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<blockquote data-quote="Jürgen Hubert" data-source="post: 3460524" data-attributes="member: 7177">I'll grant you Tolkien, but Lovecraft didn't spend time on worldbuilding as much as simply referring to names and events of earlier stories of his, as well as those of his pen pals.The whole &quot;Cthulhu Mythos&quot; was turned into a coherent form only after his death...Another good example is Terry Pratchett. He started writing his stories without worrying about petty things like geography, and for a long time apparently denied that it was even possible to create maps of the Discworld or Ankh-Morpork. And even when he did admit it, he subcontracted much of the job to someone else. Here the worldbuilding came after the fact.I maintain that Harrison's words are excellent advice for writers (obviously it isn't for GMs, but those have to act under different circumstances). Tolkien got away with it because he was a freaking professor of literature who knew what he was doing when writing literature himself, but almost all would-be authors lack this background. Thus, the danger is very real that they will get distracted by their world-building so much that they will be unable to write a coherent story, or else feel compelled to add more world building than is useful.An author who only uses minimal world-building creates his story by thinking: &quot;I want these things to happen to my character - what parts of the world do I have to invent to justify it?&quot;An author who does the world-building first is in real danger of instead letting the setting drive the growth of the character - and thus introduce all sorts of events that are not useful for the story, explain all sorts of world details that are irrelevant to the story, and so forth.Quantity does not equal quality when writing stories. Too many authors forget that.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Jürgen Hubert, post: 3460524, member: 7177"] I'll grant you Tolkien, but Lovecraft didn't spend time on worldbuilding as much as simply referring to names and events of earlier stories of his, as well as those of his pen pals. The whole "Cthulhu Mythos" was turned into a coherent form only [i]after[/i] his death... Another good example is Terry Pratchett. He started writing his stories without worrying about petty things like geography, and for a long time apparently denied that it was even [i]possible[/i] to create maps of the Discworld or Ankh-Morpork. And even when he did admit it, he subcontracted much of the job to someone else. Here the worldbuilding came [i]after[/i] the fact. I maintain that Harrison's words are excellent advice for writers (obviously it isn't for GMs, but those have to act under different circumstances). Tolkien got away with it because he was a freaking [i]professor of literature[/i] who knew what he was doing when writing literature himself, but almost all would-be authors lack this background. Thus, the danger is very real that they will get distracted by their world-building so much that they will be unable to write a coherent story, or else feel compelled to add more world building than is useful. An author who only uses minimal world-building creates his story by thinking: "I want these things to happen to my character - what parts of the world do I have to invent to justify it?" An author who does the world-building first is in real danger of instead letting the setting drive the growth of the character - and thus introduce all sorts of events that are not useful for the story, explain all sorts of world details that are irrelevant to the story, and so forth. Quantity does not equal quality when writing stories. Too many authors forget that. [/QUOTE]

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