[Giovanna Clairval]

Originally Posted by iansales

Whether you appreciate or enjoy a work of fiction is entirely subjective... but does that necessarily make the work "quality"? Clearly a lot of people like Kevin J Anderson, but I'm in the middle of Sandworms of Dune and it's painfully bad. It shows a paucity of imagination, an excess of cliches, a lack of characterisation, and a tin ear.

True! And K. Anderson built his low-quality story upon an already-existing world. No excuses!

And, going back to the subject of this thread, I never build a world before writing the story. As Teresa said, it must be lurking somewhere in the deep cellars of my unconscious mind because everyone thinks it took me years to invent a (they say) very consistent setting. Well, I just insert ideas as I go, and then copy-edit the whole thing until I can find no more contradictions, and any (uselessly) budding description is pruned before it can grow into sprawling info-dump. Of course, there's a huge amount of work there but, as I tend to edit my prose about a strabillion times, that's fine by me.

So, if you don't work before writing, you work afterwards. It is just about different ways of working.