Fiction Scribe

Creating fictional worlds and writing about them well is often called the iceberg style of writing. Icebergs look impressive enough above the water (which equates to what your reader reads) but they are much more immense and impressive when you look at what is under the surface as well (what your reader doesn’t read but is aware of).

With such a massive amount of material to work with, it’s no wonder some authors get caught up in the mechanics of the iceberg. You’re creating an entire world, after all, and you want to make sure it works in ways that are acceptable and make sense.

Having your worldbuilding overload you isn’t so much a block of writing in general but a block of getting to write the story, which is what you want to do. It’s all fine and well to create a world with an hierarchy of different magics, but if you have fifty-two magic classifications just in one element, there are two things you have to ask yourself:

“Who cares?” and “Will the reader ever know?”

When your world is getting huge, the systems complicated and the back story epic, ask yourself those two questions. I’ve had to do it as well. I have this big universe that has all these wonderful things… that the reader doesn’t want to know.

(The longest prologue I’ve ever written and I had to toss it because nobody except me would care.)

There were so many details about how everything worked, came into existence, fitted together… It took me a long time to realize that, while it was good I knew how everything worked, many details were ones that would never actually get mentioned in the story.

Here are a couple ways to get away from the sometimes addicting quality of pedantic worldbuilding and back to the story:

1. Ask yourself: What would happen if I just start writing…

2. Remind yourself that you can go back and invent some more. There is no rule that says you can’t go back and add more later. Start writing now and worry about other details later.

3. Keep a notebook/pad/whatever with you while you’re writing. This way, you can write down your world ideas and only pause in writing briefly.

4. Remember that you don’t have to know how everything works to write about it.

The key is to not let your world get so big that it distracts you from the real writing. We know that the tides happen, but we don’t need to know why they happen and how they work to be able to write about them.