Worldbuilding, for it's own sake?

So does anyone else have a hobby that is related to their writing

Click to expand...

Reading!


...

I've done martial arts my whole life, and have found that they enhance the way I write from both spiritual and physical points of view.

I specialize in mathematics and computer science, but neither is particularly useful to any fiction I write. Such details universally bore casual readers. They don't want science fiction; they just want fiction.

Anyway, I also have experience with horses, and I've run into so much bad information in books.

Writing, for me, is recent. Worldbuilding is something I've done my whole life, without knowing it under that name. Maps first and foremost, but also languages, cultures, systems and the rest.

I worldbuild for compulsively and worldbuild for writing. Sometimes the compulsive worldbuilding gets included in written stuff, but not always - I have many, many maps, for example, that will never find there way into anything.

Edit: I think what I'm trying to say is that, stories aside, I write fantasy largely because I've always worldbuilt (is that a word?). It's more complex than that - there are also characters and, as noted, stories, but I don't worldbuild because I write; it's the other way around.

So does anyone else have a hobby that is related to their writing

Click to expand...

I used to be a groom, so horsey bits are easy. Me and the Old Man collect swords / knives etc. I've done archery, rock climbing, have studied biology( esp botany) and geology quite a lot for fun ( yes I know, it's weird). Oh and I used to be a bar wench, so tavern scenes are no problem...

I love worldbuilding too, and it did get me started writing. Of course, before that it got me started making videogames until I found out that programming is a lot like long-winded algebra, which I hate.

I enjoy archery, swordfighting (if there were some legitimate place around here that taught combat-style swordsmanship, I'd be there in a heartbeat) and horseriding, among other things. I love hiking and camping and generally moving through the outside world...the natural bits, anyway.

I've got a filing cabinet full of worldbuilding stuff...I should make a setting for DnD

redpbass said:

Of course, before that it got me started making videogames until I found out that programming is a lot like long-winded algebra, which I hate.

Click to expand...

ur doin it rong

There are some ezmode languages out there. Not everything is Lisp/ML/Haskell.

I adore visiting Mackinac Island, Michigan, and taking scores of nature photos of the scenery, as well as learning about its history, both human and natural. (I adore learning about the geologic history of its natural formations.)

Considering that I write a fantasy version of this island, this is very much related to my writing, though also separate, because I just enjoy visiting and taking pictures of and learning about the place. I have no need to "reconcile" anything because...I don't know. They just go together. I don't have a job to distract me, if that's what you mean.

I've also taken up collecting books on the Indians and history and nature of the Great Lakes/Iroquois region because that figures heavily into my work too. Again, separate things, but intimately related to my writing.

And I like to read about various psychological things like disorders and dream interpretation and Jungian theory because that, too, is in my work.

Anything that I get really interested in learning about seems to find a way into my writing eventually. Can't really help it.

I don't really "worldbuild," but I love to mull over the worlds I've created, learning more about them that way. It's a form of worldbuilding, just more mental and less structured. Whenever I learn new things about Mackinac Island's formations I'll put that in my stories.

I recently bought a load of books on dissociative identity disorder, just because one of my characters has it and I wanted to learn more even though I already know a lot. Oddly, I found that some of the things I browsed over in the books were things I'd already incorporated into my (unwritten) work, which is surprising, because I don't remember consciously learning some of these things! I guess that's a sign that I'm doing something right? I want to buy some books on schizophrenia for the same reason, another character of mine has that. I just love learning. I can never learn enough.

I'd love to learn how to speak/write Ojibwa, and this interest, of course, came from my writing. I don't NEED to learn it, since I don't write in it in my stories, but I'm interested. I don't think I have the smarts to do it though...

SPMiller said:

ur doin it rong

There are some ezmode languages out there. Not everything is Lisp/ML/Haskell.

Click to expand...

I wrote a Quake emulator in LOGO.

dclary said:

I wrote a Quake emulator in LOGO.

Click to expand...

Waaaaayyy outta my league.

I got as far as a rudimentary "game" in Basic using joystick commands and a spirte or two.

I'll go back to making up stories.

dclary said:

I wrote a Quake emulator in LOGO.

Click to expand...

I once wrote an adaptive Huffman encoding algorithm in C with an ink pen ... on a woman.

zomg, I'm such a geek.

SPMiller said:

I once wrote an adaptive Huffman encoding algorithm in C with an ink pen ... on a woman.

zomg, I'm such a geek.

Click to expand...

That's not what naked women's bodies are for.

Maybe you should try something else?

SPMiller said:

I once wrote an adaptive Huffman encoding algorithm in C with an ink pen ... on a woman.

zomg, I'm such a geek.

Click to expand...

Thread successfully derailed

...anyway, I forgot to add that research is a hobby as well. Specifically researching history from the beginning up until the late 1800s with medieval history in particular.

IdiotsRUs said:

That's not what naked women's bodies are for.

Maybe you should try something else?

Click to expand...

Oh yeah? She asked for it.

I gave Liosse a genuine response, so I feel okay with my derailment.

Hehe, and to think, CT created the bar to contain all our goofy... instead, it spills over.

Liosse is going to be really unhappy with us

But our goofy, it cannot be contained!

SPMiller said:

Liosse is going to be really unhappy with us

But our goofy, it cannot be contained!

Click to expand...

"We who control the goofy, control the Universe. The goofy must flow!"
--Paul MadLib

I've always wondered if Dune were really a thinly-veiled allegory for the Saudi tribes banding together against Western society for control of the oil supply.

SPMiller said:

I've always wondered if Dune were really a thinly-veiled allegory for the Saudi tribes banding together against Western society for control of the oil supply.

Click to expand...

Could be.

Y'all remember Paul's line from the David Lynch version: "When the spice flow stops, all eyes will turn to Saudi Arabia--I mean, Arrakis."

I always found it interesting that in both filmed versions of Dune, Paul is portrayed as a 20something.

But in the book (correct me if I'm mistaken), isn't he about 15

Kyle MacLachlan and Alec Newman don't look 15.

But back to the OP--worldbuilding.

Dune. The Dune Encyclopedia.

Why are there so many fifteen-year-old protags in fantasy, anyway?

SPMiller said:

Why are there so many fifteen-year-old protags in fantasy, anyway?

Click to expand...

My guess?

Height of puberty = manifestation of innate powers. Particularly if they're of the Chosen One type of stories.

Clearly, im not doin it rite.

Liosse de Velishaf said:

I know this is writing forum, but does anyone here enjoy worldbuilding/conworlding for its own sake?

Click to expand...

I think that world-building for its own sake is like an opiate for SFF writers. It keeps them well-behaved but leaves them listless and drowsy -- eventually hooking them and making them unfit for anything else.

I know people who've spend months detailing how the Xubrac decorate their earlobes (say) and who don't have the first clue of how any of that fits into a story. Many don't actually research lives beyond their own but rather, just mash-up knowledge, prejudices and beliefs that they've never questioned nor extended. But I think that the problem with mashing-up what we already know and presenting it as a 'new world' is that too many other readers know it too. SFF readership is full of physicists and horse-riders and weekend archers and pastrychefs...

The very best SFF worlds extend our knowledge, challenge our prejudices and preconceptions. I don't believe that a writer can do that without first extending his own knowledge, challenging his own prejudices and preconceptions. That doesn't arise just from comfortable daydreams, but from interminable hours of hard, meticulous research slog -- slog that I'm sorry to say, even many published authors of fantasy no longer seem to do. The result of such laziness always looks to me like Jungian vomitus passed from gullet to gullet by shorebound pelicans too stupid to flap out to sea and fish for themselves.

I think too that it's nearly impossible to separate a good SFF world from the story that presents it. It's hard to imagine getting excited about a bunch of parched, unwashed Fremen without the characters and tensions underpinning Dune, say. It's the story that makes us engage in the world -- and limp stories seem Siamese-twinned with turgid world-building; I'm not sure which monstrosity buds the other.

Maybe I'm just bitter. I spent three months researching Afghanistan and Pakistan earlier this year, trying to find viewpoints and insights that aren't 'common knowledge', that can't just be found in popular Western press (yes, there are plenty, but it took a while to begin to find them). None of that research took me into either country, but it did take me on a day-trip to a small town just to meet a director who'd recently returned from making a film in the wilder tribal areas -- only to find that he didn't plan to stay for the showing of his film. Maybe it makes me bitter when other writers paint Tolkien's dwarves green and say 'But they're not dwarves, they're gobsheckles.'

Gobsheckles. Yeah. Right.

I'm one of those masher-uppers.

My current project is set 40 years in the future and I've built an entire city in which the story is set. I've stolen street layouts, district descriptions, and histories from several different guidebooks, map, and timelines and created more or less a "good parts" version for my city. Nothing's too out of place. I mean, the story and world logic works.

As for the world outside the city, I'm stealing from several other sources, too. Mashing-up ideas and giving them my own spin.

But my primary world building efforts are focused on the city itself.

Of course, all that's secondary to writing the story. Story comes first.