We Are All Gods: World-building Basics

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So in a previous daily post, I promised to dedicate a post to the wonderful, awful, time-consuming art of world-building.

If you've ever read or written a book or story that could be classified as fantasy or science fiction, then you're familiar with the idea of fictional worlds. From the (insanely well-researched and painstakingly detailed) world of Middle Earth, to the halls of Hogwarts, to the districts of Panem, we've all walked down a made-up road from time to time. Even novels set in the "real" world have some degree of world-building to them, unless every cafe and every street is detailed and described exactly as it really is. Invented universes, however, are much more complex than made-up towns on real-world terrain.

Worldbuilding is a complex proposition, and, to some extent, thankless. Why? Because before you can start writing in your fantasy world, you've got to figure out where the food comes from. Do they grow fields of wheat? Are the wheat fields outside or inside the city gates? How will the position of said wheat fields affect your hero's daring escape in chapter seven? 

What about water? Where do they get the water? Is there plumbing? How is the water purified on your generation ship? Where is it held? Where do the drains go?

What kind of government does this world have? Are officials elected, or is it an inherited title? Or do warrior lords take control by pitting champions against one another in the ring?

There are about 7 billion more of these types of basic, infrastructural questions you need to ask yourself when you are building a world from scratch. But that's not the annoying part.

No, the annoying part is that you then have to leave it all out. That's right: as the author and master of this universe, you need to know what happens to the chamber pots (at least, I think you do); as a reader, however, the emptying of chamber pots never needs to enter my realm of awareness (unless it becomes a plot point--maybe they hid the ruby in the chamber pot of the Earl, and must now dig through the slop to find it). Nothing kills a story faster than pages, or even paragraphs, of exposition explaining the setting of the story. BOCTAOE, including Terry Pratchett, who seems to start every one of his "Discworld" books with a description of their entire universe. 

The key is to learn how to reveal just enough about the setting that your readers aren't lost, and can picture the scene at hand, without inundating them with unnecessary descriptions. I, myself, have not mastered this yet--it was, in fact, the problem with my last draft of my manuscript, which prompted one of my beta-readers to comment that I have not read enough books yet to be writing anything.  

There is more that could be said on the process of world-building, but for now I'll leave it at the basics: you need to know where they live, what they eat, and where the poop goes, and the reader probably doesn't.