User blog:Taldin/Weekend Worldbuilding: When the World Is Too Big

One of the things that stops a lot of would be novelists is 'how do I make a world for the characters to live in?' It seems pretty daunting, to create a world or a universe from absolute nothingness. You feel like you aren't doing the world justice if you get into the action, but if you spend too much time on exposition about the world, your readers get bored and just stop reading before the novel even really gets going.

I've seen a number of different approaches to creating a world for a novel, and all of them can be effective if executed properly. Here are a few of my favorites: Your world is a stage, to paraphrase Shakespeare; what matters most is the players, not the backdrop, although sometimes the backdrop is what forms the players themselves. Family, friends, their choice of job, and its location are also part of your worldbuilding -- whether they are separate from family or are living with them still, whether their friends are the ones pushing them to adventure out or are dragging them along, and whetheir their job is a function of their location or a thing which provides a false comfort for what they could be (and will be) doing in the novel.
 * Get It All Done Up Front - Start with a prologue.  You won't get to meet the protagonist until the second scene, but you basically paint in the world with a giant brush and get it over with - you can fill in minor details about the world from the main character's point of view when we meet them.  You can be omniscient as you like during this prologue of exposition, but you have to keep it short, providing just enough history while preserving some of the mystery, and providing the reasons the world is different as succinctly as possible.
 * Open the Door to the World - The main character goes outside into the world, possibly to go to work or school, and he or she passes things of note on the way to where they're headed to start the novel.  You intersperse narrative and action and dialogue, and you get a limited picture of what the world is like from that perspective.
 * Fish out of Water - The main character arrives in the first part of the novel on an alien landscape, planet, plane, or otherwise doesn't belong in the world, so he/she/it pays extra attention to things which might be normal for the locals, but is strange to them.  You can have a lot of fun doing a reverse guessing game with the readers, describing a mundane object without its label, but don't get too lost in the details.
 * Show Me The News - We live in an Information Age, and so wherever we go, the news is readily at hand.  As such, you can sneak in a lot of world stuff if you read off the news to the main character somehow, and how they react to it is an important thing.

Taldin (talk) 22:00, December 18, 2016 (UTC)