by A.C. Williams @ACW_Author

During the winter time, little else warms me up like a bowl of chili. Here in Kansas, we usually pair our chili with a cinnamon roll or at least a hunk of cornbread. Whether it’s made from turkey or beef or pork or just vegetables, I love chili.

But the one time I had chili and didn’t like it came from a pot that was overly spicy. There was too much happening in that pot of chili, and I couldn’t enjoy the taste. I’m sure there were lots of great flavors mixed into it, but when you jumble all of the spices and herbs and flavorings together, they cancel each other out. You can’t enjoy the taste of the chili because it’s muddled up with all the different spices.

Would it surprise you to know that fantasy worldbuilding is exactly the same?

If you add too many elements—too many cultures, too many languages, too many magic systems—your readers won’t be able to enjoy the overall story. All they will “taste” is your worldbuilding. And that’s rarely the point of a story, even a speculative fiction story.

That makes sense on the surface. Anyone can agree with a statement like that. But the question is: How does it work?

How much is too much? How can you know when you’ve crossed the line into muchness?

Well, it depends.

Don’t you hate that answer? I wish I could give a more details or more information, but what you include in a story depends so much on where you are in your own writing journey.

The first thing to remember is that writing science fiction and fantasy is challenging. It’s not just chucking a spaceship into your story or dropping a wizard into your cast. It’s far more complex than that. As a rule, most speculative fiction requires the author to juggle a lot of elements. Worldbuilding by itself is a huge commitment, and when you add the emotional journeys of the characters and the plot structure into the mix, it gets complicated really quickly. It’s important to remember that your readers can only keep track of so much.

If you don’t have any experience writing sci-fi or fantasy worlds, let me gently recommend that you keep your first speculative novel as simple as possible.

Choose one fantasy or sci-fi culture. Maybe two at the most if you are writing a story where two cultures are at odds with each other. Believe me, that’s plenty.

If you’re writing fantasy and need to develop a magic system, keep it simple and straightforward. Don’t give it complicated rules, and don’t use more than one type of magic system per story. Eventually you can, but don’t start out overly complicated or you’ll burn yourself out.

The same thing applies to science fiction. If you’re going to use or focus on one advanced piece of technology, make it the only one. The average reader (not one from a niche audience) is only going to have so much patience to read your variation on terraforming. They aren’t going to want to hear your theories on hydroponic cultivation too.

And finally, keep your story simple. This is potentially the most common mistake speculative authors make. They develop a complicated magic system. They develop a complex fantasy world. And then they try to tell an intricate story with deep emotional resonance and multifaceted character arcs.

Let me save yourself some headache: Don’t do it.

Now, granted, there are always exceptions. Brandon Sanderson is determined to break every rule we make about writing, but that’s because he is Brandon Sanderson. You, my friend, aren’t him. And I’m so thankful you’re not. You get to tell a story from your own heart and life experience, but until you have learned how story works, you need to stick with the basics, especially when it comes to science fiction and fantasy.

If you have a multitude of characters, your readers won’t be able to keep up. If you have one primary character with a massively complicated emotional journey, some of the vibrancy of your world will be lost. Readers only have so much capacity. And if you are going to ask a reader to invest their focus on a fantasy world and a magic system (or a science fiction world and an advanced technology), you can’t expect them to be able to retain a super complicated plot line too.

I mean, you can try. But it’s probably not going to end well.

So keep your story simple. Make it one of the more straightforward types of story arcs (like a working together kind of story or a courage story). Both of those are simple, easy to understand styles of stories, and you can easily integrate multi-layered worlds and magic systems into them without losing the punch of a character’s emotional journey.

Science fiction and fantasy can be a ton of fun, but everything has a limit. Just like a bowl of chili can be too spicy to enjoy, a speculative fiction novel can be too complicated to understand.

Keep your story simple, your magic/technology straightforward, and your cultures recognizable, and you’ll have the recipe for a classic speculative fiction novel that any reader can enjoy.

Award-winning author A.C. Williams is a coffee-drinking, sushi-eating, story-telling nerd who loves cats, country living, and all things Japanese. She’d rather be barefoot, and if she isn’t, her socks won’t match. She has authored eight novels, three novellas, three devotional books, and more flash fiction than you can shake a stick at. A senior partner at Uncommon Universes Press, she is passionate about stories and the authors who write them. Learn more about her book coaching and follow her adventures online at www.amycwilliams.com.