A non-pozzed writing thread

[Harrow Prime]

Spoiler: I have already spoken to you a bunch about this on blockgame but I will just list all of my tips for it here (keep in mind I am a total fucking amateur):

• Go narrow but deep, not wide but shallow: When worldbuilding focus on the most important aspects of it that matter in your story and really delve into those specific things. Eg: If your character is a wandering merchant then maybe dive into medieval currency systems and bartering, do research on the topic and have it be a main thing in the story (spice and wolf does this really well), instead of diving into something like foreign policy or army dynamics which will probably not come up in such a story. If you try to tackle everything at once your story will feel incredibly shallow and the reader will not feel like the world exists outside of anything the MC interacts with.
• Prioritize writing, not worldbuilding: A lot of writers want to do all of the worldbuilding before they even begin writing so their story is perfect and amazing. Since lotr and asoiaf became popular now every fantasy writer wants their own thousand-years-of-history world with dynasties and wars and regions in the margins of the map. What people conveniently forget is that novels and such are literary works, not school textbooks, if said worldbuilding doesn't have anything to do with your main plot or future plots you are foreshadowing then don't even waste your time trying to expand on it. The reader doesn't have to know who by and how the world was created or how every race came to be, the only thing readers want to know is the story you are telling, right here, right now.
• You don't have to explain everything: Piggybacking off of the previous point, you do not have to build out all of the lore about everything from the beginning. A lot of writers put a ton of effort into their worldbuilding and wanna show it off because they are proud, but this often leads to the first chapter exposition dump that everybody will tell you is a bad thing to do. Readers don't need to be flooded with pointless information about gods, kings and other nonsense, the first thing in your book should be a relatable character introduction or a narrative hook. Even then, you arguably shouldn't explain everything, a lot of readers claim they want more lore, more details, more maps, but in reality, the most long-lived stories are those which are left open-ended, where the reader can take part in the creative process and ask themselves "I wonder what is beyond the map's borders" or "What did happen in this massive ruined city?", it invites the imagination of readers and even though they will never admit it most people are suckers for that kind of thing.
• Show, don't tell: This is a very common writing tip, but it also applies in worldbuilding! A lot of writers like to have their characters spout out exposition about this or that thing, or have the omniscient narrator deviate from the plot to go on a tangent about whatever bit of lore pertinent to the current plot point. This is a universally bad thing unless you are integrating it into the story in a creative way instead of shoehorning it in. What you want to do is have your descriptions of places and people speak to the lore behind them, Eg: The site of a battlefield, broken weapons, muddied earth covered in hundreds of footprints, trampled bodies, maybe the tattered banners of the parties involved which a character will point out or the reader will be able to discern from subtle descriptions and their own attention to previously mentioned details. It may not be what you had in mind but it's better than "and MC's friend went 'Oh lordie! This is the borderland of the Poopheads and the Buttholes! They have been fighting each other around here for decades!".
• No stupid unpronounceable names: How many times have you seen fictional names like "Ohafg' Chik-Worpabh Chiefdom" or "Tenglaitus Vorploxitus System" in novels both amateurish and semi-professional? Loads right? It's definitely a massive problem with authors; they create names that are purposefully ridiculous and unpronounceable just because they sound exotic and fantastical, I mean Tolkien has a bunch of ridiculous names like "Hithaeglir" and "Ainulindalë" right? Well, the only difference between ol' John Reuel and your average starving author is that he was a linguist, philologist and an actual scholar who had a massive love or arguably borderline obsession with languages and created several for his stories. Of course, not every writer can commit to that, and I do not recommend it, but a good tip to make your names sound natural is to simply pick them out of real life languages that inspire the culture you are writing (Tolkien based his elvish languages on welsh btw). You can pick a root word and slightly alter it, pick a related word and translate it or simply try to create words and names which follow the same linguistic characteristics.
• Piggyback on real culture and history: This is one that a lot of people do intuitively but is still worth mentioning. Trying to invent new types of cultures is incredibly tough, the cultures that exist and have existed on earth are products of a myriad of historical, environmental and chance-based factors, trying to create a culture that is completely severed from that is very much impossible, even sci-fi writers struggle to make alien races that aren't based off of humanity because we simply do not know how society would develop on other planets since our only example is ourselves. Taking cues from real culture and real history will enrich your story, even more so if you integrate them intelligently with the metaphysics of your universe instead of shoehorning it in or making it overt and obvious.
• Notice the importance of geography on culture: Geography is more important than anything when developing cultures and it has played a big part in how our world looks today, when making realistic fictional worlds always remember that readers can and will feel it when you have nonsensical worldbuilding.
  • The most important element is water, water is the bloodline of any civilization, it provides irrigation for crops, protection from enemy states, food from fishing and hunting, ease of transportation and trade, any river deltas, large freshwater lakes, large inlets or sounds and meetings between several large rivers are prime places for capital cities, important trade hubs and fortresses protecting the breadbasket. Large cities placed inland without a source of freshwater will have to be very strategic spots (a mine, a frontier fort) and will have to have their water delivered to them.
  • Second is food sources, the way your civilization acts, its relations with others and even its core ideology will be driven by where it gets its food. Is the main food source seafood? Then the state will be a coastal one with a developed maritime industry and strong trading; Is it mainly attained through herding cattle? Then the society will likely be a steppe dwelling warrior society (this always happens on earth); Great grain producing states tend to be as large as the flat riverine plains they occupy and tend to have organized monarchies with peasantry and nobility.
  • Mountains, large rivers, deep jungles, hot deserts, dark forests and artic tundra will serve as boundaries between states and will prevent culture, money and language from spreading.
  • Climate will also prevent large cultural centers from spreading, areas which are in the same climatic zone will tend to be part of the same country or civilizational root, those in different zones will struggle to unify due to the differences in their lifestyles and food sources.
• Powerful forces and their impacts on your world: Many writers love to include powerful, mind-boggling things into their worlds be it magic and monsters in fantasy or insane tech in sci-fi, it all suffers from the same story-breaking issue. When you add anything to your world, take a minute and really think about the ramifications of it upon your earth-inspired society; it is quite jarring to have fantasy where there exist super-powered magic users that can literally unleash natural disasters at will and somehow the world has not descended into total anarchy and devastation. What about having flying dragons in a medieval setting whose mere existence makes castles obsolete? Or portals which would make ANY defenses obsolete? Or time travel which is a literal plot hole generating machine? As a rule of thumb, keep uber-powerful things out of your story if you are not ready to spend the rest of your time accounting for them in every inch of your worldbuilding. A lot of writers like to use time travel or respawning or some other gimmick in their books, but it's usually something that they write the entire story around because it's so incredibly overpowered.
• Run stories in the background: This practice is also known as foreshadowing, and it is a good way to make your world feel like it exists beyond the MC and their plot-driven romps. It is always a good idea to introduce subtle ideas like a brewing war or signs of a coming festival into banal conversations between characters or routine descriptions of environments, or explaining world mechanics that are completely pointless at the moment but will become unexpectedly relevant later on. All of this makes the world feel real because it also happens in real life, how many times are we made aware of things that do not concern us at the present time but come in handy or are made relevant later on? Loads and you may not even notice it. It simply gives the world more depth on top of its usual job as a clever plot delivery trick.
• Don't be lazy and study up: If you want to make your world realistic and DEEP you should be prepared to study up on the subjects you include. A lot of writers are lazy with these things, and in part they can't be blamed as the plot and the characters ARE the most important parts and so studying up on climate and currency may not be the best use of your time. But if you are interesting in making your world more real, you should definitely try to go that extra mile and avoid having every country use the same currency and speak the same language, or having healing magic so injures barely matter after the fighting, or portals so distances don't matter, etc.
• Play to your strengths: Following up the last point, if you do have in-depth knowledge about something and are passionate about it, do not be afraid to have it be a core part of your worldbuilding. Of course, it should not just be shoved in willy-nilly and should fit neatly into the story, but your passion and attention to detail on the subject will be felt by readers.
• Avoid anachronisms: When writing dialogue, try to make it sound appropriate to the character's background and time period, I am tired of seeing people who are supposed to be royalty say stuff like "Okay man" or "That's cool".
• Don't be afraid to break from the mold:
• Decide if you need deep worldbuilding at all:
• Let the reader seek out complexity:
• The reader is much smarter than you think:

[*]

It's why we talked about this on blockgame that I brought it up here. So much to digest in the span of a minute or less.

There is something I think is important here as well: Questions that you cannot truly answer should have the simplest answer or be left with more room for interpretations. Not just for the reader's sake, but your own. An example is asking yourself how a species that nearly suffered complete annihilation by another intelligent species looks like. How would they handle such an event? How does it impact their cultures and the way the present themselves to other species? The simplest answer is the best you can do here. I don't think it's something you'll ever be able to fully understand or describe. Just work with what you got and don't try much harder in making a fulfilling answer or description, otherwise you'll be left burnt out and disappointed in what you come up with. Besides, most people tend to just accept the simple answers in these cases, and often question or criticize more bizarre answers.

Also the part of having human culture influence my writing on an alien culture is also why I try my best to avoid giving them too much of a spotlight, at least at the moment. Another thing that I absolutely struggle with is names. God I hate giving names to characters. They either sound generic as fuck or they just don't fit with them.

 

[fern_._]

Wording is a problem for me as well. I have had nights where I lay in bed annoyed at the fact that I went through countless revisions of a scene and never felt satisfied with it.
As for writing about cultures, I haven't touched writing something that takes place on a realistic setting of Earth. I am used to making up cultures that are inspired by real ones, but the relation to them are surface level mostly. The closest I've ever come to a situation like that comes from a Holo fanfic I was writing a year ago. (Also I feel like I'm bringing that up to an annoying degree. Sorry about that.)
As for compromising with the plot, it's hard for me. Especially with my original story, which, as I've said before, has nearly a decade of me building the universe. If I compromise for one thing, it might contradict with something that I've already established before in the universe. Tinkering with my past lore is difficult because it's fragile. I make one change, and now I'll have to make so many other changes to so many other things. Of course, that's a me problem and is what I get for making such a detailed universe for a story that probably won't get put out to the public for another decade probably at this rate.
I have been sitting here for nearly two hours contemplating things. I'll probably have more to say later on.

Wording is a big problem when it comes to writing. Not being able to explain why they don’t like how a paragraph is worded is a common thread that I see with people who keep rewriting their works. It helps to have your own (even if not fully developed) idea or theory of aesthetics. Note down (on a piece of paper or on some virtual document) why you like how one thing is written and why you don’t like how another thing is written. Keep it in mind as you look at other works in order to generalize your idea. Once you have a general idea of what you seek for in literature in terms of aesthetics, you’ll be able to apply it to your own writing and touch up some areas that you feel are lacking.