I made a top-10 list of speculative fiction recently and I noticed something funny: Most of it is science fiction. It's funny to me because I rarely write science fiction. I write fantasy to avoid having to justify why the world fits together the way it does. I
World Anvil has a video about agile worldbuilding which I found useful for addressing the scoping problem I was thinking about yesterday. It's essentially a structured, ordered list of questions with a length limit on answers to get things started. The questions start from the broad strokes in,
Science fiction and fantasy stories demand worldbuilding, but a world is an enormous thing where it's only a slight exaggeration to say everything affects everything else—so where the hell do I start? Well, I could start anywhere. Wherever convenient, wherever's fun. If I have an
I learned from the audiobook of Rosemary and Rue that false leads don't have to be developed or specifically contradicted. They can simply be introduced, optionally with doubt ("I didn't think so and so did it") and the subject revisited rarely if ever. The
(Cross-posted from Goodreads with slight formatting/wording differences) Despite a lot of padding and a supernaturalist and religious perspective I don't share, this book has a lot of useful stories. When I say padding: It repeats itself a decent amount. It feels like it could have been compressed