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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3485250" data-attributes="member: 4937">How the text is interpreted is irrelevant.  Because we are not digital computers, the words are not completely inflexible, but niether are thier meanings completely fluid.  The text means something, and what you wish to have it mean doesn't really matter.  No, it isn't.  And the obvious counterexample to that is that for this text here that you and I are writing, the author's intentions are far more important than the readers interpretations if what we want to do is understand what is written.  If we just want to run off on our own thing without listening, then sure, any interpretation is valid.  But then, in forgoing in belief in communication, we have also foregone any real ability to communicate.My belief in something will never make it valid or invalid.  Nor does my agreement or disagreement make something invalid.  It is either invalid or valid distinct from what you or I think of it.  Everyone may be entitled to thier own opinion, but there opinion can still be completely wrong.In two ways.  First, in your insistance on the word 'entire', which is a useless straw man modifier since no writer, not even Tolkien, has ever created an entire world, much less a functioning one.  All world builders have boundaries to thier creation, and you are willing to recognize this except when it doesn't suit your need to make a straw man argument.   And secondly, in your insistance that what makes it world building is it being separate and distinct from the plot, which is another straw man since no one that is writing fiction actually does world building which is wholly distinct and separate from the plot.  The inconsistancy in the application of this will be apparant latter when you discuss using maps, but it also humorously comes up again in again with your creation of straw men about things appearing in the text that aren't actually in the text.Try this definition: "World building is an attempt to create an internally consistant fictional world."  See how much less easy it is to knock down the argument when you don't set up a strawman?  You've repeatedly shown no sign of having read or understood my definition.  I'd encourage you to go back and read it again.Agreed.How does that follow?  Don't you see how big of a leap you've taken?  How easy it must be to prove something is a negative when you make it a negative by definition! That depends on how that information was arrived at.  As I said before, a map of Chicago is not at all necessary to creating a narrative set in Chicago.  Constructing your narrative while consulting a map is very much the same act as world building; the only difference is that your fictional city of Chicago which you are constructing through the narrative devices you will employ is based off - to some extent or another - the real city of Chicago, so you don't have to take that first step of create the maps or the history of Chicago.  (You do however have to take other similar steps, since no snapshot of anywhere is complete.)  You then have to consult and use and interpret these external to the story devices to decide which aspect of that map or history you wish to include in your narrative and, applying your judgement as a story teller, how.But don't decieve yourself into thinking that you need the map to tell the story, or even that you need to add factual information about Chicago to the story, or that in collecting and consulting maps you are doing something fundamentally different from the author of speculative fiction that draws thier own.  Slightly different, sure, but not fundamentally different because to be fundamentally different, it would have to be the real city of Chicago which is on the page and that's impossible because the real city is 3D and the medium of literature is merely words on paper.Which is precisely what world building is about.  World building is about getting things right.  If you don't care about getting things right, and if you are happy to have internal (or external) inconsistancies in your narrative, then by all means avoid wasting time with world building.  But if you do want to get things write, you will have to spend some time imagining in your head in great detail what life is like in the place of your setting - whether it be 1950's Los Angeles or an entirely invented place of your own devicing.  If it is an entirely invented place, then you can take that first step of making the maps and writing the histories so that you can get things right.  And in my opinion, this mental excercise is one that rewards the author with a richer and more interesting story, even if the details of the world building excercise are opaque to the eventual reader.LOL.  You seem immune to your own irony.  Is the sword in the story or not?Better yet, is the world building something that takes place in the story or outside of it?  For example, the vast majority of Tolkien's world building never shows up anywhere in the novel 'Lord of the Rings' or even in the appendixes that were added later.  So, is it only world building if it shows up in the story, and if it is, what do you call that stuff that happened outside of the story?</blockquote>

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