Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Post History

60%
+1 −0
Q&A How feasible is it to write a story without any worldbuilding?

Not really. "Worldbuilding" is much broader term than the question or most answers seem to assume. I ass-u-me that what is actually intended is to avoid doing any explicit exposition on the setting...

posted 8y ago by Ville Niemi‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

Answer
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T06:08:44Z (about 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26832
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar Ville Niemi‭ · 2019-12-08T06:08:44Z (about 5 years ago)
Not really. " **Worldbuilding**" is much broader term than the question or most answers seem to assume. I ass-u-me that what is actually intended is to avoid doing any explicit [exposition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposition_(narrative)) on the setting, so that the setting is either discovered implicitly as the story progresses or left obscured.

That is of course always possible. Anything that is important to the story can be revealed without exposition and anything that is not can be left obscured. It can be even argued that it is better to not use exposition, not because exposition itself is bad, but because not using it makes it easier to avoid useless information. Useless information is basically noise that distracts the reader from the story so avoiding it is good.

Excess information can also make it harder maintain a sense of wonder or mystery about the setting, so in genres like fantasy or horror avoiding or minimizing exposition is doubly good. You can still give exposition about useless things, if you want to play mind games with the reader. But if you play mind games with the reader there really needs to be a good payback for the effort.

The downside is that not giving excess information makes it easier to forget to include something that the reader actually needs to understand the story. You probably should have some way to verify whether your story is comprehensible if you want to avoid exposition. But making sure that what you write can be understood is always good, so this isn't really an extra burden to avoid.

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2017-02-20T17:49:28Z (almost 8 years ago)
Original score: 6