Whenever I write a novel, I come across a major problem.
I’ve created this entire world down to the smallest detail. I know where the mountains end and become the flat lands that will meet a river. I can picture where all the enemy camps are. I know the history of many different families for a few generations. I even know the history of that world for hundreds of years before the main characters exist. Which is my issue…
I have too much information. I want to share the entire world with each reader and let them fall in love with it. But most of the information doesn’t fit into the plot of my novel. The information gets stuck within me for no one else to see.
The more I’ve thought of it, the more I’m reminded of Cassandra Clare’s novels. All her fourteen(+) books revolve around the same world. Each series brings new information about the world. It’s another layer to add on to her complex world that keeps expanding. She does it well too, selling over sixteen million copies.
It’s a simple way to get the whole world out: keep adding more stories into the same world. If my world has that many stories to tell, I would. But there’s more than one world I want to share. In the making, I have at least five different worlds with five different stories. I can’t stay in one world and let other stories out.
I’ve thought about making a bonus feature section to dedicated fans. Maybe I can write short stories about the world I created and post them online. I could write about what happened in the novel that they didn’t get to see the first time.
I could bring out the characters more as well. I can show their family history and give out random facts. Perhaps I can even get some artistic friends to draw what the characters, so my readers can have a reference.
But it’s all a daydream right now. I still need to get my book polished enough to publish first.
What do you think though? Do you have another way to let out more information about your world?
Robin LeeAnn 
So I heard on the Writing Excuses podcast that many writers create their own resources to write out history, character info, and sociatal/culture points that are important to the novel. They mainly do this to keep things straight, but I think it would be gratifying and rewarding if you wrote all your ideas out in an organized book. You could even have it printed. It’s something that you can keep for yourself, have as an heirloom, or a future resource for books in the future. I think that if your brain is just bursting with information that needs to come out, then write it out! It might make it in the actual story someday, but for now, you’ve got a separate work of art.
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I have a journal where I keep things like character info, history, etc. – I mostly have written facts about the culture into my novel that I now have to go back and delete because they raise too many questions. I’m keeping a list of what I’m deleting though. Having it like a heirloom or so sounds cool!
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I have the same problem. Tolkien is my hero! Am currently writing some short stories to flesh out the history of different regions of my world. I like the idea of the bonus stories for fans. It made me think. I heard recently an author did a Patreon with chapters of the book so when it came time to publish they had raised something like $6k which covered self publish cost and some for marketing. What if you released the bonus stories as a Patreon bonus?
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Ooo That sounds like an interesting idea! I may look into that.
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