During a conversation with Lit Hub‘s I’m a Writer But… podcast, Mike Meginnis discusses worldbuilding for a story in which you end your world.
Meginnis says he resisted the temptation to use a cinematic montage showing the affects of his planned apocalypse all over the world before diving in close to his main characters.
“It’s not that I’m against those techniques exactly, but they’re not super book friendly, and I’m also not trying to put the world in this book about the world ending, right?” he says. “I’m trying to hint at it, but I don’t want to try and put it in there because I don’t have the time or the space, and it’s really a pretty idiosyncratic, visual apocalypse that is really meant to foreground what is interesting about a small number of characters. So it was, ‘How can we really quickly establish these facts and this mood with as little information as possible?'”
