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

[rainjoyous.livejournal.com]

Sounds a bit like s/f writer who wishes they wrote literary fiction syndrome to me - that kind of self-loathing 'must attack own genre!!' desire. Because to have written s/f, he *must* - it's a necessary of the genre even if all it amounts to is 'a world identical to our own but some people have psychic powers' or something - have worldbuilt. Just because he didn't draw the bloody maps, even if he let it happen holistically, it's still worldbuilding.

So as a philosopher and a writer, I look at his argument like this: *head tilted a little, eyebrows raised* Hm.

[dragonimp.livejournal.com]

"great clomping foot of nerdism"? "I write this genre, but I'm not like those writers ::nose in the air::"
It's not just in SF/F, either; as some of the people who posted in that second entry pointed out, *all* fiction requres worldbuilding, even if it's usually invisible worldbuilding. (kinda makes me want to tell him to get his head out of his ass.)