I started poking at a story last night, got a couple paragraphs in, wrote “Kylian Verus, Master Chronomancer and Keeper of the Locus,” and called it a night. So I know y’all have some good stuff you’ve been chewing on. If you’re comfortable showing off, let’s see it!
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I am the most amateur of amateur writers, and I’ve been having a similar problem. I have no earthly idea how to do exposition/worldbuilding. I love exposition. I will give you a ten page history of the Locus and its Keepers, of the Church of Haldorox, or of the Onyx Praetoriate. Or of the Ascension process of the Acolytes of the Locus. But at some point I have to tell a story, and I don’t know how balance “applying to magical grad school” with “here’s what magic grad school is, its history, how you apply,” etc.
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My latest finished piece is in an original Fantasy Fashion Zine. There was definitely a longer discussion about the ethics of incorporeal labor and manufacturing that was present in earlier drafts and ultimately cut from the finished pieces.
Artwork is by Amb on Twitter, it was a fun project to be a part of.
The rest of my writing is definitely a lot older or in the realm of collaborative RPing, but I have some finished short stories I want to edit again.
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I’m reminded of, I believe it’s a PKD quote, where he said that you should know every single thing about your character, and only about 20% of that should wind up in the final book. It’s not exactly worldbuilding, but it’s similar: when you’re writing a story and you’ve figured out the character beats, and then one night you realize that a character had a crystallizing moment in their childhood, how can you not put it in?
Reading the Expanse books actually really helped me realize that a little exposition here and there doesn’t have to break the flow of the writing whatsoever. I think I spent so long reading nothing but “literary” fiction and writing nothing but genre fiction that I course-corrected in the completely opposite direction. It’s really refreshing to be able to plunk down a paragraph about what’s been going on in high orbit for the last fifteen years. Finding ways to make that exposition fit with the narrative is the best way to do it.
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Not much of a fiction writer these days but I edit a literary journal devoted to weird/horror/scifi/fantasy/stuff that falls outside genre conventions and am trying to expand our output of featured fiction. If that all sounds like something in your wheelhouse or interest please feel free to shoot me a DM.
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IDK if it’s totally gauche to include fanfic in this thread but here goes- the most significant writing I’ve done at all recently is two very short and self-indulgent Star Wars fics, because I’ve decided to just stop fighting it and embrace the deeply embarrassing person I am inside.
The first one was about quietly retired Boba Fett visiting Leia between episodes VII and IX, the second is a rewrite of a scene from Rise of Skywalker where instead of imagining his dad for a bit Ben gets visited by Anakin’s force ghost.
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Heya! I write a lot of things, fiction being the main thing, but also critical essays and sometimes creative nonfic. Most of those things are not on the internet, as they exist entirely in word documents on my computer, but I did get one of my short stories into a kind of zine for Italian-American writing. It’s very different from most of what I write in that it’s realism (most of my stuff is not) and pretty heavily autobiographical (most of my stuff is also not). If you’d like to read it, it’s here: https://ovunquesiamoweb.com/archive/vol-3-issue-1/chris-lombardi/.
I also write about video games and other stuff. A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece for FPSWeekly about Shovel Knight and depression that’s sort of an essay and sort of creative nonfic and exists on the internet here: http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/like-clockwork/.
(Just realized that both of these have my real name on them so uh, please don’t use that knowledge for evil.)
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It occurs to me that my noodling is going to have my real name on it too, so I will ask for the same “Please no villainy” clause once I feel like I have enough to say I “wrote” something. (It feels less like I’m writing than it does an extremely self-indulgent word vomit.)
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