worldbuilding, unnecessary?

[dragonimp]

Y'know, if you make a blanket statement about writing which lumps everything under a few poorly executed examples, you're likely to irritate a bunch of writers. Heh.

I get that his reaction is most likely to the kind of thing that would make your novel read like a D&D manual, but calling worldbuilding in general dull, numbing, and unnecessary? What sort of writer does absolutely no worldbuilding? (Well, yes, I'm sure there are books that take place in a complete fog, but really.) For me, it's like character design and that incessant internal narrator; there's no freakin' OFF switch!!

The problem is not in worldbuilding - which is unavoidable - but in poor writing and infodumping.

Comments

[yumikoyoshihana.livejournal.com]

I agree with you: Worldbuilding is like character development. You can either have a story with bad character development or good character development, but that doesn't make character development bad, if you get what I mean (I know, not very coherent).

Some of my favorite books are the ones that worldbuild. Dragonriders of Pern? Half the fun of reading that series was figuruing out the social structure and the history and the 'rules' of that world. So, yea, this guy needs to get smacked upside the head. ^^

[dragonimp.livejournal.com]

Pern is a good example; insane amounts of worldbuilding. But the books work because the main focus is still the characters and the story. I think this guy's problem is when worldbuilding overshadows the story, but that's not what he said.