Worldbuilding and storywriting are two different skills and I'm tired of pretending that they're not.

I originally made this for r/Writing but thought that it would fit here too.

You heard this story once you've heard this story every time.

Some young upstart comes in with their special and unique fantasy, sci-fi, whatever world that they've spent 3 long years creating. They want to show off every detail, down to the creation, original sin, every war, genocide, species, various cultures, etc. And they want to know how to incorporate as much lore as possible into their story.

See, there's ya problem. They're trying to bend and break their story to fit their world instead of with their world. They want to cater to their massive, irrelevant lore dumps.

Perhaps this is an erroneous leap but I feel like the regular writing process has the story come first. Every story has a conflict and the setting answers the question as to why there is this conflict. One unacknowledged thing is storywriting and worldbuilding are two different skills. The worldbuilders want to show of their amazing reality while also wanting to stick to a standard hero's journey.

My Title

For the anthology part. You want the readers to know about the devastating battle of Dunswerth? Set a story during the battle of Dunswerth. What about how the humans drove the gods from earth by being too sinful? Set a story during that time period.

You'll find that the difference between good exposition and a dump is that exposition is an answer. Don't start with exposition, build to a point in the story where the characters and readers are asking why? The exposition will answer that, it's something readers want to know.

In a story set 600 years after the battle of Dunswerth, a page about the complex politics that led up to this war and the aftermath would be ruinous (unless those politics are somehow relevant, the aftermath would be more relevant in most cases). A story set during the battle of Dunswerth, well now those are things we need to know.

It's not like you couldn't do it. There are tons of well regarded series with rotating casts, time periods and settings. It would certainly scratch and itch, no?

The alternate path is Slice of Life. I had iffy feelings towards the genre until I watched a miniseries by the name of Sound of the Sky. It's set in a post-apocalyptic future and follows five female soldiers who reside in a bastion located in the small town of Seize. This is during an armstice so most of the story is simply the day to day lives of the ladies and their interactions with the townspeople. We get casual worldbuilding throughout and in episode 1, 12 and 13, we get some minutes dedicated to exposition. Was this boring? On the contrary, I could feel my brain shifted into focus as soon as it began.

Perhaps you could write a story about some young person trying to find the meaning of life. They decide to travel the world. They meet various people, find love and most importantly get to learn about the cultures and histories of the various places. Because that's what a globetrotting adventure is all about. Or even a an immortal or timetraveller recounting their adventures throughout history.

Instead of whipping your poor story into trying to include your 600 pages of worldbuilding, the world is what the story is about. What I'm getting at is the world is weaved together with the story instead of being a separate entity.

Conclusion

You know you could always just write a history book, it's not like there aren't fictional gui-

My short term memory loss has been getting worse lately. So I forgot what I was gonna put here. Uuuuhhh, you're wrong, I'm right but then again it's not so clean cut, this is all just suggestions and whatnot so maybe you can just ignore me or whatever.

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Bye