so abitrary and random and never feel truly REAL... story first KILLS so much of what could be done and is only a tool for lazy writers if you ask me.
2:10 ok so i liked the distinction between lore and worldbuilding but i think your not understanding NO MATTER what you like more between gardening and architecture in terms of worldbuilding, you NEED to at least as the writer always have the answers so basically if you ask me, any good writer goes world first via the arcitecture style of world building and than uses the gardening style when it comes to GIVING that information to your audience. you as the writer should ALWAYS know ALL the details about your world but than simply leave it to only showing what comes up as it would be revealed to your characters which is what oda did with his world and if you ask me, is why its even managed to nearly eclipse superman, batman, and spiderman all in terms of total fans and viewership...... going down the route of 'worldbuilding on the fly' is what leads to contradictions and obvious retcons that ruin immersion and take the wind out of the sails of your audience of being able to immerse themselves into the story and actually even if only temporarily, BELIEVE the world is real and that they are right there alongside the characters in the show. again, i firmly standby the stance that people who do their worldbuilding and not just their lore in a gardener style are being HEAVILY lazy and that is exactly what leads to poor stories that people will always forget due to the obvious laziness in not caring about making a good and REAL world that people can immerse themselves into.
I’ve always felt that what you don’t tell your audience can be as important as what you do tell them. You need to leave little spaces in your narrative. Strategically placed so that they don’t become plot holes, but large enough that the audience can peer down them and wonder what’s at the bottom and what they might find along the way down there. Give your audience the room necessary to actively participate in the story. ‘Course I’m coming at this FROM the perspective of the audience and one who has specific tastes so maybe this isn’t always gonna work.
So that makes me wonder, what rabbit holes should I leave for the reader? Should certain things never be answered in the book even if I, as the author know about it? My magic system is very, very deeply ingrained into my world, much like water is ingrained into ours. It's almost like a food chain/water cycle of sorts. However, things get weird when it comes to souls. To minimize the explanation needed, the basic premise is that your resource for casting is tied directly to your soul, and you cast with your soul, but without a body, you cannot control how much of the resource you burn. My question there is whether or not to ever offer that as an explanation to the readers or whether or not to hint at it, because the BBEG is stuck in his soul for most of it, and he is more or less the only person with enough of the resource to actually pull off staying in soul form since when your body dies, your soul has to run off of the magic resource and the drain is a rather large amount. I'm wondering if it is a good idea to build suspense by indirectly telling the readers(through conversations between characters) that the soul is what the resource is attributed to, and what processes it, but with very little information to go off of on people in just soul form(since they usually sort of evaporate in minutes) it is entirely unknown what someone can do without a body. Would that be leaving a plot-hole for readers to go, "Well why didn't BBEG just do X?", or would that just keep readers guessing on what BBEG is planning. A good example of this is Sukuna from JJK, who was viewed as crazy powerful, and when he was asked to make a pact to do something, he said no, which due to the audience not knowing a specific rule at that point, made Sukuna scarier since he was refusing power when in actuality there was nothing he could do even if he wanted to.
@@thecyanpanda241 I’m not really talking about “this has an active effect on story events” stuff. More the kind of background detail that gives the world that lived in feel. Stuff like the hobbits stopping in some ancient ruins for tomatoes and bacon on their way to Rivendell. Or all the stuff in Breath of the Wild that led to the fan community theorizing extensively about the Zonai ruins and what that culture would have looked like. Things that give your world depth but actively benefit from little explanation. Or if you aren’t looking to emphasize the history of the world you could do it with current events. “This is just like Budapest.” “You and I remember Budapest very differently.” If your audience is left going “this character has a very obvious solution to their problems and the reason why they didn’t take it is never explained” that’s not room for speculation, that’s a plot hole. If your character overhears a conversation in passing that sounds like it might be an in-depth guide on “how to fuck your livestock” but doesn’t hear enough to be certain they weren’t misunderstanding something, that’s interesting. Or at least amusing.
Yeah, absolutely. A good book can feel like the world is a real place when the author has built enough of the world to see a little more of the world than they use in the plot. Having just a few things that have minor effects on the story from beyond the immediate setting is a good way to do this. You can overhear conversations, see products from other locations, and incorporate locations into characters personality or backstories.
I’ve always seen “lore” as the stories and myths that informs the relationship between the world and it’s inhabitants. It’s a matter of WHY rather than WHAT.
this is why his advice is actually something i disagree with. i made a post earlier saying something like this: lore shouldnt be world building because: 1) everything in the story already does world building(if the character buys something, you are telling the reader how the economy works, if you make the main character get arrested for a crime they didnt commit, you are telling how bad or corrupt the legal system is and so on). but also 2)lore works best, when the reader doesnt know how true it is. if you have a lore about werewolves, but then you show it was slightly wrong, you didnt do world building with your lore, you did the opposite, you compromised your world building in order to fool the reader, which is where lore works best, as a secondary but truly unreliable narrator, that might be honest, or completely wrong about things, and its up to the reader to try and think if they should trust that info or not.
As a chronic worldbuilder, I consider what is and isn’t lore to be just another aspect of the worldbuilding. I know how the gods created my world and why. I know what happens to souls after death and where spirits come from. But what people in the story know and believe about those things is just another important facet of the world. It helps that I’ve gotten to a point where I don’t really care if the reader knows anything about my cool worldbuilding as long as they underatand what’s necessary for the story. I build the world to make it feel alive to me, and then I use what I have to make the story feel alive for my readers. For the story I’m currently writing I’m actually trying to explain as little as possible. If my readers are very confused and can still follow the story I’ve succeeded XD
I relate to this so much. I love the process of worldbuilding an intimate & elaborate cosmos with different planes of existence, a grand history of the world's many civilizations spanning thousands of years... and also thinking heavily about how the characters in my world know next to none of that. The worldbuilding is the canvas & deciding what people in-world know is just a splotch of paint along with so many others. It's a fun part of the process. Thanks for sharing.
@@SwordTune Personally it depends. Some of them I try to write into stories, currently working on a novel and a short story on the side, and sometimes it’s just something I build for the fun of it. Some of the most fun I’ve had with friends is building worlds together. That’s a goal onto itself I think.
As a huge fan of souls games, I am also a huge fan of good lore. Item descriptions, secret bosses, interesting locations, character dialogue, etc. In books, I’d say the best way to hint at hidden lore is through vague passages in books (in your books), mysterious ruins, carvings on the wall, perhaps some legendary artifacts of some sort, all that tie back to events that you hint at, but don’t include in your stories. In one of my books, I was writing an immortal character that was cursed long ago to only be able to speak in fancy language (archaic, analogies, metaphors, poems, etc). He can’t choose, he comes up with what he wants to say, and then the curse takes effects and transformed his speech into something almost intelligible. He speaks this way about past events, and I leave it up to the reader to pick up on hints, clues, and details, decipher them, and then link them to what the immortal says. And even with all of that, just like dark souls, you can really only pick up the vaguest silhouette of past events.
I just hope that unlike Souls-Borne series, it has some point to it, unless the point of it in your story is it to be vague for whatever reason. I dunno, I like lore in Souls games, don't get me wrong but with no narrative to use it in any satisfying way (for me at least) it losses some points for me.
@@ryujin8754 That's interesting. What do you think, the point could be, if there was to be one? And if you maybe indulge me further, have you run across any media, which does the understated storytelling, with a point. Anything would be appreciated, but if not, you have already given me, plenty to think about. Thank you for your comments, Ryujin..
@@ryujin8754 the point of the lore of my story is to provide background. Add layers to my storytelling. Give reasons for the thought it’s that happen. Potentially set up future events. The reader can learn the lore and also learn why the antagonist wanted what he wanted, where the protagonist’s bloodline originated from, how past rituals and events influenced the current events, the patters seen in the past that could foretell the future. I want people to be able to actively have fun reading and deciphering the lore that I write. I want people to be able to debate lore and understand more about it in a civil manner. I might be asking too much, but that is my end goal.
I always start with the story - usually a scene will come to me then I structure the plot and build the characters around that scene. So the lore comes after as well, but I try to flesh it out as much as possible before putting pen to paper. The world needs to feel lived in not just there to serve the plot.
The first time I thought about how a softer exposition style works wonders for immersion was during Mad Max. At some point they enter a swamp with these dudes that traverse the landscape on silts. It's never addressed. They're just there and it made my imagination run wild.
I've always thought for the extra worldbuilding that never gets used would be saving it behind the scenes content to get people who are already big enough fans to ask deeper questions and get them even more excited about your work.
Regardless of how much I subjectively love your videos (a ton), they are objectively very well made. Flawless structure, perfect pacing, simple yet efficient editing, accurate references, plus you're blessed with a quite pleasant voice. Your hard work shows and bears witness of your passion for the subjects. I just can't get enough
What I really like about your videos is that you don't say "this is how it's done" or "don't do this" but instead, you're aware that people's writing process is different, and people have different approaches to writing that can be just as valid. You also approach it from many different angles, rather than just 'making a cool world' which is neat. I generally focus very little on worldbulding, only as much as I can get away with while writing the story, so most worldbulding advice/essay videos, while interesting, don't speak to me and my writing too much. But your videos are different and I love them for it. Although we can all agree 'as you know' is bad exposition, lol. Although exposition is hard, so I sympathize.
i think for me, the locked tomb series is the best example of this! especially with the first book, gideon the ninth. totally recommend for anyone interested in a post-earth scifi fantasy (not dissimilar to dune)
Thoughtful perspective on Lore vs Architecture. Subjective vs Objective. I've never thought about it that way before. I'm working on something right now, and this insight will be helpful. Thanks!
I personally write purely for fun, and I admit I don't look at worldbuilding that much, I tend do think about the places where my characters go but in terms of worldbuilding I like to keep the entire multiverse for my places to create the story
A very original outlook on storytelling, made me think about it in a different way. Also, big thanks for the ad - it may be the first time I found it to be 100% what I needed. Great video overall!
Love the distinction between worldbuilding and lore - and this video made me think a lot about unrealiable exposition. We tend to assume the info dump is going to be reputable, but what if it's not? What if Professor McGonagall was a terrible teacher? What if the Hitchhicker's Guide had out of date info? As always, brilliant video - wish you added some of your own writing as examples around ;) Cheers, man!
The idea of the Guide being out of date really struck a chord with me. I had almost seen it as infallible. I don't remember if it happened in the book or not, but Arthur was traveling with Ford, a data-gatherer for the guide, so what if Arthur had helped Ford add new entries? I wonder if the secret to flying made it in. I actually have a short story that's largely unreliable info where everything is the hallucinations/dreams of a dying self-aware AI.
@@DeetotheDubs if you think of those bits as 'lore' rather than 'worldbuilding', then it becomes easier to imagine scenes like that, right? What if somebody got something wrong?
I love your explanation on world building. I enjoy doing so so much. It's thrilling to create your own worlds and flesh them out. I have been writing since high-school but began making actual novels a few years ago. I've got so many projects in mind and not enough people to share ideas with. I literally have no friend who share the same interests lol. But listening to you and the foundry help keep me motivated.
As a LORE ENTHUSIAST AND aspiring artist. I manage to figure out a balance when doing drafts before online publishing for final draft of foolproof read how to simultaneously fit the genre of the story (target audience/readers) and seamlessly felt the pacing is enough for the lore to be felt that seems natural
I do worldbuilding for fun, and use those worlds for my DMing. This really results in a kind of bi-directional world building. I write the large scale and character independent world building stuff top down because I enjoy it. And I write the lore that my players experience bottom up from their perspective. This strategy turned out really well since the fact that I have an objective view of how the world works I can easily come up with new lore on the fly when players try to dig deeper during a game session.
I love doing this. It's my favorite way of creating a sense of setting. I've taken to referring to it as "diegetic worldbuilding" on writing resumes, just because it makes the distinction a little more clear. I once wrote an entire academic lecture about how magic works in one of my D&D settings, but because it is voiced and from a characterized point of view, it is clearly a biased and incomplete take, punctuated by counterarguments to briefly mentioned competing theories. It is not a thing that is meant to be seen by anyone but me, necessarily- but having it there in my mountain of notes and writings means I have a good foundation for what an informed understanding of magic might look like in one culture in my world, and can then scale that understanding or counterpoint it with other characters, philosophies, and cultures. I often do this in lieu of making too many "hard" top-down Truths about my worlds. To me, the world remaining subjective and up for debate makes for a more dynamic, lived-in, and realistic sense of place.
Me and some friends of mine started creating a world for a potential D&D campaign on a whim recently. As someone who is completely new tp this these videos have helped me a lot. Thank you. :)
Another fantastic discussion. Subtle points and great examples. I'll have to come back to this one and pause all over the place because my mind was chasing the ramifications of your points down the rabbit holes of my own novel before you ripped me along to the next one. Sigh. The downside of delivering so many cogent arguments in a short video.
Good point on the 'worldbuilding makes me so cool' side of things. What I feel is most important about a story is how it makes the reader/viewer feel, not how awesome the writer is or wants the reader/viewer to think they are.
I've been trying to write a novel for two years now and the worldbuilding for one of my settings has been holding me back for so long, but I feel like this approach is really going to help!
I started with building a town first with my story, & then so many attributes about my MC solved itself. Then the city over had constraints, which made that easier to solve, the characters motives had to make sense to the environment they come from, & story telling for me is like solving a jigsaw puzzle
I start with the characters too. The characters then bring me to their personal history and where they come from/their magic (if that’s part of it) etc. and then once I know the characters origins I can build a world where that’s possible and start writing it. For my current series it started out as an alternative earth and then I figured out there was a second world for specific magic users that happen to include my MC. I plot and then start digging into and explore the world as I write Also Milanote is so good! I’ve been using it for 3+ years now and it’s well worth the subscription price for unlimited boards - I highly recommend it as a writer/creative
Good way to discuss this! Nice vid. I'm in the process of writing an RPG, and the big issue right now is determining what will be the best system to build from (or if I'll build my own). That said, I'd say the concept I'm building is big on Lore, low on World-building. The goal being to set up a perspective and a genre for the game, but making the setting and realities behind the perspective largely up to the GM and/or the players. A mystery I find interesting with no canon answer.
I can't exactly offer an answer to worldbuilding/lore, but I can give you a magic system. It's ironically what I like to call "The honor system". At it's most basic, the honor system is a "kill big thing, get resource, use resource for magic to kill bigger thing" system. Kill something strong to get a resource that is exclusively for magic. My magic is only derivatives of fire and in very rare instances healing, no ice or anything like that. Past surface level it gets deeper. People way different ways of thinking, and as such will have different ways of using the system. Some people say that a big explosion is enough, others opt to make weapons out compressing and slowly burning the resource, others use it as an alternative to cellular respiration to enhance their physical abilities, and some have techniques utilizing multiple concepts from these lines of thinking. I don't want to ramble, but things get deeper still from a system that, at its most basic, is just "kill thing, do magic" Entire cultures and countries can be shaped over how interacting with the system is interpreted(barbaric or honorable) and the actions of those who interacted with it(benevolent or genocidal). Even abstract things like how it is distributed between species, why creatures like dragons have so much while a squirrel has no honor within it, or why only humans can interact with it(in my story at least) and much more. If you want to know more about it, feel free to ask, I've been developing it for the past couple weeks and while I'm still figuring out the kinks, I am very happy with the results.
Thank you for your shared knowledge. You perfectly explained why I have such a high craving and intrigue for Lore and why I found my new way of worldbuilding in form of perspectives far more intriguing lately.
I'm one who only overtly tells the audience what they need to know, but I _will_ write the characters as knowing as much of the whole pie is relevent for them to know. Often times what someone _doesn't_ know is more impactful than what they do know. Properly siloing who knows what, including the audience, i feel is important to creating an engaging story.
I like to start by creating the world first and then the lore. I like to do so because it's easier for me to create a story out of world rather than a world out of a story. Honestly, I think both go hand in hand, the world is the frame, and the lore is what gives life to the world, the lore makes the world move. By creating the world first, the whole story will feel more "alive" in a sense, you can feel an ecosystem, and more importantly, the "causes and effects" of every actions is easier to plan. As you said though, creating a world first makes you want to show it off, you want to show the reader everything that is happening because you worked hours on it. I personally think that when you create a world, the best thing you can do is to not show everything about it, you need to leave some secrets and things to discover out there that the reader can go find by himself. Another great aspect of world building is that it gives a story a sort of "infinite lifespan". I like to believe that a story with a complete world is never finished, what we see is only the end of the story of the original author, but there are still infinite possibilities to explore later, and even better, the original author doesn't need to be the one to explore them, fans can do so as well via fanfictions.
I think I've kinda created my own method similar to this. Shaelin Writer also have similar method, which is she called *"Intuitive world-building".* So this "world-building" method is more like creating a narative over a your main narative. Call it a *backstory* or a *lore* like you said. This method is a solution for writer who dislike going into too much technicality and planning the stuffs. You know, the boring stuffs; politics, economics, government, geography, etc.. In Shaelin's video, it's interesting where she talked about the same problem as you on what make worldbuilding complex? Is it *VAST* worldbuilding, but lack *DEPTH?* Then I realized worldbuilding made from authors always divided by being *vast vs deep.* They can tackle so much things, but in reality its only surface level. Or you can tackle few things, but each aspects are having deeper lore going on.
My worldbuilding is shaped through a central story concept and the characters whom the story follows. Or I'll imagine a fun activity or an interesting landscape and imagine how characters would interact there which turns into a story. And the details of the world bend and morph to move the characters along the storied path in an intriguing way. I use the environment to be either nice or mean to my characters as way of moving them where I want them to go. I set details up along the way that will be followed up in future stories.
Great video. Your tips are good and helpful. Thank you for sharing! World Building is lots of fun but it is easy to get carried away and jam too much information in your story.
5:03 little late here but a funny thing that happens to me, in my circle of friends of a specific world we read, my friends are always complaining that the author explains a lot of things but not enough, this isn't to say that you are wrong, just something funny i remembered during the video, great video by the way!
Treating lore as "lens" for world-building sounds like a good process. I really like world-building. It's fun. I used to try to cram as much as I could into the story, but that led to issues of pacing and length and such. I'm working on getting a better harmony between telling the plot and including only parts of world-building that are directly relevant to the plot, or making a plot that is about world-building if I wand to do more.
Got a subscriber for life Iv been going to big for so long and started with a character just to try and it helped me so much I was looking back at how I did things always and it’s just been so overwhelming
I feel it better to do a bit of both, you make characters and think of things you want, then you find a way for it to fit in the world. But also sometimes its good to world build things first, so that way things don't contradict the story or world system. I myself have my own notes too that I will not share with my friends cause it's a huge peice of lore that can solve many of the weird and mysterious parts of the world, but I kinda just want to watch everyone scratch their heads while I sit there knowing
Great video (except for the random seige on my hear holes lol). So for in my experience writing the initial draft is all about efficiency and bare bones. I'm laying out the skeleton of the story. Along the way I make connections between interesting ideas for worldbuilding, plot, character and scenes. I work to mesh those together as I go. Often this makes my original plot outline far more conplex and interesting. Afterwards, I return to my worldbuilding and start working out the broader concepts. Often I've picked up ideas on what the cultures or tech, religions or magics, look like. So I start stringing those together. Once I've done a bunch of worldbuilding, I then take that time to work on a second pass through the story where I try to layer in lore bits. For instance, in one scene my two main characters were walking down the street having a conversation. So nothing really happened in the background and they reach their destination. Upon the second pass I realized that this district that they are in could have a bit more flair to it. On the artificial world where the story took place each major district was run by one of the primary pantheons of the civilization. That man I had all this interesting lore and setting to hint at. So I had small moments where the characters would walk beneath certain architectural structures and I would likely describe them. I would mention how the streets were being cleaned by the undead who had been forced into service because they aren't deserving of Eternal rest just yet due to some criminal misdeed. It took the scene from a typical talk and walk to something that was interesting and unique. It felt like they were moving through a fleshed out City and culture. Anyways those are my thoughts, I hope they helped.
If you want plot twists based on world building and lore you include instances where the characters significantly misunderstand how their world works, and reveal that truth for the twist. I tend to think about how the world works, and when I get an idea, I figure out whether it's what the characters think about the world, or if it's how it actually works. Then I expand the other side as necessary. But most of the time I base most things around the characters and plot, since those are what's important to the story. If a plot doesn't work with a certain world building element, I change the latter (unless that makes other plots incompatible).
I like your take on the World building debate. I personally think of a Theme with some very limited World building premises. What makes this World/Story stick out. What are some ground rules. Once I have them I go to Lore. What myths do I want people to tell. Then I start my Story draft and only then I start thinking about the World at large, to fill the blanks. Uncover the truth behind the myth.
I really appreciated the vid! I have a small suggestion that might enhance the audio quality for future videos. Consider keeping your head in relation to the microphone stationary and possibly adjust the capture gain a bit lower. While the audio leveling did a great job, there were moments where the sound experienced slight dissonance due to head movement and the software's compensation. This minor adjustment could further improve the clarity and consistency of your audio. Thanks again for your hard work!
i find that to make a world interesting its best to flood the story with details, and then build up by connecting them, like if you wanted to itroduce a new race, then start by mentioning there delicacys at a market
I feel like I've been here before, in my literature classes, creative writing classes and even research training classes. I also find this video to be comparative to "hard boiled" Worldbuilding versus "soft boiled" Worldbuilding, where the former really stretches itself to to cover everything about the world, even the ones the protagonists may never go to. The latter is a more efficient way of storytelling, onto the plot of where the characters will go, while the rest are implied. But the two ways aren't bad or good, they just have pros and cons. They are approaches to the fiction a writer wants to tell.
This is how I like to write when I construct a world I get a general idea of what the world is, how it came to be, but I never go overly detailed on it like the silmarilion, I much prefer a swordband sorcery approach where the world is just as mysterious to the reader as it is to the characters if something is not general knowledge, even if the knowledge is out their you might not ever see it until you meet someone else in the world who knows this thing, I think it's more fun this way and it makes it easier to keep track of your world especially a fantasy world where things get very out of hand very fast
Tbh, for me the difference between worlfbuilding and lore is: Worldbuilding: thinking about the houses, the currency, going deeper and explaining why where how, the world map, etc… Lore: the myths, legends, the more hidden meanings (why the character is themed red/blue and why you cant change it that easy, why the character cant have blonde hair instead of red hair, even tho it might look better character design wise)… the connection to everything Smth like this ig
Hola, me gustó mucho el video, me hizo reflexionar mucho sobre el proceso de desarrollo de algo que estoy escribiendo pero siempre me pierdo en mis propias notas. Me gustó mucho la fluidez y la tranquilidad, con la que planteas el asunto
I actually have a clever way to get around the as-you-know bs without having the have the character talk to the audience directly(which I hate as a 1st person character trope because it is overdone imo). This is also helpful because it helps me show what kind of world my world is, which is the, "if you aren't careful you will die or be maimed" kind of world. Basically, I need core basics of magic out of the way. How do we get that out of the way without making my main character by the one this is explained to? Simple, we just bring in an expendable rookie. He ultimately serves no greater purpose, and has a surface level knowledge of the system, as most people do in the world since most don't want to go through the danger of acquiring the resource and can only interact with the system in a limited capacity. So they do some explaining to the newbie about how things work, and then do some exercises with general swordplay since even though the magic is strong, it goes quick, especially when you are new to using it and dont know how to get the biggest bang for your buck. Next day they go on a mission, and the newbie gets overzealous and promptly dies. Which reinforces the "dangerous world" statement(I hate fiction that says that a place is dangerous and then shows literally nothing to back up that claim) and the readers get basic level info about how it works.
Okay, I need the lore set up first before I can start world building. I explain everything that has happening to audience, so they can become interested enough to follow the main characters on how they overcome their problems. I must these steps to encourage the audience the world I have planned for the characters interact in.
As an aspiring writer who has yet to dedicate himself and commit to writing an entire story, I realize that it’s vital to be well-read and have lots of knowledge of existing stories and fantasy to understand how to write and what has been done, and what inspires you. I’m obsessed with Tolkien, but I need more depth because I don’t just want to recreate something like middle earth. Hope that makes sense 😊
Lore is to worldbuilding what story is to plot. Also, an underapprechiated way to deliver worldbuilding are auxiliary notes. Even though I can't remember the name of it for the life of me, I do remember a comic about life on a lost colony having additional journal style pages in the back where animals, factions, vehicles and locations were described in further detail. And I loved them almost more than the story itself.
4:58 You've never talked to a fan of the Overlord light novel series by Kugane Maruyama. I like the anime, it's good junk food anime, and one of the few stories I've ever found that follows the villain as the MC in an interesting way. But some of my friends and some fans I've met tell me that the books go into excruciating detail of the most unimportant things for chapters on end, just spoon feeding every detail of how the world works and what magic items do and how cool this or that thing is and why, and they universally LOVE it. I've yet to read them myself, but I've had this explained to me by several different people, including one good friend who gushed about how tasty the spoon feeding was. It's always praised as so much detail and how it really helps immerse yourself in the world, but it sounds like an encyclopedia. And maybe that's fine for some people? It's just counter intuitive to everything you normally hear about righting advice, but it got the author several seasons of an anime and an upcoming movie, so...
I'm trying to take an approach of concept building. What concepts do i need to flesh out because they're different enough in this world and relevant enough to be important. The more mundane the difference, the more i need to know how it works because it comes up more and therefore the more changes it would make. That's my current thoughts on it.
WB vs lore is a great way to think about the different approaches to setting. Some stories need more WB, some get by with the simpler lore. I find that setting-dominant stories like real sci-fi and high fantasy need more WB, because the reader usually cares about the world as much as they do about the characters, and if the setting is inconsistent or 2D or-most importantly-if the plots and characters don't organically flow from the world, it will feel lacking. For these kinds of stories, you will need 2 layers-a primary world building layer that describes the reality of the world and subjective lore layer, which is the lens through which a character sees the world. For these stories especially, it's not important which comes first (world vs character/plot) because story development is many cycles of revising world --> revising character/plot --> revising world --> revising character/plot. The most efficient way therefore is to not spend a huge amount of time in world-building before starting to develop your characters and plot, and to understand that these early cycles will probably look nothing like the final story. That's just my method. Everyone's different.
There is this thing called a limiter which is in pretty much any editing program. It can prevent the sound not being uniform, although it would distort the load ones.
The book I want to publish started out from some random character I imagined years ago. When I started working night shifts, I couldn’t sleep, so I just let my imagination take hold of the character. For me, it was like slowly pouring ink on paper and watching it run. Now I have story, a world, and appropriate lore for the world. I just need to get it written now.
Never seen anyone separate Lore and Worldbuilding, and now that I've seen this vid, my mind's pretty much blown. I'm into screenwriting as opposed to book writing, and this is CRUCIAL to making a movie. If you want to create an original and memorable experience/story, you need to take what makes your story unique (the worldbuilding) and apply it to every aspect of your movie in a creative way (lore). the audience experiences the world through the CHARACTERS, and therefore all good/critical worldbuilding is learned in an organic way; LORE. Lore is how the character/audience experience the worldbuilding, and how they are affected by it.
My process tends to be "do a shit ton of comprehensive worldbuilding ahead of time where I figure out as much about how the world works as possible, then scrap all of it when I actually start writing and replace it all with completely different stuff that actually serves the needs of the story." The first step is there to help me establish an overall tone to the world and brainstorm potential plot devices while the story itself is still developing. For example, I spent a bunch of time researching higher-dimensional geometry only for the world of the final story to look more or less like a regular three-dimensional planet, just where familiar paths sometimes lead you to entirely different places because the stars above them are different that night, and where traveling too far from places you know can lead you in directions that it will be impossible to return from. The worldbuilding step is still important because it establishes this as a iteral part of how the word works that actually does affect things like international commerce and military logistics, and not just the author forgetting where she put things.
This is why I always wanted to be an architect as well as landscape and interior designer - I do it all and all at the same time. I love designing my world in detail and I also let the story take me by the seat of my pants. See, even if I do design every detail, that doesn't mean I have to include every detail. But, for me, knowing all about the world I've designed allows me greater freedom, both in storytelling and in tempting the reader (all of whom are imaginary atm, but that's a separate issue). That said, detailed world building is something I do typically only with novels and the short stories set within that world; I wrote a sci-fi short story where I only developed the world as much as the story needed (though I actually created further details off to the side for the fun of it, and to help in case I wish to develop further this particular universe). Btw, you "imply," we "infer." (Sorry, I can't help myself. 😁)
The best advice I've ever heard on worldbuiling is that writing a world is not about adding detail on every thing but making people believe it because it's logical. If things make sense. People will complete the thinking for you.
I personally prefer to invest little into worldbuilding. I prefer to just start writing arround a core idea, as you say in the video, and only when I'm done I add the details I think are worth adding. No, you don't need to spend time on developing too much places or things that are far away from the main plot. Just do it if it feels necessary, otherwise you should be okay.
I love your videos but if i'm using a headphone and sometimes the audio quality just.. at the start its a bit quiet then you just insert a clip where the audiois cranked up to 11. Example 0:54 and its out of nowhere if you have headphones on 100% its really basically bass boosted
As a gardener. I tell you that there is a method to the madness. I started out with writing the story of one character and as i progressed I kept adding what felt correct as I went. Expanding it from his point of view. Stuff like countries, maps, borders, languages require a more architectural touch to them as you DO need a more structured hand when it comes to these. Once the 1st draft was completed I went over it again and tweaked, fine tuned and replaced parts that felt could be better until i was happy. On the final draft as we speak and it is a beast to behold, but I couldn't be happier. Tl;dr 1st draft could basically be summarized from a gardener's pov as "fuck it, we ballin and deal with it later."
There is one author who somehow managed to make grinding the plot to a halt and cramming in half a chapter of exposition multiple times per book work. A couple of times. Walter Moers’ “13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear” uses a sort of telepathic lexicon to give information to the reader and the pov character at the same time, and sometimes he even uses how this information is delivered in misleading or inopportune ways to further the plot. In two of his other books: “Rumo and his miraculous Adventures” and “The City of dreaming Book”, he doesn’t have that plot device, but he still manages to deliver at times chapter long exposition as histories or stories in ways that are interesting and at times the sheer absurdity and creativity of the ideas he puts out manage to make these segments very enjoyable. That said, he doesn’t always manage to strike that balance and a lot of his more recent (and hitherto untranslated) books are weaker, the newest one “The Island of a thousand Lighthouses” was… difficult. Because the focus was so much on detailing the setting of the island it took place on that the first point at which the plot reared its head was at 300 pages, halfway through the book. Only to vanish again and only pop out briefly. But the climax of the story the main character still has no idea what’s going on and we only get his perspective. Basically: Plot all happened in the background, while or pov character was off… playing fantasy cricket. Or visiting a museeum. Or on a hiking trip. Or taking care of his pet snails. I swear. These snails get more coverage than the big, mysterious monster the book teases the reader with… But the other three books I’ve mentioned: Bit of an acquired taste but definitely worth a look.
I'm a scene-based writer. It means I start with neither characters nor worlds, but scenes. Heresy, I know. I shudder at myself😅 But I also enjoy worldbuilding on the side. I have piles upon piles of notes, designs, graphs and maps. God only knows it any of it will make it into the story... I just like having the material on hand in case I need it. It also helps me decide what is the "base level" of knowledge for my characters that drive their decisions
this is a really good thought prompt. i'm not sure i agree with the message. but constructing plotlines which shaped the the culture up until now, even if they are just plothooks for prequels, do seem like they would be better embellishments than trying to fix the magic system to the world and the population having perfect knowledge with no speculation about it.
Great stuff, man! New sub! But holy shit dude your audio 😂 Idk if you could move the mic closer to center without ruining the shot but something needs to change. It's noticeable on my awful phone speaker how much the volume varies. Keep on, though, you're really good! 😊 Edit: my process for a story I may never actually write because it lives so comfortably in my head, is I start with a story I want to tell about characters who are living in this world and then I write the world in a way that would make it more interesting. I try to pick up on the general themes of their character arcs and sorta build from there. Like I have this one character who's basically a champagne socialist, another who's a paladin trying to be the one good cop, and a third scrappy delinquent orphan type and together they all sort of form a found family bonding over their increasingly urgent activism. And then I came up with the idea that there was essentially a magical nuke dropped on the area where the major prison is and it's sort of turned the whole place into a wasteland. Lends the area a feel of post-war neglect, while also leaning in to the themes of police/prison brutality I already have for the scrappy orphan and the paladin to deal with, and giving the champagne socialist something absolutely devastating to radicalize her. DEFINITELY not for everybody but it works for me 😊 Edit 2: I decided screw it, I'll take a crack at actually writing the dang thing. Thanks, man, you inspired somebody ❤
kinda to reiterate what a few people said but i like doing both. i like writing myths and histories and countries and characters and lists for worldbuilding. its for me. but my stories? they're built from that framework, yeah, but its not all shared. For example in a recent chapter about a multiversal traveler i had them encounter a priest of a god in a separate project of mine. i mention the other world casually, a deity of a realm where the gods of that underworld don't know their place. did i mention that that realm had magic cowboys or a giant kitchen of souls, or the church built around the corpse of an eldritch thing? no, because that's for me to know, and them to see hints of
Lore should inform worldbuilding and worldbuilding should, through characters, settings and plot, set up implict lore that's only ever hinted at. I very much subscribe to Hemingway's iceberg writing strategy.
That is so ridiculously freeing. Worldbuilding feels like it has to be correct. Lore feels like it only has to be correct from the perspective of the belief.
For the involvement of the gods in my setting, i would put them at a 1.5. They have the potential to interact with the world directly, but it is contingent on several factors, including belief and circumstance. When they aren't interacting directly, they're interacting indirectly.
![On Worldbuilding: Fallen Civilizations! [ Forbidden West | Halo | Doctor Who ]](/img/n.gif)
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Thanks ! I was looking for something to outline my stories. Really helpful
hmmm 0:28 in and i actually like this deliniation better than how i always viewed it being that worldbuilding was describing how the systems of your world work like magic or souls or some ambigous life energy or etc while lore was the history of the world. personally tho again, i think imma use the defenitions you put forward cause it better deliniates the 2 and gives the right vibes you mentioend to when you talk about the 'lore'
1:00 for me, im still in the beginning stages of writing my own story actually and i FIRMLY stand beside the take that making a good and well thought out world first is the most important thing from all the shows i have watched and taken the time to break down why they do or dont work for me and everyone else who has watched them with my biggest inspiration being one piece. full stop i believe firmly that if you make a well thought out world to the point that anyone could point anywhere on a map and you can give them the full breakdown of the culture, the politics, the buisness deals, the local geography and how that affects their relationships with the world, and etc. THAT is how you can than make an ACTUALLY REALLY GOOD story! i think this because if you know all those details, when you make ANY character, you dont have to find a contrived spot for them in the story and than if they become more important later because you decieded they needed to be for the story, you dont than haveta go back and retcon in story for that character first as instead, you simply make each and every character who might show up as if they were real people and people who could totally have an impact on the story later because even if your viewers/readers only ever meet them once, the history you make for that character to make them fit in their own personal journey they are going through in the world will be MORE than apparent. its much harder in some ways but it not only opens the door of possibilities to bring in whoever you want, whenever you want without having to find ways to justify it and MAKE them important, but it also makes your world feel REAL in the way brandon sanderson decribes the fully capitalized world 'REAL'. this REALness gives your world and its characters immersion that just wouldnt be possibile if this wasnt your first consideration and given that every type of story structure has been done at this point in human history of hundreds of thousands of years of story telling, theres no point in even trying to make a 'unique' story first anyways epsecially since if you have REAL characters in a REAL world, the story should be something that just comes about naturally from them going about their lives however they would maybe with also just a little bit of fate touched motivation to go in any given direction..... all in all, its worldbuilding first, characters second, and than story as the by far least important and only final touches type thing.
1:10 i HEAVILY disagree that story or world first is only 'a cosmetic difference' for my stated reasons but also because the only benefits i see to story first is 2 things with the first being its far easier (lazier) and secondly, it is far quicker so if you arent intended for more than a few hour viewing like a movie than this works out plenty well enough for a one of type movie. ultimately tho, story first makes all characters loose that REAL feeling and hurts immersion as it becomes WAY to easy to make the characters all simply fill roles needed for the story and leave their personal history so far out of consideration as you wouldnt even know what their history would be until you make the world anyways that either their history feels alien to the world they are in or like an afterthought whenever you get around to actually doing it because it would be. beyond that it makes the world that your characters likely now feel alien to if you made their history of their lives before the world, feel like a true theatre play backdrop rather than a real world to care about... the best example of this is the entirety of the dc and marvel comics. both of these have their characters stories first and than their characters histories and personalities second with the world is SO MUCH of an aftertthought that its just randomly set in the real world with retcon history changes constantly within the universes own history to add in not just new characters but entire orginizations, types of magic systems, historical events that apparently no one knew about before, and entire new races and cultures of people like how the mutants just kinda appeared one day in the public conciousness....... like it leads to stories that are so disjointed and disconnected that the only thing to latch onto is good and fun characters which is why thats THE ONLY thing fans of either talk about because the worlds and stories are so abitrary and random and never feel truly REAL... story first KILLS so much of what could be done and is only a tool for lazy writers if you ask me.
2:10 ok so i liked the distinction between lore and worldbuilding but i think your not understanding NO MATTER what you like more between gardening and architecture in terms of worldbuilding, you NEED to at least as the writer always have the answers so basically if you ask me, any good writer goes world first via the arcitecture style of world building and than uses the gardening style when it comes to GIVING that information to your audience. you as the writer should ALWAYS know ALL the details about your world but than simply leave it to only showing what comes up as it would be revealed to your characters which is what oda did with his world and if you ask me, is why its even managed to nearly eclipse superman, batman, and spiderman all in terms of total fans and viewership...... going down the route of 'worldbuilding on the fly' is what leads to contradictions and obvious retcons that ruin immersion and take the wind out of the sails of your audience of being able to immerse themselves into the story and actually even if only temporarily, BELIEVE the world is real and that they are right there alongside the characters in the show. again, i firmly standby the stance that people who do their worldbuilding and not just their lore in a gardener style are being HEAVILY lazy and that is exactly what leads to poor stories that people will always forget due to the obvious laziness in not caring about making a good and REAL world that people can immerse themselves into.
0:53 headphone warning (or speakers at nighttime)
yeah … sorry about that one 🥲
@@ecyinka i thought it was intended lol
hoooooly crap i thought i'd broken my headphones, thanks
Was not ready for it lol
I thought my phone speaker broke😂
I’ve always felt that what you don’t tell your audience can be as important as what you do tell them. You need to leave little spaces in your narrative. Strategically placed so that they don’t become plot holes, but large enough that the audience can peer down them and wonder what’s at the bottom and what they might find along the way down there. Give your audience the room necessary to actively participate in the story. ‘Course I’m coming at this FROM the perspective of the audience and one who has specific tastes so maybe this isn’t always gonna work.
Also I think giving too much information at the start can be less Intresting
So that makes me wonder, what rabbit holes should I leave for the reader? Should certain things never be answered in the book even if I, as the author know about it?
My magic system is very, very deeply ingrained into my world, much like water is ingrained into ours. It's almost like a food chain/water cycle of sorts. However, things get weird when it comes to souls. To minimize the explanation needed, the basic premise is that your resource for casting is tied directly to your soul, and you cast with your soul, but without a body, you cannot control how much of the resource you burn.
My question there is whether or not to ever offer that as an explanation to the readers or whether or not to hint at it, because the BBEG is stuck in his soul for most of it, and he is more or less the only person with enough of the resource to actually pull off staying in soul form since when your body dies, your soul has to run off of the magic resource and the drain is a rather large amount. I'm wondering if it is a good idea to build suspense by indirectly telling the readers(through conversations between characters) that the soul is what the resource is attributed to, and what processes it, but with very little information to go off of on people in just soul form(since they usually sort of evaporate in minutes) it is entirely unknown what someone can do without a body.
Would that be leaving a plot-hole for readers to go, "Well why didn't BBEG just do X?", or would that just keep readers guessing on what BBEG is planning.
A good example of this is Sukuna from JJK, who was viewed as crazy powerful, and when he was asked to make a pact to do something, he said no, which due to the audience not knowing a specific rule at that point, made Sukuna scarier since he was refusing power when in actuality there was nothing he could do even if he wanted to.
@@thecyanpanda241 I’m not really talking about “this has an active effect on story events” stuff. More the kind of background detail that gives the world that lived in feel. Stuff like the hobbits stopping in some ancient ruins for tomatoes and bacon on their way to Rivendell. Or all the stuff in Breath of the Wild that led to the fan community theorizing extensively about the Zonai ruins and what that culture would have looked like. Things that give your world depth but actively benefit from little explanation. Or if you aren’t looking to emphasize the history of the world you could do it with current events. “This is just like Budapest.” “You and I remember Budapest very differently.” If your audience is left going “this character has a very obvious solution to their problems and the reason why they didn’t take it is never explained” that’s not room for speculation, that’s a plot hole. If your character overhears a conversation in passing that sounds like it might be an in-depth guide on “how to fuck your livestock” but doesn’t hear enough to be certain they weren’t misunderstanding something, that’s interesting. Or at least amusing.
Same thing with music. They literally have a symbol for silence and it's subdivisions.
Yeah, absolutely. A good book can feel like the world is a real place when the author has built enough of the world to see a little more of the world than they use in the plot.
Having just a few things that have minor effects on the story from beyond the immediate setting is a good way to do this.
You can overhear conversations, see products from other locations, and incorporate locations into characters personality or backstories.
I’ve always seen “lore” as the stories and myths that informs the relationship between the world and it’s inhabitants. It’s a matter of WHY rather than WHAT.
this is why his advice is actually something i disagree with. i made a post earlier saying something like this: lore shouldnt be world building because:
1) everything in the story already does world building(if the character buys something, you are telling the reader how the economy works, if you make the main character get arrested for a crime they didnt commit, you are telling how bad or corrupt the legal system is and so on).
but also
2)lore works best, when the reader doesnt know how true it is. if you have a lore about werewolves, but then you show it was slightly wrong, you didnt do world building with your lore, you did the opposite, you compromised your world building in order to fool the reader, which is where lore works best, as a secondary but truly unreliable narrator, that might be honest, or completely wrong about things, and its up to the reader to try and think if they should trust that info or not.
yep exactly like lore can be anything lore of your dad or country or some lost biblical mystery or some past clamity
im the kind of person who just makes world for their own sake and leaves stories for later, so i do everything in excess
valid!
So do I 😂
Pretty much that's what I'm doing with all my world
Is that a reverse of One Piece?
Sometimes creating world is creating stories especially when you create fictional history.
We writing peak fiction with tis one 🗣️🔥
get it done!
Bro its my favorite Farmer Femboy🗣️🔥🔥🔥
Not the waffled one
As a chronic worldbuilder, I consider what is and isn’t lore to be just another aspect of the worldbuilding. I know how the gods created my world and why. I know what happens to souls after death and where spirits come from. But what people in the story know and believe about those things is just another important facet of the world. It helps that I’ve gotten to a point where I don’t really care if the reader knows anything about my cool worldbuilding as long as they underatand what’s necessary for the story. I build the world to make it feel alive to me, and then I use what I have to make the story feel alive for my readers. For the story I’m currently writing I’m actually trying to explain as little as possible. If my readers are very confused and can still follow the story I’ve succeeded XD
that’s an interesting process! i think a lot of people can actually relate 🤔
The folk lore
I relate to this so much. I love the process of worldbuilding an intimate & elaborate cosmos with different planes of existence, a grand history of the world's many civilizations spanning thousands of years... and also thinking heavily about how the characters in my world know next to none of that. The worldbuilding is the canvas & deciding what people in-world know is just a splotch of paint along with so many others. It's a fun part of the process. Thanks for sharing.
What do you do once you've come up with the world? Is it actually ever used for anything?
@@SwordTune Personally it depends. Some of them I try to write into stories, currently working on a novel and a short story on the side, and sometimes it’s just something I build for the fun of it. Some of the most fun I’ve had with friends is building worlds together. That’s a goal onto itself I think.
As a huge fan of souls games, I am also a huge fan of good lore.
Item descriptions, secret bosses, interesting locations, character dialogue, etc.
In books, I’d say the best way to hint at hidden lore is through vague passages in books (in your books), mysterious ruins, carvings on the wall, perhaps some legendary artifacts of some sort, all that tie back to events that you hint at, but don’t include in your stories.
In one of my books, I was writing an immortal character that was cursed long ago to only be able to speak in fancy language (archaic, analogies, metaphors, poems, etc). He can’t choose, he comes up with what he wants to say, and then the curse takes effects and transformed his speech into something almost intelligible.
He speaks this way about past events, and I leave it up to the reader to pick up on hints, clues, and details, decipher them, and then link them to what the immortal says.
And even with all of that, just like dark souls, you can really only pick up the vaguest silhouette of past events.
Understated.
I just hope that unlike Souls-Borne series, it has some point to it, unless the point of it in your story is it to be vague for whatever reason. I dunno, I like lore in Souls games, don't get me wrong but with no narrative to use it in any satisfying way (for me at least) it losses some points for me.
@@ryujin8754 That's interesting. What do you think, the point could be, if there was to be one?
And if you maybe indulge me further, have you run across any media, which does the understated storytelling, with a point.
Anything would be appreciated, but if not, you have already given me, plenty to think about. Thank you for your comments, Ryujin..
Sounds like a good book
@@ryujin8754 the point of the lore of my story is to provide background. Add layers to my storytelling. Give reasons for the thought it’s that happen. Potentially set up future events.
The reader can learn the lore and also learn why the antagonist wanted what he wanted, where the protagonist’s bloodline originated from, how past rituals and events influenced the current events, the patters seen in the past that could foretell the future.
I want people to be able to actively have fun reading and deciphering the lore that I write.
I want people to be able to debate lore and understand more about it in a civil manner.
I might be asking too much, but that is my end goal.
Its so interesting how art is a collaborative effort between maker and witnesses. The careful balances of world building seem like an example of that
Exac
Yes! Thank you! I just realized this a few weeks ago and I haven't heard anyone else mention it
That's actually really cool!
I always start with the story - usually a scene will come to me then I structure the plot and build the characters around that scene. So the lore comes after as well, but I try to flesh it out as much as possible before putting pen to paper. The world needs to feel lived in not just there to serve the plot.
shout-out to the random earrape
Read this just in time to "find out the hard way". Thnx m8.
@@TODavis__me too lol
The first time I thought about how a softer exposition style works wonders for immersion was during Mad Max. At some point they enter a swamp with these dudes that traverse the landscape on silts. It's never addressed. They're just there and it made my imagination run wild.
you mean krekekapanõ?
I've always thought for the extra worldbuilding that never gets used would be saving it behind the scenes content to get people who are already big enough fans to ask deeper questions and get them even more excited about your work.
My brother, we need the podcast. You have the voice for it. It would be a gift to us all.
this is YTP level of mic stability. Cool vid anyways - subscribed :D
Regardless of how much I subjectively love your videos (a ton), they are objectively very well made. Flawless structure, perfect pacing, simple yet efficient editing, accurate references, plus you're blessed with a quite pleasant voice. Your hard work shows and bears witness of your passion for the subjects. I just can't get enough
not the best video to comment on editing when the audio is a nightmare.
What I really like about your videos is that you don't say "this is how it's done" or "don't do this" but instead, you're aware that people's writing process is different, and people have different approaches to writing that can be just as valid. You also approach it from many different angles, rather than just 'making a cool world' which is neat.
I generally focus very little on worldbulding, only as much as I can get away with while writing the story, so most worldbulding advice/essay videos, while interesting, don't speak to me and my writing too much. But your videos are different and I love them for it.
Although we can all agree 'as you know' is bad exposition, lol. Although exposition is hard, so I sympathize.
You should make a video placing popular world building authors on a spectrum from architect to gardener!
I love how the comment above yours is literally about him not labeling people as right or wrong when it comes to writing a story.
i think for me, the locked tomb series is the best example of this! especially with the first book, gideon the ninth. totally recommend for anyone interested in a post-earth scifi fantasy (not dissimilar to dune)
NEW YINKA VIDEO
Great advice as always. If only I actually wrote my lore and worldbuilding down...
Thoughtful perspective on Lore vs Architecture. Subjective vs Objective. I've never thought about it that way before. I'm working on something right now, and this insight will be helpful. Thanks!
I personally write purely for fun, and I admit I don't look at worldbuilding that much, I tend do think about the places where my characters go but in terms of worldbuilding I like to keep the entire multiverse for my places to create the story
Your voice is so calming! Love the video and really like the pacing. Great ideas
A very original outlook on storytelling, made me think about it in a different way. Also, big thanks for the ad - it may be the first time I found it to be 100% what I needed. Great video overall!
Love the distinction between worldbuilding and lore - and this video made me think a lot about unrealiable exposition. We tend to assume the info dump is going to be reputable, but what if it's not? What if Professor McGonagall was a terrible teacher? What if the Hitchhicker's Guide had out of date info?
As always, brilliant video - wish you added some of your own writing as examples around ;)
Cheers, man!
yeah, wheel of time is awesome at unreliable narrator, the different povs never have the same interpretation for an event!
The idea of the Guide being out of date really struck a chord with me. I had almost seen it as infallible. I don't remember if it happened in the book or not, but Arthur was traveling with Ford, a data-gatherer for the guide, so what if Arthur had helped Ford add new entries?
I wonder if the secret to flying made it in.
I actually have a short story that's largely unreliable info where everything is the hallucinations/dreams of a dying self-aware AI.
@@DeetotheDubs if you think of those bits as 'lore' rather than 'worldbuilding', then it becomes easier to imagine scenes like that, right?
What if somebody got something wrong?
Your story wouldn't be called Simulations In Loss, would it?@@DeetotheDubs
@@BJGvideos No, I hadn't heard of that one, but I may have to check it out.
I love your explanation on world building. I enjoy doing so so much. It's thrilling to create your own worlds and flesh them out. I have been writing since high-school but began making actual novels a few years ago. I've got so many projects in mind and not enough people to share ideas with. I literally have no friend who share the same interests lol. But listening to you and the foundry help keep me motivated.
As a LORE ENTHUSIAST AND aspiring artist.
I manage to figure out a balance when doing drafts before online publishing for final draft of foolproof read how to simultaneously fit the genre of the story (target audience/readers) and seamlessly felt the pacing is enough for the lore to be felt that seems natural
I do worldbuilding for fun, and use those worlds for my DMing. This really results in a kind of bi-directional world building. I write the large scale and character independent world building stuff top down because I enjoy it. And I write the lore that my players experience bottom up from their perspective. This strategy turned out really well since the fact that I have an objective view of how the world works I can easily come up with new lore on the fly when players try to dig deeper during a game session.
I do something similar with RPGs I play, whenever I choose a new class, I try to flush out a new character I'm designing.
that's the ideal for DMs and why most TTRPG systems already have fleshed out settings for newer DMs to run campaigns with
OMG YAY! Love these videos
I love doing this. It's my favorite way of creating a sense of setting. I've taken to referring to it as "diegetic worldbuilding" on writing resumes, just because it makes the distinction a little more clear.
I once wrote an entire academic lecture about how magic works in one of my D&D settings, but because it is voiced and from a characterized point of view, it is clearly a biased and incomplete take, punctuated by counterarguments to briefly mentioned competing theories. It is not a thing that is meant to be seen by anyone but me, necessarily- but having it there in my mountain of notes and writings means I have a good foundation for what an informed understanding of magic might look like in one culture in my world, and can then scale that understanding or counterpoint it with other characters, philosophies, and cultures.
I often do this in lieu of making too many "hard" top-down Truths about my worlds. To me, the world remaining subjective and up for debate makes for a more dynamic, lived-in, and realistic sense of place.
Me and some friends of mine started creating a world for a potential D&D campaign on a whim recently. As someone who is completely new tp this these videos have helped me a lot. Thank you. :)
Great video, i hope nobody goes off saying some dumb shit like “pls get a better microphone “ you stay doing your thing. I really needed this video
Another fantastic discussion. Subtle points and great examples. I'll have to come back to this one and pause all over the place because my mind was chasing the ramifications of your points down the rabbit holes of my own novel before you ripped me along to the next one. Sigh. The downside of delivering so many cogent arguments in a short video.
i like how you talk and move u seem very genuinely into it while still being informative
Good point on the 'worldbuilding makes me so cool' side of things. What I feel is most important about a story is how it makes the reader/viewer feel, not how awesome the writer is or wants the reader/viewer to think they are.
I've been trying to write a novel for two years now and the worldbuilding for one of my settings has been holding me back for so long, but I feel like this approach is really going to help!
glad i could help! also i’m an avid viewer of your channel 👀
I started with building a town first with my story, & then so many attributes about my MC solved itself. Then the city over had constraints, which made that easier to solve, the characters motives had to make sense to the environment they come from, & story telling for me is like solving a jigsaw puzzle
I start with the characters too.
The characters then bring me to their personal history and where they come from/their magic (if that’s part of it) etc. and then once I know the characters origins I can build a world where that’s possible and start writing it.
For my current series it started out as an alternative earth and then I figured out there was a second world for specific magic users that happen to include my MC.
I plot and then start digging into and explore the world as I write
Also Milanote is so good! I’ve been using it for 3+ years now and it’s well worth the subscription price for unlimited boards - I highly recommend it as a writer/creative
Good way to discuss this! Nice vid.
I'm in the process of writing an RPG, and the big issue right now is determining what will be the best system to build from (or if I'll build my own). That said, I'd say the concept I'm building is big on Lore, low on World-building.
The goal being to set up a perspective and a genre for the game, but making the setting and realities behind the perspective largely up to the GM and/or the players. A mystery I find interesting with no canon answer.
I can't exactly offer an answer to worldbuilding/lore, but I can give you a magic system. It's ironically what I like to call "The honor system".
At it's most basic, the honor system is a "kill big thing, get resource, use resource for magic to kill bigger thing" system. Kill something strong to get a resource that is exclusively for magic. My magic is only derivatives of fire and in very rare instances healing, no ice or anything like that.
Past surface level it gets deeper. People way different ways of thinking, and as such will have different ways of using the system. Some people say that a big explosion is enough, others opt to make weapons out compressing and slowly burning the resource, others use it as an alternative to cellular respiration to enhance their physical abilities, and some have techniques utilizing multiple concepts from these lines of thinking.
I don't want to ramble, but things get deeper still from a system that, at its most basic, is just "kill thing, do magic"
Entire cultures and countries can be shaped over how interacting with the system is interpreted(barbaric or honorable) and the actions of those who interacted with it(benevolent or genocidal).
Even abstract things like how it is distributed between species, why creatures like dragons have so much while a squirrel has no honor within it, or why only humans can interact with it(in my story at least) and much more.
If you want to know more about it, feel free to ask, I've been developing it for the past couple weeks and while I'm still figuring out the kinks, I am very happy with the results.
Thank you for your shared knowledge. You perfectly explained why I have such a high craving and intrigue for Lore and why I found my new way of worldbuilding in form of perspectives far more intriguing lately.
I'm one who only overtly tells the audience what they need to know, but I _will_ write the characters as knowing as much of the whole pie is relevent for them to know. Often times what someone _doesn't_ know is more impactful than what they do know. Properly siloing who knows what, including the audience, i feel is important to creating an engaging story.
I like to start by creating the world first and then the lore. I like to do so because it's easier for me to create a story out of world rather than a world out of a story. Honestly, I think both go hand in hand, the world is the frame, and the lore is what gives life to the world, the lore makes the world move. By creating the world first, the whole story will feel more "alive" in a sense, you can feel an ecosystem, and more importantly, the "causes and effects" of every actions is easier to plan.
As you said though, creating a world first makes you want to show it off, you want to show the reader everything that is happening because you worked hours on it. I personally think that when you create a world, the best thing you can do is to not show everything about it, you need to leave some secrets and things to discover out there that the reader can go find by himself. Another great aspect of world building is that it gives a story a sort of "infinite lifespan". I like to believe that a story with a complete world is never finished, what we see is only the end of the story of the original author, but there are still infinite possibilities to explore later, and even better, the original author doesn't need to be the one to explore them, fans can do so as well via fanfictions.
For me, the story is most important. Lore and worldbuilding is there to heavily 'support' the story, to make sense of it.
I think I've kinda created my own method similar to this. Shaelin Writer also have similar method, which is she called *"Intuitive world-building".*
So this "world-building" method is more like creating a narative over a your main narative. Call it a *backstory* or a *lore* like you said.
This method is a solution for writer who dislike going into too much technicality and planning the stuffs. You know, the boring stuffs; politics, economics, government, geography, etc..
In Shaelin's video, it's interesting where she talked about the same problem as you on what make worldbuilding complex? Is it *VAST* worldbuilding, but lack *DEPTH?*
Then I realized worldbuilding made from authors always divided by being *vast vs deep.*
They can tackle so much things, but in reality its only surface level. Or you can tackle few things, but each aspects are having deeper lore going on.
My worldbuilding is shaped through a central story concept and the characters whom the story follows. Or I'll imagine a fun activity or an interesting landscape and imagine how characters would interact there which turns into a story. And the details of the world bend and morph to move the characters along the storied path in an intriguing way. I use the environment to be either nice or mean to my characters as way of moving them where I want them to go. I set details up along the way that will be followed up in future stories.
Great video. Your tips are good and helpful. Thank you for sharing! World Building is lots of fun but it is easy to get carried away and jam too much information in your story.
Thanks for elucidating this. I'd always written lore instead of "world-building," but didn't recognize the difference until you pointed it out.
2:09 Okay, you're just casually throwing the best arts out there WTF???
Great points man, imma def take in the lore building more into my project
5:03 little late here but a funny thing that happens to me, in my circle of friends of a specific world we read, my friends are always complaining that the author explains a lot of things but not enough, this isn't to say that you are wrong, just something funny i remembered during the video, great video by the way!
Treating lore as "lens" for world-building sounds like a good process. I really like world-building. It's fun. I used to try to cram as much as I could into the story, but that led to issues of pacing and length and such. I'm working on getting a better harmony between telling the plot and including only parts of world-building that are directly relevant to the plot, or making a plot that is about world-building if I wand to do more.
Brooooooo a channel all about worldbuilding 😁💜 amazing!!
Got a subscriber for life Iv been going to big for so long and started with a character just to try and it helped me so much I was looking back at how I did things always and it’s just been so overwhelming
Amazing video. You explained everything so clearly and perfectly and made excellent points. Thank you
This is a great video. I love the reference to that Batman movie, i almost thought like 5 people total had even seen it. Subbed!
I feel it better to do a bit of both, you make characters and think of things you want, then you find a way for it to fit in the world. But also sometimes its good to world build things first, so that way things don't contradict the story or world system. I myself have my own notes too that I will not share with my friends cause it's a huge peice of lore that can solve many of the weird and mysterious parts of the world, but I kinda just want to watch everyone scratch their heads while I sit there knowing
Great video (except for the random seige on my hear holes lol).
So for in my experience writing the initial draft is all about efficiency and bare bones. I'm laying out the skeleton of the story. Along the way I make connections between interesting ideas for worldbuilding, plot, character and scenes. I work to mesh those together as I go. Often this makes my original plot outline far more conplex and interesting.
Afterwards, I return to my worldbuilding and start working out the broader concepts. Often I've picked up ideas on what the cultures or tech, religions or magics, look like. So I start stringing those together.
Once I've done a bunch of worldbuilding, I then take that time to work on a second pass through the story where I try to layer in lore bits.
For instance, in one scene my two main characters were walking down the street having a conversation. So nothing really happened in the background and they reach their destination. Upon the second pass I realized that this district that they are in could have a bit more flair to it. On the artificial world where the story took place each major district was run by one of the primary pantheons of the civilization. That man I had all this interesting lore and setting to hint at.
So I had small moments where the characters would walk beneath certain architectural structures and I would likely describe them. I would mention how the streets were being cleaned by the undead who had been forced into service because they aren't deserving of Eternal rest just yet due to some criminal misdeed.
It took the scene from a typical talk and walk to something that was interesting and unique. It felt like they were moving through a fleshed out City and culture.
Anyways those are my thoughts, I hope they helped.
If you want plot twists based on world building and lore you include instances where the characters significantly misunderstand how their world works, and reveal that truth for the twist.
I tend to think about how the world works, and when I get an idea, I figure out whether it's what the characters think about the world, or if it's how it actually works. Then I expand the other side as necessary.
But most of the time I base most things around the characters and plot, since those are what's important to the story. If a plot doesn't work with a certain world building element, I change the latter (unless that makes other plots incompatible).
I like your take on the World building debate. I personally think of a Theme with some very limited World building premises. What makes this World/Story stick out. What are some ground rules. Once I have them I go to Lore. What myths do I want people to tell. Then I start my Story draft and only then I start thinking about the World at large, to fill the blanks. Uncover the truth behind the myth.
0:53, bro wanted to make sure you HEARD him
I really appreciated the vid! I have a small suggestion that might enhance the audio quality for future videos. Consider keeping your head in relation to the microphone stationary and possibly adjust the capture gain a bit lower. While the audio leveling did a great job, there were moments where the sound experienced slight dissonance due to head movement and the software's compensation. This minor adjustment could further improve the clarity and consistency of your audio. Thanks again for your hard work!
i find that to make a world interesting its best to flood the story with details, and then build up by connecting them, like if you wanted to itroduce a new race, then start by mentioning there delicacys at a market
I feel like I've been here before, in my literature classes, creative writing classes and even research training classes.
I also find this video to be comparative to "hard boiled" Worldbuilding versus "soft boiled" Worldbuilding, where the former really stretches itself to to cover everything about the world, even the ones the protagonists may never go to.
The latter is a more efficient way of storytelling, onto the plot of where the characters will go, while the rest are implied.
But the two ways aren't bad or good, they just have pros and cons. They are approaches to the fiction a writer wants to tell.
Love this. My latest worldbuilding project started with just lore
This is how I like to write when I construct a world I get a general idea of what the world is, how it came to be, but I never go overly detailed on it like the silmarilion, I much prefer a swordband sorcery approach where the world is just as mysterious to the reader as it is to the characters if something is not general knowledge, even if the knowledge is out their you might not ever see it until you meet someone else in the world who knows this thing, I think it's more fun this way and it makes it easier to keep track of your world especially a fantasy world where things get very out of hand very fast
Character creates the lore that builds the world. A series of “but why?”s. The story is the character going on a tour of the lore and the world.
Tbh, for me the difference between worlfbuilding and lore is:
Worldbuilding: thinking about the houses, the currency, going deeper and explaining why where how, the world map, etc…
Lore: the myths, legends, the more hidden meanings (why the character is themed red/blue and why you cant change it that easy, why the character cant have blonde hair instead of red hair, even tho it might look better character design wise)… the connection to everything
Smth like this ig
Hola, me gustó mucho el video, me hizo reflexionar mucho sobre el proceso de desarrollo de algo que estoy escribiendo pero siempre me pierdo en mis propias notas. Me gustó mucho la fluidez y la tranquilidad, con la que planteas el asunto
I actually have a clever way to get around the as-you-know bs without having the have the character talk to the audience directly(which I hate as a 1st person character trope because it is overdone imo). This is also helpful because it helps me show what kind of world my world is, which is the, "if you aren't careful you will die or be maimed" kind of world. Basically, I need core basics of magic out of the way. How do we get that out of the way without making my main character by the one this is explained to? Simple, we just bring in an expendable rookie. He ultimately serves no greater purpose, and has a surface level knowledge of the system, as most people do in the world since most don't want to go through the danger of acquiring the resource and can only interact with the system in a limited capacity. So they do some explaining to the newbie about how things work, and then do some exercises with general swordplay since even though the magic is strong, it goes quick, especially when you are new to using it and dont know how to get the biggest bang for your buck. Next day they go on a mission, and the newbie gets overzealous and promptly dies. Which reinforces the "dangerous world" statement(I hate fiction that says that a place is dangerous and then shows literally nothing to back up that claim) and the readers get basic level info about how it works.
As someone who has dedicated years to developing lore for a fantasy world, I’m really excited about this video.
gHonestly.. i didn't knew how i needed to knwo the difference between worldbuilding and lore.. thank you
this video is sponsored by grammarly
@@VoiceOfDistortion And Grammarly is sponsored by fingers, that are faster than their brain...
@@VoiceOfDistortion and eyes who think that it doesn't even matter^^
Okay, I need the lore set up first before I can start world building. I explain everything that has happening to audience, so they can become interested enough to follow the main characters on how they overcome their problems. I must these steps to encourage the audience the world I have planned for the characters interact in.
Worldbuilding is your grade school history textbook; lore is the sidebar/inset personal stories that you actually remember.
As an aspiring writer who has yet to dedicate himself and commit to writing an entire story, I realize that it’s vital to be well-read and have lots of knowledge of existing stories and fantasy to understand how to write and what has been done, and what inspires you. I’m obsessed with Tolkien, but I need more depth because I don’t just want to recreate something like middle earth. Hope that makes sense 😊
Lore is to worldbuilding what story is to plot.
Also, an underapprechiated way to deliver worldbuilding are auxiliary notes.
Even though I can't remember the name of it for the life of me, I do remember a comic about life on a lost colony having additional journal style pages in the back where animals, factions, vehicles and locations were described in further detail. And I loved them almost more than the story itself.
4:58 You've never talked to a fan of the Overlord light novel series by Kugane Maruyama. I like the anime, it's good junk food anime, and one of the few stories I've ever found that follows the villain as the MC in an interesting way. But some of my friends and some fans I've met tell me that the books go into excruciating detail of the most unimportant things for chapters on end, just spoon feeding every detail of how the world works and what magic items do and how cool this or that thing is and why, and they universally LOVE it. I've yet to read them myself, but I've had this explained to me by several different people, including one good friend who gushed about how tasty the spoon feeding was. It's always praised as so much detail and how it really helps immerse yourself in the world, but it sounds like an encyclopedia. And maybe that's fine for some people? It's just counter intuitive to everything you normally hear about righting advice, but it got the author several seasons of an anime and an upcoming movie, so...
I'm trying to take an approach of concept building. What concepts do i need to flesh out because they're different enough in this world and relevant enough to be important. The more mundane the difference, the more i need to know how it works because it comes up more and therefore the more changes it would make. That's my current thoughts on it.
6:02 Okay, this is FUCKING SICK, never felt grateful for an add
6:25 YEEEEESSS, THAT'S WHAT IM TALKING ABOUT!!!!!! THAT'S WHY HE'S THE MVP!!!
WB vs lore is a great way to think about the different approaches to setting. Some stories need more WB, some get by with the simpler lore. I find that setting-dominant stories like real sci-fi and high fantasy need more WB, because the reader usually cares about the world as much as they do about the characters, and if the setting is inconsistent or 2D or-most importantly-if the plots and characters don't organically flow from the world, it will feel lacking. For these kinds of stories, you will need 2 layers-a primary world building layer that describes the reality of the world and subjective lore layer, which is the lens through which a character sees the world. For these stories especially, it's not important which comes first (world vs character/plot) because story development is many cycles of revising world --> revising character/plot --> revising world --> revising character/plot. The most efficient way therefore is to not spend a huge amount of time in world-building before starting to develop your characters and plot, and to understand that these early cycles will probably look nothing like the final story. That's just my method. Everyone's different.
There is this thing called a limiter which is in pretty much any editing program. It can prevent the sound not being uniform, although it would distort the load ones.
The book I want to publish started out from some random character I imagined years ago. When I started working night shifts, I couldn’t sleep, so I just let my imagination take hold of the character. For me, it was like slowly pouring ink on paper and watching it run. Now I have story, a world, and appropriate lore for the world. I just need to get it written now.
Never seen anyone separate Lore and Worldbuilding, and now that I've seen this vid, my mind's pretty much blown. I'm into screenwriting as opposed to book writing, and this is CRUCIAL to making a movie. If you want to create an original and memorable experience/story, you need to take what makes your story unique (the worldbuilding) and apply it to every aspect of your movie in a creative way (lore).
the audience experiences the world through the CHARACTERS, and therefore all good/critical worldbuilding is learned in an organic way; LORE.
Lore is how the character/audience experience the worldbuilding, and how they are affected by it.
I am really interested in lore and I am excited to start working on my own
I see lore as the history of the world, and the worldbuilding as the facts of the world.
My process tends to be "do a shit ton of comprehensive worldbuilding ahead of time where I figure out as much about how the world works as possible, then scrap all of it when I actually start writing and replace it all with completely different stuff that actually serves the needs of the story." The first step is there to help me establish an overall tone to the world and brainstorm potential plot devices while the story itself is still developing. For example, I spent a bunch of time researching higher-dimensional geometry only for the world of the final story to look more or less like a regular three-dimensional planet, just where familiar paths sometimes lead you to entirely different places because the stars above them are different that night, and where traveling too far from places you know can lead you in directions that it will be impossible to return from. The worldbuilding step is still important because it establishes this as a iteral part of how the word works that actually does affect things like international commerce and military logistics, and not just the author forgetting where she put things.
This is why I always wanted to be an architect as well as landscape and interior designer - I do it all and all at the same time. I love designing my world in detail and I also let the story take me by the seat of my pants. See, even if I do design every detail, that doesn't mean I have to include every detail. But, for me, knowing all about the world I've designed allows me greater freedom, both in storytelling and in tempting the reader (all of whom are imaginary atm, but that's a separate issue). That said, detailed world building is something I do typically only with novels and the short stories set within that world; I wrote a sci-fi short story where I only developed the world as much as the story needed (though I actually created further details off to the side for the fun of it, and to help in case I wish to develop further this particular universe).
Btw, you "imply," we "infer." (Sorry, I can't help myself. 😁)
As I world build, I like to create small bits of info about various things I can put into conversations or notes the characters find.
The best advice I've ever heard on worldbuiling is that writing a world is not about adding detail on every thing but making people believe it because it's logical.
If things make sense. People will complete the thinking for you.
I personally prefer to invest little into worldbuilding. I prefer to just start writing arround a core idea, as you say in the video, and only when I'm done I add the details I think are worth adding. No, you don't need to spend time on developing too much places or things that are far away from the main plot. Just do it if it feels necessary, otherwise you should be okay.
I love your videos but if i'm using a headphone and sometimes the audio quality just.. at the start its a bit quiet then you just insert a clip where the audiois cranked up to 11.
Example 0:54 and its out of nowhere if you have headphones on 100% its really basically bass boosted
As a gardener. I tell you that there is a method to the madness. I started out with writing the story of one character and as i progressed I kept adding what felt correct as I went. Expanding it from his point of view.
Stuff like countries, maps, borders, languages require a more architectural touch to them as you DO need a more structured hand when it comes to these.
Once the 1st draft was completed I went over it again and tweaked, fine tuned and replaced parts that felt could be better until i was happy.
On the final draft as we speak and it is a beast to behold, but I couldn't be happier.
Tl;dr 1st draft could basically be summarized from a gardener's pov as "fuck it, we ballin and deal with it later."
There is one author who somehow managed to make grinding the plot to a halt and cramming in half a chapter of exposition multiple times per book work.
A couple of times.
Walter Moers’ “13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear” uses a sort of telepathic lexicon to give information to the reader and the pov character at the same time, and sometimes he even uses how this information is delivered in misleading or inopportune ways to further the plot. In two of his other books: “Rumo and his miraculous Adventures” and “The City of dreaming Book”, he doesn’t have that plot device, but he still manages to deliver at times chapter long exposition as histories or stories in ways that are interesting and at times the sheer absurdity and creativity of the ideas he puts out manage to make these segments very enjoyable.
That said, he doesn’t always manage to strike that balance and a lot of his more recent (and hitherto untranslated) books are weaker, the newest one “The Island of a thousand Lighthouses” was… difficult. Because the focus was so much on detailing the setting of the island it took place on that the first point at which the plot reared its head was at 300 pages, halfway through the book.
Only to vanish again and only pop out briefly. But the climax of the story the main character still has no idea what’s going on and we only get his perspective. Basically: Plot all happened in the background, while or pov character was off… playing fantasy cricket. Or visiting a museeum. Or on a hiking trip. Or taking care of his pet snails.
I swear. These snails get more coverage than the big, mysterious monster the book teases the reader with…
But the other three books I’ve mentioned: Bit of an acquired taste but definitely worth a look.
I'm a scene-based writer.
It means I start with neither characters nor worlds, but scenes.
Heresy, I know. I shudder at myself😅
But I also enjoy worldbuilding on the side. I have piles upon piles of notes, designs, graphs and maps.
God only knows it any of it will make it into the story... I just like having the material on hand in case I need it. It also helps me decide what is the "base level" of knowledge for my characters that drive their decisions
this is a really good thought prompt. i'm not sure i agree with the message. but constructing plotlines which shaped the the culture up until now, even if they are just plothooks for prequels, do seem like they would be better embellishments than trying to fix the magic system to the world and the population having perfect knowledge with no speculation about it.
Great stuff, man! New sub!
But holy shit dude your audio 😂 Idk if you could move the mic closer to center without ruining the shot but something needs to change. It's noticeable on my awful phone speaker how much the volume varies. Keep on, though, you're really good! 😊
Edit: my process for a story I may never actually write because it lives so comfortably in my head, is I start with a story I want to tell about characters who are living in this world and then I write the world in a way that would make it more interesting. I try to pick up on the general themes of their character arcs and sorta build from there. Like I have this one character who's basically a champagne socialist, another who's a paladin trying to be the one good cop, and a third scrappy delinquent orphan type and together they all sort of form a found family bonding over their increasingly urgent activism. And then I came up with the idea that there was essentially a magical nuke dropped on the area where the major prison is and it's sort of turned the whole place into a wasteland. Lends the area a feel of post-war neglect, while also leaning in to the themes of police/prison brutality I already have for the scrappy orphan and the paladin to deal with, and giving the champagne socialist something absolutely devastating to radicalize her.
DEFINITELY not for everybody but it works for me 😊
Edit 2: I decided screw it, I'll take a crack at actually writing the dang thing. Thanks, man, you inspired somebody ❤
kinda to reiterate what a few people said but i like doing both.
i like writing myths and histories and countries and characters and lists for worldbuilding. its for me.
but my stories? they're built from that framework, yeah, but its not all shared.
For example in a recent chapter about a multiversal traveler i had them encounter a priest of a god in a separate project of mine. i mention the other world casually, a deity of a realm where the gods of that underworld don't know their place.
did i mention that that realm had magic cowboys or a giant kitchen of souls, or the church built around the corpse of an eldritch thing? no, because that's for me to know, and them to see hints of
Lore should inform worldbuilding and worldbuilding should, through characters, settings and plot, set up implict lore that's only ever hinted at. I very much subscribe to Hemingway's iceberg writing strategy.
That is so ridiculously freeing. Worldbuilding feels like it has to be correct. Lore feels like it only has to be correct from the perspective of the belief.
For the involvement of the gods in my setting, i would put them at a 1.5. They have the potential to interact with the world directly, but it is contingent on several factors, including belief and circumstance. When they aren't interacting directly, they're interacting indirectly.
Another Yinka video, ohh yeah, we demand more to consume!