Settings - Why Worldbuilding is Bad

[Mark]

Found this thread on En World here

Settings - Why Worldbuilding is Bad
Sci-fi writer M John Harrison tells you why you don't need to spend hours crafting your campaign setting:

Quote:
Originally Posted by M John Harrison
Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

Above all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid.




From here. Discuss.

[Dirt_Kami]

Ok, I guess I'll stop doing it then
Thats very funny, the clomping foot of nerdism, lol, I love that line

I also enjoy making detailed NPCs that usually never get used or the party kills them before they can speak

I even enjoy making huge world maps and detailed dungeon maps that never get more than a glance

I guess I'll have to find a cooler way to spend my time, maybe go to raves, sky-dive and hunt polar bears

I guess Tolkien wasted his time with all the background stuff

[Mark]

You can hunt Polar bears.................awesome!!!!!!

[Dweren]

Good thing no one ever told Frank Herbert, Tolkien, C.J. Cherryh, Harry Turtledove, George R.R. Martin, Charles de Lint, J. Michael Straczinski, C.S. Lewis, Larry Niven, or Rowling about how horrible worldbuilding apparently is.

[Mark]

Although I do wish someone had told Rowling, can't be doing with the whole middle class Harry Potter stuff.

Saying that I've never read the books, just seen a couple of the movies. Its just its the sort of tripe the python people and Hugh Grant would be in kinda fantasy meets three weddings Euurgh.......................

[Dweren]

That would be because the movies leave out 75-80% of the story thanks to Hollywood simplification and time limits. Really, it would take 8+ hours each to do a good movie version of books 4-7.

Honestly, I love Tolkien's work, but Rowling's is much better (both in complexity and overall writing quality). For one thing, she gets across a deep, well developed world without getting bogged down in describing a single tree for page after page, ala Tolkien. She's also nowhere near as black-and-white as Tolkien (actually one of Pratchett's complaints about Tolkien, that there was absolutely no chance of redemption for the orcs and trolls, 'course, he also thought the elves were shifty and up to something, which they probably were).

On the other hand, she says she spent at least a year working out the setting before writing starting on mapping out the series much less writing the first book.

[Mark]

The thing with Tolkien is the majority of is work is plaigarised from Norse and Celtic Mythogy. The character of Aragon is almost the same as that of the Norse Siegfried, sword, parents kingdom ect. So I feel he had very little room to negotiate when he was keeping so close to other peoples work.

Ps . Your explanation of Rowlings work puts it in a much better light than I previously thoughy

[Dweren]

Originally Posted by Mark

The thing with Tolkien is the majority of is work is plaigarised from Norse and Celtic Mythogy. The character of Aragon is almost the same as that of the Norse Siegfried, sword, parents kingdom ect. So I feel he had very little room to negotiate when he was keeping so close to other peoples work.

Yes and no. Aragorn, for instance, isn't exactly Siegfried so much as he is an archetypal figure, which Siegfried is as well. Boromir, as another example, has a lot in common with Roland and Lancelot, while being neither. But, that's an entirely different topic.

The important part is that Tolkien was never really quite certain how to explain/discuss/present the world he spent so long creating without getting bogged down in unnecessary details (or getting unnecessarily pedantic). While the story's good (and his work is probably the most read in my personal library, 20+ times, I think), he really needed a better editor, one who knew more about storytelling (and basic grammar, actually). There are a number of points where Tolkien spends far too long describing a particular part of the setting (geographically, historically, linguistically) when he should be moving the story along. Had he cut or condensed some of those sections, he could have worked the Aragorn-Arwen romance in, thereby explaining a lot and adding another layer to the story.