Cleaning up lore

[Corrupted Unicorn]

Sooo, I compiled all there is about one of my fictional worlds, Tooneiros (trust me, there's WAY more behind the scenes than what I put on the website) into one .doc file that contains all my written notes, all the loose ideas I discussed together with my bf and... it's 50 pages long  WITHOUT taking into account I made separated .docs for smaller aspects (characters, story...)

I think it's come to a time for me to create a more... "solid" version of all the ideas I've had on my head (and both myself and the site will benefit from that  ), but this is one humongous beast to tackle and I don't even know where to start 

Have you ever come across this situation? (Any novel writers, perhaps?) What storylines or aspects of your world did you decide to trim off and why? How do you determine which darlings are worth killing?   

[Melooon]

Sooo I do have opinions here although I'm not a big writer so please do correct me if I'm giving bad advice 

However the approach I'd take with a project like this is to start with the core-idea of your world, what is the one thing that it all hinges around? After that you logically connect each element into the core idea and you see if it fits, if it does not you cut it.

For example: Core idea: A world where everyone is a floating sphere!
Logical connections: How do spheres manipulate the world? Do they have fold out arms? Do they have telekinetic powers? If they don't have arms then they cant have an arm-wrestling club, but maybe they can have a physic dojo - or maybe they have a sport of bumping into each other or rolling in races?

What do sphere people eat? Do they have mouths? Obvs a sphere who only eats grass would be very different from one that only eats cows. A grass eating sphere might have evolved tiny pores on its body to ingest the grass and it would mow grass like a big shaver!

How do spheres age? Do they turn into cubes? Are the cities of sphere people built out of the cube bodies of past lifeless spheres that have been reused as bricks?? This implies a lot! For example it gives us ideas about how the spheres grieve and what their beauty standards might be ~ do they find more-spehereish-spheres beautiful, do they value the wisdom of a lumpy less round sphere?

So basically you take your core-idea and you extrapolate it; you've already got a bunch of ideas and plans in mind, so you can use those as a guide, but I'd also say don't let your existing ideas hold you back!

 

EDIT: Also is this page supposed to be really hard to read??     (see attachment)

[Corrupted Unicorn]

EDIT: Also is this page supposed to be really hard to read??     (see attachment)

No it's not, I'm being a silly dilly here This was from back when I was still getting a grip on web design. The original background was easier on the eyes, but I either lost it or the link died. I need to rework BOTH what's written there and how it displays, so for the moment, please ignore.  (hard to do it when the link is RIGHT THERE, but still)

However the approach I'd take with a project like this is to start with the core-idea of your world, what is the one thing that it all hinges around? After that you logically connect each element into the core idea and you see if it fits, if it does not you cut it.

OH YES, one thing I am proud of for this world (is NOT the web design  ) is that I have the core idea clear: "What if everything is alive?" Thank you for reminding me that: this "core-idea" has helped me meld new ones onto the whole world, but now it's time to see how "the big story" (I won't elaborate on that for now, it's a surprise plotlie that will help us later  ) squares up to the core.

Also yes, I agree: sphere-people roll over food to eat 

[loren]

i have next to no experience writing fiction, but i do have other writing projects that i often have to edit down for length. my advice has less to do with how to pick which parts to keep or trim, and more to do with the process of tackling a humongous beast of a document...
make a second document for your discarded ideas

i used to get stuck trying to make every idea/sentence/etc i liked fit into projects that they just weren't compatible with. some of them were good ideas, and i had a hard time letting go! but once i started keeping a second document, it got easier for me to get rid of the cruft and let my original idea shine. maybe the discard doc will become its own humongous, unorganized beast, but that's okay! you never actually have to look at it. it's just there as a backup, to free you from feeling like you're killing your darlings. your darlings are simply archived, out of the way of your current project. i usually don't miss anything that i move to the second document, but when i do, the text is intact and easy to add back in (or be the spark of inspiration for a new project!)