my writing advice as a professional writer for over a decade is that "lore" is antithetical to good storytelling, if anything you're doing looks like "lore" then it probably can be deleted
A friend of mine was working on a novel that suddenly came to a screeching halt to give several pages of backstory on a horse and we ribbed her mercilessly for it. In our writers group this mistake became known as "horse backstory" 😀
Now I want to write a book called Horse Backstory about all the media in which the vehicle becomes the story (how did they get that ship, that spaceship, get to Colchis, get back from Troy etc etc)
As a fantasy author and lover I am deeply enamored with this to the point of considering taping it above my desk to glare at when I'm getting mired - as a WTNV fan I'm cackling as I remember desperately craving Lore as a teen in the early days. "But WHY is it such a strange city?" Stfu. Sword Time.
I want to mail this skeet to everyone currently working on Star Wars as it seems as though that entire franchise has devolved into little more than "how did she get that sword" writ long.
*The Head of the Church of England puts his hands on his hips*
"I am not crowning Arthur Pendragon king until I know where the Lady of the Lake got it. What if it's a cursed sword and he cuts off my head? That's no way to run a country, accepting gifts unknown from lake people."
This has literally saved me from scrapping a story where I can't explain where a character's magic pen came from. Is that really the important question here? NO, what will she do with it is the important question. ~heaves big sigh of relief~
The Fated Mates podcast often use the sentence « for Romance reasons » to explain away batshit insane settings in Romance novels and that is genuinely how I’ve been trying to live my writing life. Why do they need to be married to inherit? Romance reasons, don’t worry abt it.
The sewers are too badly unkept and for years the effluent has been too vile to count as “water,” therefore explaining why the sewer nuns are also active politically working for better infrastructure
It depends on your mythology. Stoker’s Dracula was limited by the tide, not the water itself (and could also go out in sunshine, though weakened). And does sewage count as water? Perhaps the vampires dual-classed as rules lawyers.
As a Tolkien fan, I would disagree. Nearly all the world building is optional. By and large, everything the reader needs to know is included in the text, which is why his fantasy epic is only a thousand pages long and every other fantasy author's is ten thousand pages instead.
Even Tolkien has less lore than you think in the main books. sometimes he goes overboard and invents a backstory for the giant spider but sometimes it’s simply, “here’s weathertop, it used to be a watch tower.” And then you imagine the implied history of the watchtower
It's also (and I think was always intended to be) Middle Earth's equivalent to a Bible-type text, which makes it even less surprising that it's chock full of lore.
Also, fun fact: Tolkien pitched The Silmarillion to his publisher after The Hobbit, got rejected, then started working on LOTR instead.
All this just supports the OP’s point—lore is usually dull and hard to read. For the sake of those who want to study Tolkien’s work, I’m glad The Silmarillion was published. I’m just not happy to read it.
I would argue more, “the Lore is not for the novel itself, but there will be an audience for those deep cuts as well, so if you can serve that separately, go for it.”
@mrmaresca.com beat me to it. It seems fair to say that an established success in sff will draw in readers who want to dig into the lore. The issue might be less with readers than risk-averse publishers, if anything.
As for the quality of the reading experience, I agree that lore-dumping is 1/2
I figure most of the important facts about my setting will come out organically, but I am struggling with how much exposition you can throw at the reader at once. Trying to keep it to a few sentences at a time.
I mean obviously that's for starters. Then you casually throw out earth-shattering revelations as they come up from there on out. Did I mention there's a sentient race of flying dinosaurs? Oh, well there totally is, nine chapters in. Buckle up.
DNF’d a promising SF novel within the first few pages once because after a brief scene-setting it became a literal instruction manual for a piece of technology a character was using.
lore writing really hits in video games, but I'm the psycho playing like 100 hour long rpgs and reading everything possible
Not everyone is gonna enjoy that
