fiction - What are the pros and cons of building the setting before the characters and story

I have a science-fiction setting I have been kicking around for sometime, but I am not sure how to go about fleshing out events or characters that would make for stories within this setting. What are the pitfalls to fleshing out a setting before you dive into specific characters or plots within?

Answer

Sometimes for me, when growing the setting first, I find it generates new characters, details and interactions that lead to a story organically growing out of the exercise. There are many ways to start putting a story together and very few are right or wrong.

Still…

Pros

• A cure for writer’s block; if you want to write but don’t know where to begin, building up your world and its history can lead to unexpected inspiration


• An excellent reference; by writing all your thoughts down, when you start writing you’ll already have a concise reference to aid with the writing, such as names of organisations and places and so on



• Strong logic; preplanning helps ensure that are no logical flaws in your plot by testing logical connections before you start writing


• A map! I often draw up a map of my world (more relevant in fantasy but still works well in sci-fi.) These maps are incredibly handy for working out things like distances, time and relationships. For instance, I once built a full political affiliations map for a nation at war, and in the process knew where my characters could safely go, and developed the story by discovering new relationships between warring factions.


• Cushioning; when we have a lot of prebuilt content in the form of history and setting we know we have stuff we can fall back on if we hit road blocks while writing

Cons

• Getting bogged down; it’s easy to get bogged down in world/setting development, and lose track of the story itself, I have many worlds lying dormant due to this


• Getting scared; as a world gets bigger it’s easy to believe you have to cover everything in your story. This can get scary, and can easily lead to you balking from making a start on the story


• Starting with setting; it’s easy after spending so much time in world creation to want to start your story with a big descriptive piece. Remember that publishers tend to cast aside stories that start with big descriptive pieces (that’s why we use prologues to get a reader stuck in with some initial action)



• History lessons; being caught up in our world’s history makes us want to share it with our readers, but if we stop to give a history lesson the story stalls and the reader may lose interest.


• Constricting creativity; this one’s kind of ironic as I said in Pros that this exercise can boost creativity. But too much of it can restrict creativity as it limits what changes you will allow yourself to make once you start writing as you’ve already set things in stone (so to speak)

Conclusion
When it comes down to it, whether developing your world first is a good idea comes down to you, and the way you write. I find it can help, but I often find that if I spend too much time working on world development I never actually write the story. Most of my stories are written by simply jumping in, but conversely; when I do that, I find that I often hit logic flaws that could have been avoided if I’d planned out my setting first.