You’ve seen Men in Black. A big alien cockroach comes down to earth and hides in the body of a delivery driver. Problem is that the body of the delivery driver is way too small for the alien, so the alien has a tough time keeping the skin on as a disguise. The driver is just about ready to burst with big old mean alien bug all over the place.

My brother and I were talking a few nights ago, and we came to the conclusion that the alien from Men in Black is my book, and I’m the delivery driver. I’ve had this stupid bug hiding inside me, growing and growing, until now it’s far too big for my skin. And so I’m trying to write as fast as possible before I explode and have to clean novel guts up off the kitchen floor.

I think I’ve figured out that this is how a novel has to be written for me. I have to work out a good portion of the characters and plot beforehand, but the details of the world come out as I write. It leaves surprises for me and makes me excited to get to writing on my manuscript again.

Too often writers fall into the trap of trying to plan out everything in their novels. That’s my tendency. I want to know the steps the characters take to resolve mysteries or their own character arcs. I want to know the beliefs of the different fantasy religions in the world. I want to know the languages that the people speak. Because I come from a background in Visual Arts, I also like to know what colors people wear and how the styles of architecture developed. Pretty soon I’ve got a mess of notes and no way to connect them together. I’ve heard it called World-Building Disease, or Tolkien’s Disease. And I know I have it.

So I’ve got to do a little of that stuff, but there comes a point when it’s time to just write, and everything that isn’t developed I’ll make up on the fly and fix it later when the book’s done if the spontaneous creations don’t fit in with the world view. If I don’t do it this way, the book will never get finished.

The whole World-Building thing is overblown anyway. Who cares how the architecture in your world developed if it’s not a detail that’s integral to the story? If you want to read pure world-building books, you don’t pick up a novel. Most people want history or travel or sociology nonfiction books for that sort of thing. You pick up a novel for the characters and for the story.

So when you’re building your world, develop the concepts that are directly related to the story and characters you want to tell. When an artist paints a picture, a lot of times the frame that goes around the picture hides the edges of the painting. The artist knows this and compensates by painting just a little more around the edges than what will be seen. It gives the impression that if the frame wasn’t there, then the landscape of the painting might go on, revealing more interesting sights.

This is what must be done in novel creation. You paint the important details—those that show up in the frame—and then you hint that the world is much, much larger than what you’re showing us. This cuts down on world creation time too. Let’s face it, you don’t have decades like Tolkien did to build the world of your story. If you want to be writing for a living, you’ve got to be writing at least one book a year, maybe even two. You don’t have the time to “sand the underside of the drawer,” to borrow a term from Pixar. You’re an impressionist painter, you hint at what’s there using broad strokes rather than painting the picture so detailed that there’s nothing left to the imagination. But I’m digressing.

Having a rough idea of an outline allows for spontaneity that can be standardized throughout the text after you’ve finished the rough draft. But not everybody is comfortable working that way. It’s somewhere in between the way Stephen King writes and the method of the meticulous outliners.

Deep world building and meticulous outlines may work for other people. That’s how I was working at first, but it was paralyzing me. I kept thinking that I couldn’t mess up, so it had to be all planned out.

News flash: It’s all right to mess up and write some crap. That’s what a first draft is for. The idea is to finish the book and use revisions to sweep up the crap later.

I wish I had figured this out earlier. Then maybe I’d have been able to write more books between then and now.

–Stewart!