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Are questions about the development between world building and creative writing off topic?

I wanted to post the following question below, but I was not sure if it is off topic.

I encountered an interesting distaste from the creative writing community. At least some creative writers do not support beginner writers world build their first story. The shocking truth that I am told time and time again, the first written story will fail, because it is the first piece ever created by the author. This goes beyond the practice of creative writing. Even if the author practices writing short stories for several months to even years, the first story will still fail. Once the failure is complete, the author learns from the mistakes to make a better published piece.

How do world-builders move past this scary colossal truth?

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  • $\begingroup$ I modified the formatting. Does it still reflect your question? $\endgroup$
    – HDE 226868 Mod
    Jan 7, 2015 at 0:59
  • $\begingroup$ @HDE226868 Thanks for the edit. $\endgroup$
    – linuxfreebird
    Jan 11, 2015 at 2:50
  • $\begingroup$ It's not every day I get a thank-you for what was a two-character edit, but I appreciate it nonetheless. By the way, I think you're question's off-topic, but have you considered posting some variant - if you think you can salvage some bit and make it on-topic - in the Sandbox? $\endgroup$
    – HDE 226868 Mod
    Jan 11, 2015 at 2:52
  • $\begingroup$ @HDE226868 Yeah. I am not sure how to patch it up, but I am considering posting it in the Sandbox. Oh wait, what is the Sandbox, is that the same as worldbuilding? $\endgroup$
    – linuxfreebird
    Jan 11, 2015 at 3:14
  • $\begingroup$ It's this $\endgroup$
    – HDE 226868 Mod
    Jan 11, 2015 at 14:22

2 Answers 2

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First, thank you for bringing this to meta and giving us the opportunity to provide feedback before asking on main.

Most of your question sounds like "how do I get over having my first manuscript rejected", which doesn't sound very much like a worldbuilding question to me. It doesn't seem to be about the world or the process of building it; it sounds like it's about the writing/editing/submission process. If, instead of fiction set in a new world, your manuscript were a physics textbook (that you'd heard would be rejected because you don't have the right academic ties), would you think it on-topic at either Physics or Academia? I wouldn't.

Further, "how do X move past this" sounds primarily opinion-based to me; how would you objectively evaluate answers?

Now, if you have a question about how to design a world for reworking -- e.g. how to design parts of your world so that, if the containing story/game/etc is rejected you don't have to go back to square one -- that would be a world-building question and on-topic here. Be sure it's answerable and not an opinion survey or discussion, but I would expect there to be things akin to "defensive coding" and encapsulation that you could do when designing a world, and I can imagine good questions in that space.

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It is off topic.

As it stands, you've written a question about both worldbuilding and writing processes. Questions here about worldbuilding process have been closed before, so I would't expect much different for this one, especially given the addition of writing process.

I would recommend going over to Writers, but it seems they've expressed distaste for such a question and since I'm not a member there I can't shed much more light than that. Perhaps some nice commenter will come up with somewhere you can ask this :)

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