I recently read the first book in Josiah Bancroft’s Books of Babel steampunk fantasy series, Senlin Ascends. It’s a great book and I’m excited to dive back in with the next books in the series. Obviously this sort of fantasy might not be your cup of tea, but the book made me think about a specific aspect of worldbuilding that applies to my current WIP: Holding back.
It’s early days in my own new novel, and I’m pantsing it pretty enthusiastically right now. But I do have a general idea of where I’m headed with this story, and despite not sitting down to craft a history or any kind of detailed study of my fictional universe, I have some definite ideas about how this world evolved into what it is, and what’s going outside the specific concerns of my characters and the setting. It’s just that I won’t get to a lot of it for a long time—maybe not even in this book.
The Long Game
And that’s okay. In Senlin Ascends, Bancroft drops a bunch of references to aspects of his universe that never pay off in the first book. I assume they’ll pay off in the sequels as he develops those ideas—but maybe he won’t ever really get into it. And that’s okay.
When I’m excited about a fictional world I’m building I have to fight the urge sometimes to just dump it all on the page as I’m going, to hurry up and get it into the story. Because I’m excited about these ideas, and part of me worries if I don’t explore them immediately I’ll forget them, or at least many of the details. But there’s good reason to wait—one, these sorts of unexplained details tantalize and get your reader excited about what’s coming. Two, these sorts of unexplained details deepen your universe and cement the illusion of reality you’re going for, because there’s always more to discover. And three they act like a pressure valve—if you ever get stuck in your main story, you can just veer off to explore that weird thought you had 40 pages earlier.
That urge to just get it all out is pretty powerful, but a lot of writing is what not to include. In fact, the ability to self-edit your work in real-time is sometimes all that separates what’s publishable from what’s not. As is the ability to not make all your main characters a guy named Jeff whose superpower is charm.