: Re: How feasible is it to write a story without any worldbuilding? Is it possible to make a story (with a plot and characters) that has no worldbuilding or explanations for events? Like whenever

@Debbie451

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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, 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.

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