World Builder's Disease

For those who don't know, world builders disease is a writer affliction where the writer is so caught up with the world and setting building of their novel that they never actually write the novel. For those who do know, I'm sorry the first sentence was a waste of your valuable lifetime. My brother is the foremost expert on world builders disease. He would write the book on it, if he wasn't still busy trying to hammer out the details about the setting, and the culture and history. More famous people with the affliction, in case you don't know my brother despite his best attempts and that certain Rolling Stone incident, are J.R.R Tolkien. He spent pretty much his entire life developing Middle Earth, and while The Lord of the Rings certainly benefited a lot from this, it also meant that we got way less output from him than many die hards would have liked.

This is a big problem. If I had overcome world builder's disease myself I would probably have a great deal of input on this that would be really beneficial to all of your lives.  Unfortunately I have the opposite of world builders disease. I shoot my world building questions with a machine gun until they die too fast to react properly and then I move on. If any question happens to survive the onslaught at the very beginning, I answer it with a Random is Best policy. I imagine that the older wiser version of myself will have a collection of ink blots, and a shelf covered in glass jars filled with various categories of nouns. Then if I wonder "What is the most popular pet in the country" I can just pick up the Animal jar and answer the question in less than a second. This is probably why I will only truly be equipped to write humor. No serious self respecting author could tell their readers that the national pet is a squid which the people of the nation will feed anything but spaghetti for fear of promoting cannibalism.  In the meantime, since I do not currently have jars or inkblots I use generators found at Seventh Sanctum, and Serendipity (Reference Google for further information). These are also immensely useful when it comes to naming things, which is something I'm not very good at because I have the tendency to think that everything in the world would be slightly better if it was named either Stymie, or Faunterloy.  While this is probably true, it would also probably be slightly confusing if it were taken into complete practice.  If you happen to suffer from world builders disease you might want to consider using some of these methods. They could help you. Or be completely useless.  But sometimes the best things you can do in life are completely useless and can even somehow lead to finding your soulmate according to Match.com.

Other possible solutions could be to imagine that your entire world is a blank page. Unfortunately this is also called Writer's Block, which is frowned upon in most literary circles because it apparently isn't conducive to literature. Or you could possibly just give up, and put your information to use by starting a new country. Giving up is also frowned upon, especially by motivational speakers, but I've spoken to several quitters who swear by it, and several revolutionaries who actually think this is a really great plan. You can find supporters for anything if you try. It's not even hard if you have Facebook. The only other option I can think about is to forget about the world and try to focus on only the characters of your potential novel, only pick 3 to start with and work from there, or you could go to writingexcuses.com and look up actual legitimate solutions from legitimate authors.