: Re: How does one deal with world builder's syndrome? I am a planner in the extreme. I tend to drift toward fantasy oriented novels when writing; it's just what comes out. This means that I do

@Annie587

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I think you've pretty much identified the solution yourself: You have to know when to stop.

I think it's good when a story has enough texture to it that it feels like real people in a real world. Every now and then I read a story that has some allusions to things that happened before page 1, and it strikes me that in many stories, it seems like history began with page 1 of the book. Apparently nothing of important happened before the book began, none of the characters had lives or did anything worth mentioning, etc.

But yeah. If you're trying to create a backstory for your fantasy world, it can be good to sketch out a past history so that your story is consistent and coherent. You might want to say, "350 years after the Great Migration, Fwacbar and Tionack fought w war that ravaged both nations and left them hating each other for generations after, but neither had the strength to destroy the other." Maybe there's some value in deciding what the biggest battles or the greatest heroes were. But coming up with a detailed timeline of every battle fought, the names of the units involved, how many soldiers on each side were killed, listing where each dead soldier was buried, who attended the funeral, etc, is almost surely unnecessary. If when you actually write the story you find it necessary to name one particular soldier killed in the war and to discuss what happened to his family, you can surely make that up as you go along.

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