That's all good advice. Especially if you write character-based stuff.
I think to do a series if you start with book one with the main characters which is 'right in the middle' then all you need to do is just expand it either side of that middle (and add new characters as they organically arise).
With the ongoing series I'm doing, though, I went totally postmodern. After writing god knows how many hundreds of thousands of words for 'the character in her world' I then suddenly thought 'what would happen if that character showed up in this world?'. And hey presto - there we have it. Katrina shows up in this world, no one believes that she's from a utopian parallel world, and there's your setup. Just follow her adventures and misadventures. Then it becomes a character-based thing - how would she (your main character) react to being in this world, and how would people here react to her being here. And as she changes things, you end up with a new parallel world. (you can follow this on my Substack, by the way).
So I think it's not so much about the characters, but more about subjecting those characters to different settings and problems and so on. The world-building simply follows them. The trick is to make the world-building secondary, in that sense. And drip-feed it. A lot of writers probably, and understandably, fall in love with the worlds they create and want to tell everyone about them - but sometimes you have to be a prick-tease lol.
My two pfennigs there, anyhow.
(p.s. just so as you know I got to this post via a note from Brian Reindel/Lunar awards guy - I shall be perusing your site in due course - that's how to grow your audience - make best use of notes!)
That's all good advice. Especially if you write character-based stuff.
I think to do a series if you start with book one with the main characters which is 'right in the middle' then all you need to do is just expand it either side of that middle (and add new characters as they organically arise).
With the ongoing series I'm doing, though, I went totally postmodern. After writing god knows how many hundreds of thousands of words for 'the character in her world' I then suddenly thought 'what would happen if that character showed up in this world?'. And hey presto - there we have it. Katrina shows up in this world, no one believes that she's from a utopian parallel world, and there's your setup. Just follow her adventures and misadventures. Then it becomes a character-based thing - how would she (your main character) react to being in this world, and how would people here react to her being here. And as she changes things, you end up with a new parallel world. (you can follow this on my Substack, by the way).
So I think it's not so much about the characters, but more about subjecting those characters to different settings and problems and so on. The world-building simply follows them. The trick is to make the world-building secondary, in that sense. And drip-feed it. A lot of writers probably, and understandably, fall in love with the worlds they create and want to tell everyone about them - but sometimes you have to be a prick-tease lol.
My two pfennigs there, anyhow.
(p.s. just so as you know I got to this post via a note from Brian Reindel/Lunar awards guy - I shall be perusing your site in due course - that's how to grow your audience - make best use of notes!)