14.35: What You Leave Out
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary Robinette, Dan, and Howard
The advice commonly given to writers is to worldbuild an iceberg, but only to show the reader the tip. This is still too much work. Icebergs are big.
In this episode we talk about worldbuilding the tip of the iceberg, and then worldbuilding as little as possible of the rest of the iceberg so that the tip behaves correctly.
Homework: Take a chapter of yours which has worldbuilding elements in it, and remove all of them. Set the worldbuilding slider to zero.
Thing of the week: Stealing Worlds, by Karl Schroeder, narrated by Nancy Wu.
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