So I'm walking down to the library, excited to write a few more pages of a book I've got growing in my head. Every week, I head down to the local library and sit in a small, quiet meeting room to do nothing else but write.
I get there, I write a few pages, and then I stop because I've got a dilemma. My MC has just walked out onto the street of a futuristic city. I know he's headed home. I know he'll run into some trouble that he'll deal with fairly handily along the way. I know how he'll deal with it, and I even have a cute little catchphrase he'll depart with. But what I don't know is what the HECK streets even look like in this city!
Are they elevated hundreds of feet in the air? Are they bridges? Are there tubes that suck you to different areas? Do you board drone transports? Do people fly? Are there giant escalators or moving sidewalks like those airport things?
What do I even want them to look like? What do I want getting around in this city to feel like?
And what does my choice mean for the city as a whole?
My choice has ramifications for the entire world this is set in. So I should first consider the world. What does this city look like? Who built it? Why? Was it always a city? Does it have some other purpose? Do people who live in the city now know who built the city?
At this point I'm not writing anything, I'm just sitting there, thinking of larger and larger questions that are getting me further away from my MC walking down the street.
World building is essential, and I like to have things figured out because it makes choices later-on easier. It also means I'll have fewer of these questions that will stop me down the road as I write more and more. But I think there comes a point where I've gotten too deep into coming up with a mythology for this world, and too far from what is actually relevant to the story I'm trying to tell. Sure, it could all be relevant. I could make it all relevant, but I do have to actually write some pages of the story at some point. That is the goal, after all - write a story. So I'm trying to balance world-building and overall plans with writing the actual story and allowing myself to be somewhat spontaneous with my choices, and then build the world around those if I like them.
So, yeah: pay no attention to that cat sniffing the wizard (or at least don't feel the need to explain why he's doing it. Sometime's shit is just there for fun).
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