110% this. I once wrote an article long ago on impishidea about it too. Build your worlds off what you're good at and interested in.
i.e.
For me, I often get lost imagining the biology of how peoples would be and the cultures that would arise from these realities. Like a people with poor eyesight but sensitive ears would highly value music but not as much paintings.
You also need to weigh simplicity of reading against depth of worldbuilding. My partner and I just finished Katherine Addison's _The Tomb of Dragons_, which goes heavy on the invented vocabulary. She does it well, I think, but it was still sometimes hard to read, and there's one word (the one for the undead dragon) which is such a long compound word, and shares so many elements with other words in the story, that it's just "the long r-word about dragons" in my mind. I think I was figuring it out from context every single time, and it slowed me down and made things harder. I also struggled with the titles of nobility, important though they are.
There's also the aspect of whether they are alien to the viewpoint character. Notice that the hobbits had very few strange words (*mathom*) and they weren't plot significant.
The whole point of Tolkien's focus on language as a basis of his stories was that language is intrinsically tied to the way cultures move and develop, and how events naturally are shaped by and in turn shape language. There are few similar aspects of culture around which to form worldbuilding. Geology, architecture, and food sourcing are a few possibilities.
The other thing is that people often overestimate how much world-building is needed for a story. It needs to feel solid. And when the characters don't go in for deep history, it needs only to look solid from the viewpoint character's viewpoint.
110% this. I once wrote an article long ago on impishidea about it too. Build your worlds off what you're good at and interested in.
i.e.
For me, I often get lost imagining the biology of how peoples would be and the cultures that would arise from these realities. Like a people with poor eyesight but sensitive ears would highly value music but not as much paintings.
It makes it much easier for your viewpoint character to notice things that you and he both are interested in.
You also need to weigh simplicity of reading against depth of worldbuilding. My partner and I just finished Katherine Addison's _The Tomb of Dragons_, which goes heavy on the invented vocabulary. She does it well, I think, but it was still sometimes hard to read, and there's one word (the one for the undead dragon) which is such a long compound word, and shares so many elements with other words in the story, that it's just "the long r-word about dragons" in my mind. I think I was figuring it out from context every single time, and it slowed me down and made things harder. I also struggled with the titles of nobility, important though they are.
Very true.
There's also the aspect of whether they are alien to the viewpoint character. Notice that the hobbits had very few strange words (*mathom*) and they weren't plot significant.
The whole point of Tolkien's focus on language as a basis of his stories was that language is intrinsically tied to the way cultures move and develop, and how events naturally are shaped by and in turn shape language. There are few similar aspects of culture around which to form worldbuilding. Geology, architecture, and food sourcing are a few possibilities.
The other thing is that people often overestimate how much world-building is needed for a story. It needs to feel solid. And when the characters don't go in for deep history, it needs only to look solid from the viewpoint character's viewpoint.
Oh, goodness, yes, soo much worldbuilding! It always startles me, even though I know it's necessary lol.
But it really does need to start somewhere solid, rather than just the history of buttons or something
It's amazing what can be reverse engineered with sufficient effort. (And a good thing too, considering how whimsical the muse is.)
Truth!