Should worldbuilding come second to characters and story?

[matt0044]

Title says it all. Heck, is it possible to subconsciously build your world more cohesively than you'd realize at first?

 

[Beth Pavell]

They should really go hand in hand. Good characterisation and plot is informed by good world building. The best world building is done sneakily through characterisation and plot. Obviously, the more inventive and original the setting, the greater need there is for expository world building.

 

[Legacy]

^ This.

A good story will have good characters and plot and will successfully flesh out the world the character and plot exist in. I will say though, that all the clever worldbuilding in the world won't help a story if the characters are bland and the plot is boring.

 

[Oblivion]

The bane of my existence as a writer is that I'm able to come up with really awesome worlds and environments, but then fall flat in the delivery of those worlds in a way that diminishes the overall effect. Worldbuilding is the foundation of the pretty little house that is your fanfic, while the plot is the walls and the roof and the rest of the structure.

 

[CrystaI]

^ I support this one.

Especially if you are writing original story set in original world, the author should have a basic understanding of the world before one started to build the plot and characters.

But, only the basics at the beginning is enough. When one had decided what kind of story one wanted to told, and what characters are involved in the story, author can then go into the deeper world-building if necessary.

 

[The Dude]

Yes, for the love of everything that is good and right in the world, YES.
Actually it goes like this:
1. Character
2. Mood/Tone
3. Setting
4. Plot

It's good to have all sorts of story ideas, but given how long fics can be, write like you're writing a TV show you expect to go six seasons (and a movie). Create well-defined characters first and foremost. Then worldbuild with them in mind. Build locations towards big moments for the characters, rather than making a cool looking lighthouse and then plopping the characters in it for a big battle. In life not everything has meaning, but in fiction, everything does.

 

[AetherX]

Yes, for the love of everything that is good and right in the world, YES.
Actually it goes like this:
1. Character
2. Mood/Tone
3. Setting
4. Plot

It's good to have all sorts of story ideas, but given how long fics can be, write like you're writing a TV show you expect to go six seasons (and a movie). Create well-defined characters first and foremost. Then worldbuild with them in mind. Build locations towards big moments for the characters, rather than making a cool looking lighthouse and then plopping the characters in it for a big battle. In life not everything has meaning, but in fiction, everything does.

Although I totally agree with you about creating cool locations with worldbuilding in mind rather than plot, I still think that plot is ultimately more important than setting. I can think of several examples in fantasy. I've encountered tons of people who aren't huge fans of the Lord of the Rings books since the way the story was written didn't really pull them in. And yet, I think everyone can agree that Middle Earth is an epitome of worldbuilding. Skyrim is another example. It's a beautiful world with rich history, and yet the plot and quests completely fail to take full advantage of that.

 

[Elric von Bek]

Heh, well I don't consider Middle Earth to epitome of worlbuilding. I give this honor to Malaz, though it is mostly because I really enjoy the world and its history. Following that, the Multiverse of Michael Moorcock's fiction or the setting of the Conan stories. I think Robert Howard did a great job at conveying his world through character and plot, mostly due to the limitations placed on pulp writers back then.

 

[AetherX]

You don't consider a whole world imitated by an uncountable number of fantasy worlds to follow, with tens of thousands of years of history and multiple complex languages to be an epitome of worldbuilding? I'm not saying it's my favorite fantasy world, nor THE epitome of worldbuilding, simply AN epitome of worldbuilding.

Either way, my point still stands.

 

[Instrutilus]

I've constructed a universe around my planned stories, with all worlds having their own histories. But the main thing about world-building is how it affects the characters. For example, one character is a prince whose country started an infamous full scale war that resulted in the present day union between the countries in order to prevent that happening again between those countries. The war also had the effect of giving a new empire the chance to expand and become as productive as the kingdom that maintains the union, which is a very bad thing.

This all affects the actions of said prince, whom flees to the kingdom and hides among its people to avoid his tyrannical father, who was raised during the war and seeks to rebuild his country's standing (aka, take over the other countries) and helps with the populous after seeing what war does to them. Basically, the world affects the characters, so build a world that compliments them.

 

[Elric von Bek]

You don't consider a whole world imitated by an uncountable number of fantasy worlds to follow, with tens of thousands of years of history and multiple complex languages to be an epitome of worldbuilding? I'm not saying it's my favorite fantasy world, nor THE epitome of worldbuilding, simply AN epitome of worldbuilding.

Either way, my point still stands.

Not at all. That world and its legion of imitators are, despite the tremendous amount of work put in, very bland. If the setting is bland, then all the work put into is time wasted. It is a case of "work smarter, not harder." It is an epitome of how to not build a world, perhaps. That is kind of an epitome of worldbuilding, in a way.

 

[Misfit Angel]

The thing I don't like about Middle Earth as a setting is that it seems like every god damn area aside from the Shire is depicted in the most depressingly boring and drab way possible. Imagine Call of Duty, but in book form. I don't picture color when I think Middle Earth, I picture washed out brown. Maybe I'm interpreting it wrong, but there weren't really too many interesting locations aside from Helms' Deep, which by definition was a dark, depressing hole in the ground.

I'll be honest, I found the town from The Giver to be more colorful when I pictured it, and that book was about a utopia where color didn't exist except to the one person chosen to bare the weight of all that makes people human.

 

[Beth Pavell]

The thing I don't like about Middle Earth as a setting is that it seems like every god damn area aside from the Shire is depicted in the most depressingly boring and drab way possible. Imagine Call of Duty, but in book form. I don't picture color when I think Middle Earth, I picture washed out brown. Maybe I'm interpreting it wrong, but there weren't really too many interesting locations aside from Helms' Deep, which by definition was a dark, depressing hole in the ground.

I wonder whether that's a side effect of Tolkien's prose. I remember quite a few passages of description from The Lord of the RingsI love, but Tolkien being Tolkien, he was never a master of pacing

 

[The Dude]

I've constructed a universe around my planned stories, with all worlds having their own histories. But the main thing about world-building is how it affects the characters. For example, one character is a prince whose country started an infamous full scale war that resulted in the present day union between the countries in order to prevent that happening again between those countries. The war also had the effect of giving a new empire the chance to expand and become as productive as the kingdom that maintains the union, which is a very bad thing.

This all affects the actions of said prince, whom flees to the kingdom and hides among its people to avoid his tyrannical father, who was raised during the war and seeks to rebuild his country's standing (aka, take over the other countries) and helps with the populous after seeing what war does to them. Basically, the world affects the characters, so build a world that compliments them.

I agree with this. I'm hoping to created a series of shared-universe stories, too, defined by the characters and their actions, and the ripple effect their good and bad decisions have. For my first story, the main character travels to a region I've created, but I try to see the region like aspects of her personality, reflections of her inner conflict. Even the way the cities look could be determined by her mood at that point in the story. Not literally in the universe of the story, but in how I describe the city. Even the region's government has symbolic significance. Especially because I'm doing it in first person POV (because I'm insane).

 

[Professor Willow]

Although one could argue that world-building is less important than the characters and story, in my opinion nothing should "come second" to anything. They are all very important and you should put as much effort as you can into all three; there is no good reason not to do so.

 

[Drakon]

I've had someone complain about my RPs that plot and pacing seemed to come second to worldbuilding. Ideally, worldbuilding should occur naturally as the story progresses and the characters develop. Granted some "forced" (expository) worldbuilding might be unavoidable if you are writing an original story or an AU fan fiction.

However, worldbuilding alone is not sufficient for a story. Plot and characters must be part of a story as well. As for why plot and characters are so important? People read stories for characters and the plot. They are what drives the story. Without them, you have a travel guide.

 

[Dorothy]

Characters and setting serve each other in tandem. Neither is more important than the other.

I will say, though, for me at least, crafting the setting is the really fun part

 

[Jose-the-Mew]

To me at least, wordbuilding is a totally secondary thing to storytelling. I think characters should always come first since that's to me the most interesting thing of stories.

However, the trick to being a good storyteller is paying attention and crafting carefully every little detail to serve your purpose. Not fleshing your characters through their interaction with their setting is a huge lost opportunity. In fact fleshing out your characters thrpugh their interaction with any story element they're able to perceive in-universe is also a huge lost opportunity.

To me what works is just coming up with basic concepts, making stuff up as I go along, and thenrevise for any inconsistences that may have popped up.

 

[Snowy]

No. Depends on the franchise, of course, but I consider the world to be just as important as the people in it. This is more than just cities and towns. It is concepts, cultures and life styles.

Take the pokemon anime, for instance. In the first few seconds of the first episode, the Narrator did some important world building by telling us that 10 year olds could become trainers.

The world... or the setting as it is more often called.. is a very important part of any story.

 

[Natu? Natu!]

Both are important. There are cases where potentially good basic plot ideas are ruined due to glaring holes in the underlying logic of the world, and at the same time, no amount of worldbuilding can hide a bad plot. The amount of worldbuilding that is necessary depends on the kind of story. What makes me think that an author has overemphasized worldbuilding at the expense of a good plot is often when there are long, irrelevant info dumps, that don't advance the story, but rather seem to be there as a way to let the reader know that 'Hey! Look how much work I have put into this!". Most cases of complex worldbuilding come from people who are inherently interested in worldbuilding. However, the readers of a story are often not as interested in the underlying mechanics, history or languages of the world as the author. I want to know these details if they add to the story, or if they affect how the characters think or act in any specific way (but I never want to learn about it through long infodumps, and no, letting a supporting character have a long lecture about some detail in the world does not change the fact that it is an infodump), but I definitely think that it is possible for an author to become too much in love with his/her world/universe to be able to keep the balance between not telling enough and telling too much. Worldbuilding is important as long as it helps creating a coherent story, but apart from that I think that it's more fun to create worlds than to read about them. I often create quite complex worlds, and then I end up cutting down large amounts of text or whole chapters in the post-writing editing process of my stories. When it comes to Pokémon fanfics, I usually don't do that much worldbuilding. I relyquite heavily on the anime, manga, games and Bulbapedia, and add stuff only if I need to.