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Q&A How to revise your "setting bible"

Let me second what @ItWasLikeThatWhenIGotHere says, and elaborate. Fiddling with a setting is an endless task: you can delve into sociology, millennia of history, technology, geography, geology - ...

posted 6y ago by Galastel‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

Answer
#4: Attribution notice removed by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-12T21:57:23Z (about 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/36936
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T09:07:11Z (about 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/36936
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by (deleted user) · 2019-12-08T09:07:11Z (about 5 years ago)
Let me second what @ItWasLikeThatWhenIGotHere says, and elaborate.

**Fiddling with a setting is an endless task** : you can delve into sociology, millennia of history, technology, geography, geology - all the endless scientific endeavour thousands of RL scientists are trying to figure out with our real, existing world. You can easily keep building your world for years and years, and never come to write anything in it. That's a danger you must beware of.

**In the end, the setting must serve the story, not the other way round.** Imagine you start writing a story, and then some idea comes up that doesn't quite match your "bible", but serves to show some really poignant idea. What do you do - discard the brilliant story idea? Or discard the endless time you've spent on your bible, and change it?

**The main goal of keeping a "world bible" is keeping in an ordered way the facts you've already written into your stories, so they don't come to contradict each other.** Facts that don't come into play in your story serve no purpose. Facts that get in the way of what you want to write do damage.

It follows that, like @ItWasLikeThatWhenIGotHere, focus on the characters, and start writing a story. The story will guide you with what parts of your world you need to get deeper into. The scope of a game can be bigger than a novel, in terms of bits of the world the player gets to see, but the guiding element is still the story and what serves best to tell it.

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2018-06-14T11:58:37Z (over 6 years ago)
Original score: 6