The Curse of World development.

If you ever frequent the Discord server you probably know that I've been working on a story for main stream publication. It's a completely original universe. That being the case, I have to come up with everything in how the universe works.  This is beyond the character design and main story plotting. Issues can sneak up on you and totally surprise you. There is always story creep where the plot wants to head off in a different direction.  More often than not in my case I end up being faced with a new issue that could potentially affect how the rest of the story progresses, even though it's all background stuff.

In this universe the various realms of heaven and hell exist and the souls of the departed are escorted to their destination.  I latched on to the idea that ghost or souls don't age.  And that led to some truly silly mental images of "teachers or respected elders" being the wrong age.  It started distracting me from working on the actual story.  So I end up spending days trying to come up with an idea that would resolve the issue.  I have the idea.  Now I am going to spend more days trying to pick apart potential issues that might come up with my solution. One of the many books on writing and plotting I've read also pointed out the need to procrastinate.  That's kind of where I'm at having set the idea on a back burner for a bit while my subconscious chews over the issue.  This is why I have posted the plotting template and harp so much on character development. This is taking that left turn at Albuquerque and trying not to get lost.

Yep. And it's also one of the reasons aspiring writers trip and fall. They start writing the story by the seat of their pants and slowly get bogged down by world development issues. Especially if you are writing in a different universe or time frame. Fantasy and Science Fiction. If I didn't have my own issue with the question of "What now?" dealing with plotting the story line, I'm sure that I would get just as bogged down with the minutia of the world.

One interview I read with an author who commonly wrote sci-fi gave me a work around. "Write the story as if everything the character deals with is common. If it's new to the character, then go into describing it in detail. There's no need to give an info dump on an automatically opening door if the character sees it every day. Now if you are writing a world change style story like the "System Apocalypse" stories where a RPG gaming system is laid over the existing world, most likely all bets are off. You might end up giving a detailed description of an Amazon delivery package that just tried to eat you.