During an interview with the Otherppl podcast, George Saunders discusses how revisions are important to creating fictional worlds with consistent rules.
When you’re revising, the rules of your fictional world will begin to reveal themselves. “The way they do is that the prose will suddenly be good in a certain place, and then you’re in the story,” Saunders says. “And therefore I have to stick to whatever rules you’ve just told me about.”
Saunders also imagines his reader resisting aspects of his fictional world, and then works to ensure their suspension of disbelief. “I better run up and beat you to the pass and give you something to hold on to,” he says. “In a sense, that’s what worldbuilding is. I’m anticipating the places where you feel that this is just indulgent, or crazy for the sake of being crazy…and I give you a little more information and then you’re like, well, okay, it’s starting to make sense to me.” In other words, revision is an opportunity to discover your rules of the world and to anticipate where your reader will resist – or drop out of – it.
