forum Lore: How far back should it go?

Started May 13, 2020 by @RedTheLoveless

tune

This is a question I've been concerned about in my world for a while now. There are multiple stopping points I can take for that to be the end of my lore-building, but I'm not sure which one I should go for. Obviously, my lore doesn't reach all the way back to the dawn of time, have to keep a bit of mystery going ya know. But I've been curious about how other people view this dilemma.

So, I'm opening up this question to everyone to answer. How far back should lore go? Is it dependent on the story, or is there a set average? How do you know you've gone too far? Alternatively, how do you know when you don't have enough?

Well theres a few things to think about. You don't want to drown your readers with unnecessary lore. I know that for me personally, too much lore gets annoying, especially shoved in at the very beginning of the story. You only want to really feed your readers the necessary lore for them to understand whats going on in the story, anything else is pointless tbh. You know if you don't have enough when you know people won't understand whats happening without it.

Well theres a few things to think about. You don't want to drown your readers with unnecessary lore. I know that for me personally, too much lore gets annoying, especially shoved in at the very beginning of the story. You only want to really feed your readers the necessary lore for them to understand whats going on in the story, anything else is pointless tbh. You know if you don't have enough when you know people won't understand whats happening without it.

Yes!! ^^^^^^^ Expanding on this, if you do have a vast lore behind your world, feed it to your readers gradually, not all at once and DEFINITELY not at the very beginning of your story! Give crumbs and pieces through the setup of your scenes, reference it in character dialogue (try to avoid an exp dump though), and do it loosely and far separated! :)

Aight. My time has come.
So far Juniper and Celestial have talked about in-book exposition.
Expand your question. Is this in book or out of book? Personally I think if you want to go all the way to knowing every historical second that's just fine (though exhausting).

So, I'm opening up this question to everyone to answer. How far back should lore go? Is it dependent on the story, or is there a set average? How do you know you've gone too far? Alternatively, how do you know when you don't have enough?

Ok, it really depends on the type of story you're writing. My answer is not contained to book narratives, given my "specialty" is game narratives, so this is suitable for any story you wanna write in any media :) Also, this is just MY OPINION, not a strict set of rules

It depends on the focus of the story. Ask yourself: is my story character-based or plot-based? I like to use the 70-30 rule, focus on producing 70% of the story based on one and 30% on the other, for example, keep 70% of your writing about the characters and their inner worlds and 30% about the world they live in, or vice-versa.

If it's character based, it makes for a better story to keep the lore short, and add the mystery spark in the lore and plot of the world, since you wanna develop and showcase the internal world of your charaters, therefore, cluttering the story with lore and a heavy outer plot might make it too complicated and hard to follow, the reader/player might get confused with so many timelines and pieces of information seemingly unrelated being woven together. In this case, develop what is necessary, no extra embellishments needed, for example, "centuries ago" is relevant to the story, but "when humans first inhabited this land" is prooooobably not.

The opposite is equally valid, maybe the sense of wonder you want to evoke is through an ethereal, other-worldly universe, with stable languages and religions, consistent laws and magic and determined social structures. In this case, you DO want to create a long set of lores, and keep in mind you should start with at least 1 millennium ago. That, or what is enough to explain the "why" your world is how it is, a good rule of thumb is to ask:
-why is the society in this world the way it is?
-why are the religions in this world the way they are?
-why is the magic in this world the way it is?
-why is the law in this world the way it is?
-why is the tecnology in this world the way it is?
-why are the clothes in this world the way they are?
If you prefer, replace "why is ___ the way it is?" with "how did ___ become this way?" if it's easier to answer this way!
in this scenerio, your characters don't have to have a super detailed backstory, just enough to make them drive the plot and not be 2-dimensional. You don't have to tell people about how your main character's abusive great-grandma shaped their grandpa to be abusive which made their mom want to stop the cycle and then shaped your MC to be a world-saver and that's why they're the MC, unless that abusive great-grandma was the queen who started the war between MC's country and another country, and therefore changed how traditions were carried and had an effect on the enviroment around your MC.

To make it clear, NONE of these are rules, they are just my take and advice, there's no "right way" to write Lore. I hope this was helpful somehow :]