246. Against Worldbuilding 

Thanks for this. This really lines up with what frustrates me about nerd conversations about media, especially as it pertains to the idea of "canon"

As a person who's got herself neck-deep into writing a science fiction novel, I strongly agree. As much as I enjoy hashing out details and making sure the world fits together, it's still ultimately a story about characters having feelings and making decisions. There's a couple of world elements that I just do not have a satisfying answer to, and decided that the lack of a satisfying answer in-world was more than enough justification to not worry about it and focus on the important parts.

A well constructed fictional world will have many unexplained aspects because that is true to our lived experiences. The obsession some authors have with explaining every mystery away only makes the world seem more like a set on a stage because they make the world small enough to be understood by your average reader. The real world is a complicated and confusing place because it is inhabited by real people, so it is evidence of competent writing when some aspects of a fictional world remain unexplained.

I think your observation that critiques focus on it because it's easier to 'proof' and be 'objective' is certainly right, but I think this is also one of the many examples of people assuming that we all get the same thing out of a story (mind projection fallacy). Worldbuilding is always seen as supporting the story; "story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding". (An uncharitable reader might accuse Harrison of positing that worldbuilding isn't writing, but let's be charitable and assume that with "writing" he meant plot, themes, characters, prose, dialogue…) People like Plato think the purpose of stories is to instill desirable behaviors, while others like Faulkner think "The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself". In this common viewpoint the "writing" is indeed more important than the worldbuilding. The focus of stories then is psychological; what are the protagonists struggling with and can I take something away from it? I like these stories, I really do, but there is so much more to write about. What about the sociological aspects? 'Great man histories' can be easily captured in this psychology focussed writing (see the popularity of biographies), but a more sociological vision doesn't have that luxury. Or what about biology? Or linguistics? Or any other lens to look at the world with? You can say, oh we have textbooks for that, but we have textbooks for psychology too! The reason to read it in a fiction format (apart from it being much more fun) is that we learn something from describing how things *aren't* whereas textbooks focus almost exclusively on how things *are*. So with a socio-economic lens this will lead to an obvious “worldbuild a better world to build a better the world” speech, but even for less political things like biology this is true. There is a youtuber called "biblaridion" who publishes a story about the evolution of an alien biosphere. By all metrics and advise I've heard from actual writers, it is a terrible story. There are no characters, no themes, no dialogue, no plot...only worldbuilding. Yet it is one of the most wonderful stories I've ever watched. By exploring biology in a fictional setting I understand much better which attributes of life are incidental happenstance and which ones aren't. I wish there were more stories like it. Maybe you won't like it and that's okay, but please realize that we might not be trying to get the same thing out of a story and if a certain writer focusses more on worldbuilding over “writing”, that isn't necessarily a mistake.

I think a lot of younger writers on the internet have it backwards. A great story isn't created through worldbuilding. Rather, most worldbuilding is created through writing stories! Consider Star Wars. Almost nothing was planned originally, beyond the steps of the plot and main cast. Most minor characters had no names, and no depth beyond their interactions with the main cast. Props were just props. They didn't have serial numbers and manufacturers for every ship. The "Clone Wars" was never explained. It was an important event from decades past, and that's all Lucas needed to say. And that's probably all he had written about it back in 1977. The mastery of Star Wars was creating an illusion of depth, and all the best authors do that. I'd define good worldbuilding as really just setting the stage for a narrative and maintaining consistency in the details. Fantasy encyclopedias are fun, and indeed I'm writing one! But they are not necessary, and can be counter-productive because mapping global weather patterns doesn't help with plot and characters and writing techniques and all the things that really make a good story.

Speaking as someone building a sort of world for a TTRPG, I'm building a world because it's fun to do so. I think worldbuilding _can_ be done in a way that produces poorer art, and the influence of capital on how well funded art gets chosen is super relevant, but it's not necessarily a bad thing to do worldbuilding. I think the actual underlying issue might just be anxious artists. Many authors of art are a little too afraid of their audience and are anxious, and this produces all sorts of self-defeating behavior. For example, in a serialized work, re-writing your good ending for a badly written but unexpected ending, because the author got self conscious about being predictable. Or, lampshading serious moments, because the author is anxious that sincere expressions of emotions will not be taken as serious, so they downplay them (the old, "well that just happened *wink and nod to the camera*" vice). A self conscious artist approaching world building also results in some bad art and self harm, as this video demonstrates. It's certainly also the case that the world we live in exacerbates these anxieties. I abhor Cinema Sins and all people that behave like him--I sense no genuine love of art from that sort of commentary.

This is why my stories always take place on present-day planet Earth. Worldbuilding seems like an endless nightmare to me.

I am an old school D&D Dungeon Master who homebrews. I am a Worldbuilder and it's not necessarily for my players benefit. It's part of what makes it fun for me. I deserve to have fun while writing adventures and creating engaging plots and NPCs. But there is a limit, and it took me a few decades of overdoing it to find a happy place where I wasn't filling my time with content I would never use and subplots and symbolism that was too opaque for my players to latch onto. I think Sanderson and Rothfuss will get there eventually. But I understand the allure.

"What's with the turtles? They're an imperfection in the quilt." - Pat McHale

The last few years I've taken to writing science fiction that I've tried to make quite hard. That's largely because I have a bunch of ideas for relatively near term technologies and I like to think about how they might affect human life, but even speculating on timescales of less than a century the error bars on even the most grounded speculation are wider than the broadside of a barn. I've mostly been focusing on how to blend that all into the background so the actual story about human emotions and experience isn't interrupted by a mcguffin or dues ex machina that makes no sense. To me the truly good authors like Tolkien are the ones that will meticulously build a world that they could spend volumes just describing but then condensing it all down just to those elements that are actually relevant to the narrative.

Thank you for this. And happy new year! :)

When a publisher goes back to a successful author and says "we need you to write prequels in your universe" just say no

Thank you! We don't need Midi-chlorians! ... and the rest was good too

Great video as always!

Interesting and well said points. Imo, predicting a reader's reaction to the specific wording you use is too difficult, which waters down the usefulness of spending time on specific words, and indeed on committing to specific world building choices.

So many people forget writing isn’t about anything other than the word, and how that word sounds alone and together with other words. I think the thing that killed world building is that, for someone like JRR Tolkien it’s an exercise something he challenged himself to do. It was his fellowship of the ring to take the ring to Mordor. To others I think it more comes out of fear a fear of a lack of control. I constantly bring up to one of my friends who loves world building. But insists everything needs to be perfect, perfectly written, perfectly crafted, everything must be satisfactory at the end. And to me that’s just bad writing, that shit dosnt happen in real life. The best writing should be honest and life is not a clean cut story, where every narrative has a clear ending, there’s mystery and disappointment. People come, people go, it can be aimless, it can be random, it’s a mystery. If you keep looking around the entire world, will you ever find a story like the lord of the rings? With all its lore and world building isn’t it not just a story that an individual can read and believe that everything should be ok in the end, and everything has a purpose and good triumphs over bad? In the real world lore is myth and myth isn’t real, tho in the lord of the rings and many science fiction and fantasy the lore and myths and gods are real.. Thats not life, life’s hard to define and these world builders like decided to take the easy way out of writing. I always wonder what else have they read? Have they read Le comte de lautréamont, Plato, Charles Bukowski, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Loren Eiseley or Celine? I always think they got caught in a fandom they are too afraid to leave and never learned to just love the art of literature

This could have something to do with Garth Nix replacing Brandon Sanderson as my literary candy. I don't mind a few inconsistencies from book to book when the unexplored possibilities are interesting enough. Internal consistency is all well and good but I get tired of what I guess you could call implied predictability.

I would say that Tolkien is kind of a special case. He did not go into such exhaustive detail because he thought it was necessary for the story. He did so because that was his style. I joke that the only reason he wrote The Lord Of The Rings was to have an excuse to invent languages, which was his real passion. I think people make a mistake using Tolkien as a template for their own writing and I sure as hell HATE the idea that you're not writing a story, you're creating some kind of franchise. Every creative person knows that they are going to leave little inconsistencies in the narrative, sometimes by accident, sometimes deliberately. Alfred Hitchcock called these "icebox scenes", illogical scenes which, in his words, "hit you after you've gone home and start pulling cold chicken out of the icebox". TV Tropes calls this "Fridge Logic". The idea behind these inconsistencies is to get the reader (or viewer in the case of Hitchcock) thinking about the story AFTER they have finished experiencing it. If your worldbuilding is too exact and precise, this doesn't happen. You might remember really well written (or acted) scenes, but you won't spend time puzzling about things like Tom Bombadil. I think a creator would much rather that people think about their work than have it as a "one and done".

Sadly, with each generation we're straying farther and farther from the core of fantasy, that is not world build, but Romance, Poetry and Myth. From what I've observed, your world is only as interesting as the people who live it and the experience of passing through it.

This kinda feels similar to that maxim of writing for the people who already like your work, instead of writing defensively with your critics in mind. Which kind of, tangentially, links back to the recent hbomber ep, much as I enjoy his work I think it has put the fear of god in (some) people about plagiarism. So creators who take his work super seriously are all taking on a more defensive creative posture right now. The irony being that the folks who are the listening closely to him already like his writing and take the things he takes seriously seriously! So it’s kind of sowing fear of plagiarism in creators (like yourself) who are already doing thoughtful, thorough and well cited research. And almost entirely glancing off the people it is supposed to actively critique.

I think so too. My favorite franchises always have some room for the fictional world to breathe or expand. Like Star Wars originally The Force was an unrxplained thing that you could kind of tune in to and learn to channel rather than micrscopic animals in your blood. And even in the current run of Spiderman Dark Web therd's this character Hallows Eve who has magic Halloween .asks but we dont know if she's evil or if her masks are demon-magic powerred or what...and noe she has her own comicbook series.

This guy’s so attractive I can’t this morning…

Ah! What is imagination? Maybe like a pearl the grain of sand ( or other irritant?) is lumenously coated by layers and layers of whatever! The actual work of fiction is only really the irritant! I CANNOT watch the Lord Peter Whimsey movies because I know so perfectly who all the characters are! The disconnect is actually painful! The symbiotic nature of reading is amazingly important! A really great story causes in your mind a much more detailed and personal world!

omg newton is so cuteeee

Meticulous world building pays off when the medium is open and interactive e.g an RPG game. The large world gives the audience a larger space of possibilities and more control over how the events of the "story" play out. In contrast, a story whose emphasis is more on characters and events rather than the world, may not be as interactive though it could be intriguing in its own way. To a limited extent, I think the same idea applies for less interactive media e.g books, comics, film. If you leave the world building open enough, that can promote audience engagement.

i feel like worldbuilding doesn’t have to be “nitty gritty” you can do a basic society; and the idea you are sending, and maybe some conlanging

“Content” is the dead end of all storytelling. “Content” is a product, just another toy - not something deserving of the label “writing”.

Eh... why dont writers write their work privately and then just publish it without worrying about what the trolls would say. Many beloved immortal stories are riddled with plot holes

Eh, I think that having a fleshed out world can be equally rewarding to investigate as a complex narrative, and not necessarily a detriment to the story. For example, in the Cosmere, there's a lot of fun to be had in trying to untangle the story happening behind the scenes through the magic system and establsihed lore. If those systems were invented arbitrarily to support the main stories, then the meta story of the universe wouldn't just be mysterious it'd be nonexistent. Also, I've always thought Tolkien was obviously a practitioner of worldbuilding for its own sake, to amuse himself. The elvish languages and most of the lore in the Silmarillion are totally unimportant to the books, and never intended to be published. He just enjoyed creating them.

While I agree with this, one should not throw the baby out with the bathwater. The baby being a tight script absent of plot flaws. Tom Cruise has been pretty atlas-like in keeping the bar high, in this regard at least. I love walking out of the theater or closing the last page of a book without glaring flaws bringing down my mood.

guys if you need a new worldbuilding tutorial, i would reccomend artifexian

So it’s not just me who thinks Brandon Sanderson’s popularity is a symptom of the writing of our times? Not to discredit Brandon himself - his writing advice videos are certainly sound and helpful. It’s just that they seem to give a lot of people - especially amateurs! - the wrong focus: Namely, to put plot and setting over story, lore over theme, style over substance. Perhaps it’s also a fallout of roleplaying games, which emphasise exploring a setting over telling a story that has some thematic point to it. People who were gamers first before they started writing then go on to write stories that mirror their roleplaying nights. I guess that’s one reason why most Dungeons & Dragons movies sucked. And of course, the problem continues in music. Especially my own genre, power metal, is infamous for rehashing the same old fantasy and sci-fi tropes, imitating the aesthetics of Tolkien & Co. without any significance behind the tales and symbols they use. Rather, it sometimes seems like having vapid lyrics consisting of merely dramatic-sounding words has became part of power-metal etiquette: The purpose of an average power-metal song, at least live, is just to be another party anthem - not to make you think. Power metal is a genre that had already been Marvelised before Marvelisation was even a thing. 😂

Several disagreements: Brandon Sanderson has specifically said that you shouldn't spend all your time on world building. His metaphor is that you want a hollow iceberg. You want to do enough world building to make it so the reader thinks you've done all the world building. You want to give the impression of a tolkien-esque encyclopedia, without actually writing said encyclopedia. I think your characterization of Brandon Sanderson's thoughts on world building are a little bit inaccurate. I don't think world building is inherently about "anxiously hand holding" your readers. I think the hand holding and not trusting your readers is about how you write the story, not about the world you've developed to go along with it. It's entirely possible to have an overly planned world without being overly blatant in shoving it down your readers throat.

What should a fiction author do to immerse today's generation of stem educated systems-engineers into a fictional universe? Attempt to enumerate a setting wth perfect veresimilitude according to the disparate expertises that the audience is likely to be familiar with? Seems to be a fool's errand when the focus should be on characters and narrative. What is with this fixation on the "set dressing" that everyone seems to have? There are limitations inherent in creating a linear piece of entertainment. You shouldn't have a right to complain that the stage has no fourth wall and characters only enter the stage from the left and right sides.

Interesting stuff, but i think you should just write notes & not a script. Your videos will be easier to follow.

3:11 Poor CGPGrey

Gonna do some nitpicking myself. 2:02 Putting Cinema Sins in the same category as people interested in worldbuilding is some sort of intellectual crime. Not gonna go into detail here but CS is cynicism at it's dumbest, to the point where they've needed to shield themselves as "parody" while clearly being serious at the same time. Most people interested in worldbuilding can't stand them. 2:38 ...But this _is_ a pretty solid criticism of a story that claims itself to be based upon "real-world" conspiracy, it goes and makes shit up anyways. Your point would make sense if The DaVinci Code was more willing to admit that it's _world_ is fictional, there is not, actually, numerological significance in the number of panes of glass on the Louve. 3:06 The examples you're giving here are exactly the sort of thing that makes worldbuilding interesting, actually. A good example of this would be the mechs in BattleTech- are ten meter tall walking war machines reasonable? No, and and that's the whole joke of the universe. Mechs were built because they were cool, and through a series of absurd developments became the symbols of a new noble warrior. They exist to tell the little people "interstellar politics is _our_ job". Every time someone reverts to a more rational sort of warfare, the noble class responds a bit like they did in the 16th century as firearms started to spread. Are there people who would criticize this for being a little silly? Yes, but they're idiots, and BattleTech is still a world with an _absurd_ amount of "fluff" justifying it's existence, and that's fun. 3:43 I'd direct M. John Harrison to two philisophical ideas- the "world of forms" and psychological archetypes. Point being, there's enough shared "stuff" in our heads to get well close enough, we aren't building our imaginations wholecloth, we're all human beings with the same common ancestors. Obviously he's correct that reading is an interaction between the reader's imagination and the text- but how likely is it that their imagination will reach an unsatisfying conclusion, which is what people who nitpick worldbuilding are usually communicating? Harrison's response seems to me like giving up. In fact I'd argue that detailed worldbuilding often forms the building blocks of the imagination that writers want their readers to exercise- just look at the endless re-imagining and re-interpretation of places like r/TESLore where people have come up with ideas as as varied as Nirn actually being a mobius strip with a "mirror world" on its reverse side, or that it's actually the corpse of the god that drafted it (and therefore a kind of hell). The whole fandom is built on the possibilities and escapism that all the allegorical goodness provides. Similarly, there's the endless speculation on who the hell Tom Zane is in the Alan Wake franchise, probably a question never to be answered- but god if there isn't a lot of _potential_ answers sitting in all the material Sam Lake came up with. All readers very literally doing the effort for authors, but mostly because those authors already engaged in the process themselves and met us halfway. Sometimes those authors even get in on the speculation themselves. This is fun, not tragic. 7:46 Helen Marshall is correct that stories are falling by the wayside for franchisable media, but what this video is missing is that a world _can_ tell a story. It can exist as allegory, trying to tell us something in itself. The best of them all do. Tolkien's Legendarium was, in his mind, a re-telling of myths present in nearly all mythologies, all pointing towards some truth humanity could never see. He wanted to reconcile some of those myths which were missing in his own catholicism in a way he found satisfying. It's ultimately about the world becoming less and less magical over time, and why God might actually have set it up that way for good reason. The Elder Scrolls, on the other hand, explores a world in which some esotericism's most popular ideas are true- there is in fact a Godhead, there is a literal anima and animus, every living thin is in fact a "subgradient" of one greater, all-encompassing thing. The ultimate "moral" is actually not too dissimilar from that of Tolkien's, the idea that the world was created so that someone might eventually transcend it (and the story of why we need to be mortal for that to happen, while up in the "spirit world" things seem so much nicer.) To that story it adds a path, mostly drawn from Thelema, a path that suggests radical self-acceptance and a world-as-self perspective to extend that empathy towards everything. These are complex ideas, and what's wild is that this little fictional Elder Scrolls universe literally _is_ what it says it's about in-universe, because that's what it's better authors turned it into for it's audience, which is _cool as shit._ You might notice that this all starts to sound a little like religion, and yeah, that's because religion is the same thing, it's myth-making to help us understand ourselves and push a particular narriative or view about the world and our place in it. People who are very interested in their religious beliefs can start to sound a whole lot like star-struck readers tossing their own thoughts into the collective fictional pot. Of course, I've failed to explain the very "nitpicky" side of worldbuilding. You jump back to discussing sci-fi and I feel like there's something else you're missing: The term Science Fiction. *_Science_* fiction. The genre began, and in it's purest form remains, an exercise in taking current scientific knowledge and wondering where it might lead us. An attempt at a hopefully accurate depiction of what the future might hold, usually with a little wimsy sprinkled in to make it fun. To do that properly, obviously some rigor is necessary. Nowadays this is called "hard science fiction", but I imagine the whole culture of... "hard worldbuilding" I guess, which is what you really seem to be criticizing, comes from. Even outside of hard sci-fi, it's the question "what if?" that pushes people to do this. Authors and readers alike are absolutely allowed to respond "I don't care", but that doesn't change that we just think it's fun.

Cinema Sins is kind of garbage though.

I've always assumed that the whole world bible thing was just so authors wouldn't introduce inconsistencies that take you out of the story. I enjoy novels where I'm invited to speculate on how things not addressed in the story might be different. Take Neal Stephenson's Anathem. I imagine there would be a lot of unarian maths where widowed retired burghers would spend their last years. I'm also reminded of H. Beam Piper's First Cycle where the equivalent of universities on one planet are called "rendezvouses" for reasons anyone who is interested will have to read the story. Please stay away from continental Europeans and their pomo jibber-jabber. Have they had a good idea since the 1900s? Well threre are a couple of Viennese. And please don't conflate Science Fiction with swords and elves magical lala stories.