what to write once you've made a world

so, i recently decided a worldbuilding project of mine is finished. great! now i can start writing!

...except i have no idea what to write.

any advice for this predicament?

What is this project exactly? What are the most important parts of it?

its a twilight world where the terminator is dominated by huge mushrooms. the worlds inhabited by humanoids, but they live in underground houses due to constant storms

Hmm... maybe you could write a story about one of the worse storms, which destroys a mushroom grove. Then, they have to venture beyond the terminator to find a new home.

thats a good one! ty, definitely gonna keep that in mind

As a compulsive worldbuilder myself, I've found that the best worlds inspire new stories from the details that have been crafted.

If your world isn't inspiring any story ideas, you're not done. And I say this as a professional who's been sitting on about 2-3 big, sweeping settings because I just can't crack the right stories yet. I know those worlds need more development.

Keep going.

Here's a few story-prompting questions that may help you:

1. Who are some important figures in your world's history? What did they do, and how did it change your world?
2. What's life like for an average person in your world? How does their life change when something extraordinary happens to them?
3. Is the world supposed to be this way, or did something interrupt its natural state? How did it get this way?

Now, if you do the inverse — start with a story and build a world around it — you have a lot more freedom to only develop the parts of the world that are essential to that part of the story. I've got a few like that and I feel way more confident about those than I do about the "world first" projects.

And all of this comes with the caveat that you don't have to make a story out of this world if you don't want to. Some worldbuilders just want to make the world for their own enjoyment and leave it at that, with no stories or characters. That's perfectly valid.

thanks so much - that's very helpful advice :) i'll definitely do some more world-work

As a compulsive worldbuilder myself, I've found that the best worlds inspire new stories from the details that have been crafted.

If your world isn't inspiring any story ideas, you're not done. And I say this as a professional who's been sitting on about 2-3 big, sweeping settings because I just can't crack the right stories yet. I know those worlds need more development.

And all of this comes with the caveat that you don't have to make a story out of this world if you don't want to. Some worldbuilders just want to make the world for their own enjoyment and leave it at that, with no stories or characters. That's perfectly valid.

Ha, seems like we have something in common here!

For me, the story idea came first, so I started writing before I even knew what the whole deal was.

Again, perfectly valid! Brandon Sanderson has talked before about the "Hollow Iceberg" theory of worldbuilding where, if you already have a story and just need to build a world, you don't need to develop all the intricate details — instead, you can just focus on those details that actually show up in your story.

In my Urban Fantasy Conspiracy Thriller script, I put a decent amount of work into the different cultural groups, how they relate to each other, a few broad characteristics of their societies to give them a flavor, and kind of left it at that. One of the cultures has its own Conlang, but it's just a relexification of Esperanto.

On the script level, I can get away with these shortcuts because a lot of other aspects (food, clothing, geography beyond what we see) aren't important to the story. Now, since the plan is to make this a movie, I will flesh those things out with the production design team, but that's really just in service of the movie's overall look-and-feel.

My point is: you can gloss over a lot more than you think you can and still get away with it. So long as the questions people ask aren't story-breaking, you should be golden.

(That's not to say that you shouldn't develop your world as much as you can — knowing the deep, intricate details helps with immersion and will make it easier to hook your audience. But from a story mechanics level, you really just need a bare minimum.)

Edited by AwSamWeston on Sep 5th 2020 at 11:24:54 AM