Alright, so here’s the second part of that question I wanted to answer in a metawriting entry, concerning worldbuilding:
[W]hat are your thoughts on erotic artists and writers who attempt fantasy or science fiction worldbuilding in their works?
Well, first of all, I’m going to speak to worldbuilding in general in this entry, because regardless of your genre, worldbuilding is an act that can take place in any story, and I want to spend a moment talking about what worldbuilding is, or rather, how worldbuilding is different from simple setting.
Setting, of course, is where your story takes place. That said, setting isn’t necessarily elaborate. Settings don’t need to be developed, they don’t need explanation. I can have a story take place in “a room”–I don’t need anything beyond that for a story to work. Sure, I can be more elaborate in my description (what kind of room? What kind of furniture does the room have? Does the room lead anywhere else?) but adding details doesn’t constitute worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is the act of ascribing rules to how your broader world functions and behaves beyond the scope of the reader’s lens.
In my simple setting–that room can exist in a universe outside of everything else. It might have no windows or doors, it might be a physically impossible space, it might have no builder. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter–there is a room, and a story occurs inside of it. That’s all a setting entails at the most basic level. However, if I decide to worldbuild, that entails constructing an entire world which exists outside of that room regardless of whether the story ever leaves that room or not. This is the fundamental difference between a setting and a world–a setting only exists so long as the story describes it, but a world exists whether or not the story ever describes it–the author has created it outside of the story itself, and the story then, must subvert itself to that world.
Now, what exactly constitutes a world? Good worlds, built properly, are consistent with themselves. They should possess rules, and the things which exist in the world must abide by those rules, and those rules ought to possess no exceptions without very good reasons for those exceptions. So, in a fantasy world, if you are going to construct a system of magic (which would be only part of a larger world, of course), it ought to possess “rules of magic” (who can spellcast, what spells can and can’t do, how spells are cast, etc.) and in a science fiction world, if you want space travel, space travel must have rules as well (whether spaceships can surpass the speed of light, do they possess artificial gravity, how do they account for special relativity, how common alien species and habitable planets are, etc.) and all of those rules need to be consistent with each other and need to possess no exceptions without reason. What I mean by “without reason,” is that, if some spaceships can go faster than light, but others can’t–there needs to be a good reason for that rule to apply only in some cases; put another way, there needs to be a meta-rule governing the first rule’s exceptions.
Now, back to the question at hand–what do I think about erotic authors who worldbuild in their stories? Let me start off by saying that I think worldbuilding, if done well, can be very effective. I would say that two of the better examples that come to mind are the works of Onix, and “Cigar Monitor” by E. S. Morwood. Both of these stories possess worlds which have systems that the authors use to enhance erotic tension and propel their stories forward (although as a caveat, Onix does have a habit of getting bogged down in exposition) and the determining factors of whether an author has world-built well are considerations of momentum.
A well built world ought to be one which does work for you. It ought to be intuitive for a reader to understand, provide complications which you can exploit for your plot, and fill in setting, letting you focus on character and action. However, most of the worlds I see do the opposite–they bog down the story in exposition which is irrelevant to plot and character, and serve only to drag a story down until it moves so slowly that I stop reading it. And ninety-nine percent of the time, there are two reasons the exposition is being given, and both of them are really bad reasons.
First, the writer is providing exposition because the world they’re creating is too complex for a reader to be able to intuitively understand it from context; small, well placed details; and limited exposition. If this is your problem, you need to rethink and simplify your world, or give your reader a bit more credit. Chances are they can put more together on their own than you think, especially if your world is relying on fairly standard tropes of the genre you’re writing in. However, if the problem is that your rules possess too many exceptions, then you really need to rethink and redesign your world, or find better ways to incorporate your exposition so you don’t go too long without progressing your plot, or giving your reader a sex scene.
That problem, however, is the rarer of the two. Far more often, the reason the exposition exists is because the author is so proud of this world they’ve created that they just have to tell you every minute detail about it. Here’s what I think about that.
Shut the fuck up.
I read a story because I want a story–not so I can read about a system of rules you’ve devised for a world that I have no reason to care about because you haven’t bothered to craft an interesting plot, well rounded characters, compelling MacGuffins, or titillating sex scenes. Your bullshit world doesn’t blow my cock; if you get off on systems of rules constructing worlds, go read fucking Spinoza you freak.
Don’t do this. Don’t make me hate you. Don’t do it.
Worlds are there to help stories get off the ground, by implementing systems for readers to rely on, freeing up the author to spend time on the story, and not on the setting. However, if you spend the whole piece describing the system, you’re using worlds wrong. Go DM a game of Dungeons and Dragons, and bore someone who isn’t me, please.
Bracken's Corner 