Not Now, Narrator; September 5 2020

Hello, fellow querying writers! I hope you had a successful #PitMad, if you participated on September 3rd!

For people who aren’t querying writers, or who didn’t participate, I hope you had a great Thursday regardless! Maybe you had a really good breakfast, or you found five bucks in your pocket that you forgot you had. That’d be nice. If nothing like that happened, then the universe owes you one.

I thought I’d talk a little bit about worldbuilding and how to include it in your writing, this time around. The world I created for Qistedei is immense, and it’s always tempting to include all these cool tidbits of information I have floating around in my head at every opportunity.

The problem is, no reader wants to sit through a bunch of exposition as I explain how indoor plumbing works.

So, how much is too much worldbuilding? When should you include it?

The rule I’ve come across from critique partners and industry professionals is ‘only tell us how it works when it comes up’. Keep it concise, but you can work in an explanation for that cool holiday you invented when it’s time for the celebration in-fiction. Something I struggled with in earlier iterations of KANAE was how and when to explain the Telling ritual, which is key to understanding the political climate and magic the world is built around. If there’s something you think absolutely needs to be explained to make your world work, be sure to include a scene that shows us why it’s relevant.

One of the hardest things to accept about creating a whole new world is that you’re always going to know more about it than the reader does. And that’s how it should be! You should have that information, because it might come up somewhere down the line in ways you don’t expect. You’ll find it easier to avoid plot holes or inconsistencies if you’ve mapped out these finicky little details ahead of time. That doesn’t mean the reader has to be given these factoids – they’re for you, not for the reader.

And ultimately, I think that’s what worldbuilding has to be about. It’s for you, the writer who’s about to play in this space. The more you know, the more varied and interesting you can make things, but ultimately? The reader only needs the basics, the essentials. After all, we don’t even know everything about our own world. If you wouldn’t find it interesting to know how Earth’s land masses are formed (which you might, this is just an example!) then why would you assume everyone needs to know how your fictional world’s land masses came to be?