I’ve determined over the past few days that I might be too much of a vibes-based writer for my own good. Maybe it’s because I spent so long not writing and just daydreaming about it. I tend to think first of setting, atmosphere, and feel rather than what Dean Wesley Smith describes as a character in a situation with a problem. I eventually get there by accident most of the time, but I could probably make things easier on myself by starting with character. There’s something melancholy about starting with vibes. Like I don’t really think I’m going to finish it, and I just want to cope by basking in the feelings— either the feelings of thinking about it or the feelings of browsing some imaginary wiki about it. Everything orbiting around the story that is not the actual story.
Today DWS wrote a blog post about some writers who asked him for help and then confidently rebuffed him. The delusional fanfiction writer and the AI sycophant did not bother me so much, but the guy who had spent six years worldbuilding… oo-wee. I used to check out the worldbuilding subreddit now and then. I wasn’t doing that much worldbuilding myself, just watching others do it. Oo-wee. I looked at it again today. I just wonder where all the stories are. Some people are making art books and stuff which is cool but it doesn’t seem like many people are getting around to writing stories. And maybe they don’t want to and they get all defensive. “It’s fun for its own sake!” It looks like lunacy to me now. DWS says that worldbuilding is just critical voice and for me at least that’s probably true: worrying about whether my conlang’s phoneme inventory is naturalistic, worrying about the tectonic profile and ocean currents of my world that I really just want to be like Earth anyway, worrying about the realism of scale and government and industry and biology and blah blah… no thanks. You know what an important aspect of it is? I’m not writing for the sort of reader who has “worldbuilding pet peeves” and posts about them. Perhaps at one time I thought I was because that person and I are both nerds, but in fact we are different. Nothing especially against that sort of person. I shouldn’t write for anyone but myself.