How much world building do you do?

I do a fair amount of worldbuilding by necessity. Left to my own devices, I am a terrible thief — meaning both that I steal too much, and that I’m bad at it, with a tendency to take whatever cultural flotsam is at the top of my brain, chuck it at the dartboard without looking, and trot merrily on assuming it’ll hit bullseye. It does not hit bullseye. (Or as my brother put it after reading an early draft of my first novel: “This is like a bad Star Wars ripoff, only more boring.” Cheers, bro.)

These days developing a story idea looks a lot more like ping-pong. I’ll think something like (ping) okay, this character is a fighter pilot and that one’s a war orphan, who was the war with? NO NOT THE SHADOWS DAMMIT *shoves Babylon5 back in the closet*. And then after discarding ideas until I hit on something I like, it’s (pong) back to the characters: so he lost his parents to the aliens he’s now in charge of making peace with; what does that say about him?

Or (ping) I want to use the Rich Old Fart murder plot, what does that tell me about the culture? (pong) Now that I’ve got the basics of the culture, who’s my suspect pool for the murder?

I have learned not to let myself play paddleball. At the point where my worldbuilding pings are generating not character or plot details but just more worldbuilding pings, it’s time to stop. My goal — especially when prewriting — is not to get all the details, it’s to get enough detail that sloppy borrowed ideas aren’t setting up in my story like cement.

I do as little worldbuilding as possible during drafting. At that point I’m not even playing paddleball, I’m Elmer Fudd on a rabbit hunt, and oh boy is that rabbit hole deep. If inspiration strikes, awesome, but if I hit a snag I use my old friend [thing] and fix it on my next developmental pass. “Don’t spend six hours researching the wallpaper for a scene you’ll toss on revision” is a lesson hard but well-learned. Likewise it’s only now, with the first round of revisions on my zero draft done and reasonable certainty that most of those scenes will survive in some form, that I am allowing myself to draw a map. I love drawing maps. I can draw maps all day. And the number of beautiful, lovingly measured, days-in-the-making maps I have sitting around gathering dust because the characters decided in Chapter 2 they were gonna take off for the map next door....

The tl;dr version... I worldbuild as much as I need to, and when I need to, to make the best story I can. Which I suspect is everyone’s answer in the end.

To me, world building is a kind of escape when I'm too scared to actually write. I plot diagrams of gods, elements, and all matter of creation—of how the Universe came to be. It has the minor benefit of still actually being considered "working". And subconsciously I develop a better understanding of the world I write in.

I am currently dealing with building a magic system, and—as does everyone I guess—I don't want it to be boring or shallow. When I hit a roadblock in writing and realize the system might be falling apart at the seams, I stop and go back to world building, finding ways to implement rules and restrictions so the world remains believable.

It is ultimately helpful to me, however I do realize that I'm wasting a lot of time. It's fun though.

I do not plot, but write by the seat of my pants. When the idea comes to me, I go where that takes me. The details are drawn out in my mind as I write. So, I suppose I am a plotter as well. Just that I don't have notes galore to check back on. I have been busy. The details come to me, the instance I start to thing about it. The work that is there is what I can think about it.

I've been thinking about this a good bit, and I think there are two schools of thought on this. There seems to be two schools of thought, one where the characters serve the world building and where the world severs there characters.

The world builders are writers like Tolkien, Kameron Haley and China Mieville where you buy the ticket for the world, not so much the characters. It's not a slam, but it seems like Mieville especially crafts his worlds first and then places the characters in place to do specific things.

The character writers seem to be writers like Helen Wrecker, Nichoals Eames and Neil Gaiman. They all have inventive worlds, but the world seems to serve the characters.

There's not a wrong way to do it, but with my own projects I've tried to do the heavy world building stuff and I'm never as excited about them as I about the character focused stories.

I'm like you in that I flesh out the basics, through I outline the plot pretty good before I dive in. But I let the world and characters grow as I write, though I always wish I prepped more and world-builded more

I have a lot of the broad swaths planned out before (like who's the king, who lives in this country, how they all feel about each other, basic physics/rules of the world) so I have a feel for the setting and what people act the way they do or think the things they think. But I get a lot of questions that pop up as I'm writing. Humans having magic is a very new thing, and now they feel empowered to do something about their social position, cool! That's why characters are doing the things they do. But hold on, can there really have never been any stories or legends of humans using magic over 10s of thousands of years? I, as the author, know for a fact that there weren't humans with magic back then, but the people of the world don't. People make up stories all the time, or appropriate events to fit their own narratives. Propaganda goes both ways.

So now the old ancient empire of Original Species Do Not Steal is now an ancient kingdom of humans wielding magic (at least in the myths of the people). Were they really evil, or was it the other kinds/species taking issue with humans having magic? Now the stories of the king bravely fighting the evil empire takes on a new connotation. I, as the author, know that they were Very Bad and Very Evil, and for a very long time I was stuck thinking that characters/cultures either knew the 100% absolute truth, or they didn't know anything about it at all. But we believe false things about the past all the time, through revisionist history, propaganda, or just how words shift in oral traditions. All this came up because I had a thought of "But wait a minute, shouldn't someone be....?" when writing and I think things are much better off because of it.

I have a spreadsheet that's supposed to be for my outline but has a bunch of pages for stuff like heraldic colors for royal advisors, family trees of various characters, real world and in-universe names of various mega-fauna, what kind of stuff people put into their tea for which purposes...most of that probably isn't going to end up in the book, and that's fine. If I ever need to sprinkle in a detail like what someone's tea tastes like, I got that info. I know so much about radiation and how radiation changes the color of gemstones. I know all about blue amber and the physics of fluorescence. All so I could say "these diamonds are green because bird radiation," but then again bird radiation is a big force on the world, so the more I know about it I can naturally sprinkle in stuff so the reader can connect the dots and say "OH this is ionizing radiation, that's why people are getting sick!" It's tricky to balance all the info you have and putting it in in a natural way. It's also hard not to get into the weeds, so you need to know when to stop yourself so you can stop world building and get back to writing.

I have only recently embarked upon my first project that takes place in a world/universe that is not a version of our day-to-day lived in "reality". There are multiple sentient species in this world, and I worked out the basics of their cultures and biologies, and a loose sketch of the history of their intercultural dynamics, as well as a birds eye view of the collective governing body these multiple cultures have created, before I started on the story. Essentially, I set up boundaries and then began writing the story. In the writing, I made sure to keep details of history and culture within the boundaries I established in the initial world building. That initial world building includes a pretty big spreadsheet, glossary, and encyclopedia-like entries on the various worlds. So in terms of the background world and setting, I did a lot.

But! I did none of that on the characters--their backstories I let arise as I wrote, with the only guideline being to make sure their stories/experiences fit within the cultural parameters I previously set.

So to answer the question that is the title of this thread: just enough to provide boundaries for the development of character and plot without going so far as creating whole languages (e.g., Elvish or Klingon).

How much? Too much, definitely.

I rarely do any world-building, and it always comes back to bite. I just don't find world-building interesting. I just go with whatever pops up. I probably should do more of it though.

I do world building because I hate plot holes. HATE plot holes. I have a magic system that I designed to have rules that I will never break because it is within those rules I can make interesting stuff happen.

Similarly, because my story takes place in a modern day where magic just kinda popped up as a thing one day, there was a lot of changes to the status quo that I needed to keep track of. It's also fun to reference things I know happened, and my MC knows happened, but the reader doesn't without further context. It's common knowledge to my MC that China had a really rough time with people getting possessed after magic resurfaced for instance, and she mentions it twice, but never goes into detail.

Fun little things like that, and being able to check your notes to you don't step on your own feet, are excellent reasons to world build in my opinion. I do try to limit it though, I could spend days and days sussing out the geopolitical landscape, emergent cultures and technologies etc, but I have to draw the line.

So ya. That all came out as a mess and I'm sorry I did that to anybody bothering to read this post.

<3 Tulip Mama

I’m a complete pantser when it comes to worldbuuilding. I just start writing and whatever ends up making sense is how things work. For example, I’m well into the second draft of my current manuscript and just figured out a couple of days ago that summoning a demon requires a sacrifice/offering.