When does coherence/focus become one-dimensional simplicity?

Your setting is where your story takes place. Worldbuilding has been a buzzword for the last decade. But think back to all the classic movies and think about the worlds. Star Wars you barely know about the world in the first movie. There is an empire that is bad, mainly because the main characters say it is. The rebels are rebelling. For how long and how? no one knows. Darth Vader is a bad guy. what's his back story? We don't know. In any medium, story is king. Your setting is not. Most fantasy setting actually can't work. Harry Potter could never happen in the real world and I'm not talking about the magic existing. Taking for granted it does, it would destroy the economy, countries, transportation and lives of normal people. Same with dragons in fantasy. Plate armour doesn't work against an elephant, now imagine how worthless it would be to a dragon. But we ignore these things if the story is good.

I get where you are coming from if the story is too basic, but that is a thousand times better than just people milling around like Game of Thrones. With no direction, things just happen. Do that enough and people will lose interest. At least if it's going in a direction, the reader can see how it goes that way.

I don’t think the issue is really much to do with setting in my opinion. I’ve seen comics and stories with amazing and awesome settings and “world building” but I drop the story in 3 chapters because of what you explained. A simpler plot is fine, complexity in plot is fine. The thing that will make a story feel like it has focus is if events actually mean something. Sure, having the world affect the characters is important, but many fictional worlds in popular media are very rarely expanded upon outside the very necessary information needed to understand what’s going on.

If your characters just sit and talk for an entire episode about their favorite ice cream when your story is a fantasy about dethroning the evil king but you’ve shown and explained all of the world building and background and crazy awesome powers and politics, your audience is going to think you have no idea what you’re doing and probably drop it as well. You can have a simpler plot about a bunch of kids in high school, for example. It’s very easy for a open ended plot like that to get lost and feel a bit pointless, but as long as there’s a goal the characters want to reach by the end and there’s things affecting your characters or story in some way, it can be an entertaining and enjoyable read.

As for the “too much direction” comment, I feel like this is less about being too focused on the plot to the point it becomes one dimension, and more about what most people refer to as ‘pacing’. Giving your characters time to breathe in between plot points and intense moments, stuff that perhaps helps show relationships or build character development, can probably solve that issue entirely, as well as making your writing less on-the-nose- and more behind the scenes, if that makes sense. Subtlety can be a big factor in plotting.

It's a tricky balance, honestly, managing the cognitive load of a reader.

With my comic, Errant, I did end up choosing to simplify the worldbuilding somewhat, or to at least make a lot of the stuff about the worldbuilding go unspoken. There are certain things I could tell you about the worldbuilding that are true... but also burdening more casual readers with them, who might already struggle to follow a story about 4-5 main characters, one of whom has two identities and another has lived multiple lifetimes under different names, across a 10 year timeskip, trying to covertly arrange a coup... might just make it hard for them to follow or engage with.

As an example, the characters in Errant do not speak English. It makes sense, right? King Arthur was a 100% real, actually magical Romano-Celtic King of "Britannia" in this universe, with a real magical sword. He fought off the Angles and Saxons and so.... there was never an "England" and English doesn't exist. So the language they're speaking isn't the Germanic-Romantic hybrid language of English... but probably a Celtic-Romantic language that'd sound like a cross between Welsh and French.
...But that's really hard for people to get their heads around, so they all speak British English in the text. When a character speaks British English, it gets across "they are British" in a way that makes it a lot easier to explore things like the personalities and class dynamics. I have at least done one little thing, which is never having the characters use any term derived too directly from Christianity, because they're a pagan society, and if they worship gods, they're probably polytheistic (Except Subo, who was probably raised Muslim). They never say "god", "jesus", "jeez", "bloody hell!", "christ", "crikey" etc. and Sarin often says "Sulis Minerva!" refering to the composite Romano-Celtic deity who combined the Celtic healing and protection goddes of water, Sulis, with the Greek/Roman goddess of war and wisdom Athena/Minerva, Honestly, I really don't think the audience cares or notices, but it makes me happy.

Realistically, the butterfly effect of the alternate dark age history, and having magic in the world ought to have made the world they live in basically unrecognisable. No England... does that mean no British Empire? What does mean for America? Is there a United States of America in my setting? Various inventions could actually be radically different because of this change, or have come out at different times... Are there mobile phones? Do they look anything like our mobile phones? Was there a WW2? And if not, how come references suggest that Sailor Moon exists, when no WW2 could mean no Tezuka making cheap comics after the war, which means no manga, which...
But I've chosen to not explore this, because every time a normal thing is unrecognisably different, it's necessary to devote time to showing context clues about what it is, or explaining what it is.

I call Excalibur Excalibur in my comic. I could have called it Caledfwylch, its original Celtic name, and did consider it... but then I'd have to have had a panel or scene where somebody or a narrator clunkily explains that Caledfwylch is Excalibur. What has that panel added? Not a lot really, now you just know that there's this sword that's basically Excalibur, but it's called Caledfwylch... so it's basically Excalibur, why does it need to be called something else, when it's just a plot item where the important thing is that it functions like Excalibur? By all logic, Excalibur should be a little roman spatha or gladius type sword, not this big fancy fantasy sword... But that's another thing to explain, because readers who don't know Roman history probably aren't aware of that and would just be like "hurr hurr, why legendary Excalibur so small and boring?".

It comes down to this for me, and some people may prioritise differently, but I personally believe that the audience has limited cognitive load, and that every new thing you need to get them to understand adds to the mental "weight" they are carrying. If I want to tell a story, and I think the most important thing is that it's about this one girl who really wanted to be a shounen manga hero, and then she grows up and it's all horrible because on another level, it's about "girlboss" culture and how modern society treats women, and it's in a setting that should feel "British", then I should make sure that those are the things somebody takes away from it, even if it means I need to cut corners on the worldbuilding to make it more familiar and not need thinking about. Cars look like cars, phones look like phones, there's a social media app called "Sqroller" that's pretty much twitter (wait...even twitter isn't twitter any more irl...ugh...) France is basically France, but it's just called "Gaul" instead, potato crisps exist, there is a Japanese culture that produces Anime, and one of them is Sailor Moon. I just don't have the space to explain a whole alternate history, or to have somebody say "let me check my phone" every time they get some weird looking device out so the audience knows that's a phone (and I have done that in another comic I did in the past where "phones" were little helicopter-like drones that project holograms, but it was a much simpler comic!).

It would be cool to make a comic some time where the alternate world IS the story. I admire Paul Duffield's The Firelight Isle for that. In the case of Errant though, the story isn't about the world so much as about these friends, and they already have a lot going on. It's been a learning process; I'm not sure I'd necessarily do it this way if I made another Fantasy comic, but... that's how I ended up doing it.

Sorry to be a bit of a nitpick, but people with the most common form of intersex, XXY, are AMAB. Most men may not even know they have it until they try to have kids or are dealing with other health issues.

The second most common form is X, which tend to be AFAB.

Having ambiguous genitalia is actually quite rare and most of the time doctors just pick whether it looks more male or more female. A lot of awareness recently has been about forced surgeries on infants that has lead to issues with these individuals later in life.

I agree with other replies about not really knowing much about the actual setting of your story besides how it relates to the conflict of the story. I think that the only thing you should think about is how interesting events could arise from your setting and how it fits the story thematically.

I love to read plots of all levels of complexity, but I love to write complex plots the most, even if it makes writing trickier, so maybe I'm not the best one to respond. I may be posting a novel here with complex intertwining plots and an ensemble cast with nine primary characters and it will be interesting to see if it can engage people, given that Tapas by nature and time episodic release in particular is better suited to more focused plots and character casts.

I also love worlds that are fully-developed in the author's mind, even if you see just parts of that in the story. A world with history, geography, politics, economics, climate, an explanation of the provision of subsistence - food, water, shelter, clothing, art and music and magic. The tricky part is integrating these elements into the story in a seamless and interesting rather than distracting or worse, boring way. I try to do this by inserting them referentially in the background or describing them when necessary to the plot. I think I have done so reasonably well in Elf Noir, which takes place in a small urban area. I don't feel the same confidence about the other work I referenced, which I wrote earlier, because there are sections I need to edit where my love of the world results in more exposition or immersion than is strictly necessary for the plot to move forward. What I love about comics as a medium is the ability through art for the author/artist to illustrate unique bits about their world without exposition.

How to give stories focus and direction without making it feel one-dimensional and overly simplistic?

That is tough. I think the key is in the second half - as you already know - make the characters real and interesting and make supporting characters more than sidekicks, have a rich background world that is somehow interesting and relevant, throw up obstacles and distractions. One thing I like to try to do is to keep readers guessing about things. Characters can develop a clear agenda or behavior within a few chapters, but their motivations don't have to be revealed right away. They can be peeled back like layers over time. Throw out a few subtle Checkov's guns amidst the backgrounds of personality and ordinary life so your audience can enjoy surprise when the truth comes out or feel cool when they put some clues together that not everyone else did. It also makes writing more fun for me.

I like what Hadleestt had to say about this, since it pertains to what i'm working on at the moment. Let's forget worldbuilding and setting or whatever for a second. A scene isn't filler just because it doesn't shift the main plot forward, and having these additional scenes just to show how characters interact and what their relationship is like to one another is just as important to the story. Without them, you really do get this sense that things are way too contracted if there is no "breathing room" as it is said, in between big action and major conflicts. Sometimes you need context.

If I said here's two characters, and they're the greatest friends in the world and then something happens to one of them, how are we as readers supposed to feel? Sad? The most you're going to get is a shrug because there wasn't enough context. Context is the set up needed to tie everything up later in the beautiful bow called pay off.
I always ask myself, "What are we learning here?" and if it's not immeditately important to knowing something about the characters, setting or plot, I trash it. The purpose of filler is not to add any of these things, it's redundant.

This is such a complex question...I had to read the OP 3 times and skim the whole thread before I truly felt like I understood it. ^^;

I think...one of the reasons that this doesn't often come up as an issue is because it's actually pretty easy to make a world feel 3-dimensional. For one thing, it's mostly in the background of the story, so you don't have to actually work that hard, and for another thing, like @darthmongoose explained, balancing the reader's cognitive load with the intricacy of your world's history often results in you leaving a lot of things within the realm of their understanding, only choosing to make something radically different when it serves a specific, important purpose to the story.

Basically, you just have to make a few big changes; explain them well and integrate them consistently, and you'll have a 'fleshed out world'. And for most budding writers, who already tend to worldbuild too much, this is an easy bar to hit. The much more prominent struggle is in knowing when to stop. ^^;

I think (and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) in most stories like this the simplicity is the point. Even when the writer doesn't really realize it, it usually shows in the tone of the story they're writing, and the subject matter they spend most of their time on. Like, even when they think they're writing a 'dark, gritty, serious story'; when the MC spends 5% of it commenting on how the edgy worldbuilding is edgy and unfair, and 95% of it killing monsters and trying to survive...it's pretty obvious what their priorities are.

Not that ^that's a bad thing. I honestly prefer that writers just focus on what they actually want to focus on, rather than shoehorning in details they don't care about to fill some kind of 'complexity quota' (which is always GOD-AWFUL to sit through). If it means you end up with a simpler story, so be it. Simple stories can be fun, too.

If you're writing a 'Real World Except With X' story and for some reason you can't think of ANY additional worldbuilding ideas to support your X-factor (and I've never heard of anyone with this problem before...), my advice would be...don't. Like, I said, focus on what you have; lean into the characters and their specific struggles, and you will still end up with a satisfying, complex story. It will simply require a little suspension of disbelief from your readers (which is FINE. Not everything has to be explained! Soft sci-fi and fantasy are valid; magical realism is an actual genre!)

Conversely, if you're trying to shave down a very intricate and complex story without accidentally over-simplifying it, first identify the most important aspects of the worldbuilding, that the actual plot will likely collapse without. Logically, all the other aspects are secondary, and only need to be worked in in casual, minor ways.

For example, I once wrote a story with some very subtle colonialist/nationalist commentary. This is actually a huge aspect of the story's worldbuilding and history; it explains the values of most of the antagonists and protagonists, and why so many of them are obsessed with hoarding super-weapons (sound familiar? ^^).

But how much does it have to do with the actual plot...? Does the reader really need to have this told to them in some way; do we really need to set aside time to spotlight this issue? Very little, no, and not really. So I just added it in minor ways: the characters place a lot of importance on the police, military, and state-sanctioned religion in their daily lives. Occasionally they mention that other countries exist, but only as abstract objects to be 'taken' or 'occupied'. The governmental structure is organized by concentrating and glorifying power, and all its most important figures busy themselves with removing power from those who "don't deserve it".

All of ^this is stuff you come to understand from simply reading the story; it's never said outright. The things that ARE said are mostly the scientific aspects of the worldbuilding that have greater direct effects on the characters and the stakes...but including the minor things makes it clear that that's not all the story has to offer, while keeping the focus where it belongs.

This is some good analysis, and I think ties into the concept of why people tell stories in the first place.

When talking about historical events, people tend to make it into a narrative. You'll see this happen if you ask how somebody's day went, or if you read a history book, or if you watch a movie based on a real event, like say, "Apollo 13". People will curate the events into a narrative pretty much instinctively rather than telling you literally everything they did that day. They have to; because they just can't tell you literally everything they did; there isn't time. If you asked me what I did this morning, I'll tell you I got up, I made a cup of tea, I got dressed, and I checked this thread on the Tapas forums while drinking my tea. I wouldn't include things like "I went to the toilet" or "I walked down the stairs" or every last step involved in making a cup of tea.

This sorting of information into "important to the narrative" and "not important to the narrative" is important, because the function of a narrative is to help us to understand the world by sorting all the stuff that happens into "important" and "not important" so that we can learn from them. The fact that I went to the toilet is only worth noting as part of this story, if something interesting happened there (which is why if in a TV show a character ever goes to the loo, they're probably doing a pregnancy test, about to discover something is wrong with them, or something will happen in the bathroom or while they're out of the scene, because there's no reason to mention it otherwise. Yes, we all pee, but it's not inherently interesting on its own). The fact that I made a cup of tea, however, could be interesting because either 1. It is character-building information: "Kate is a tea-drinker, not a coffee-drinker", "Kate makes tea first thing every morning; Kate is a person who likes routine." OR 2. setting information, "Kate made Twinnings Everyday tea using an electric kettle, which might be a clue that this story is set in England".

When you're making up a narrative from nothing, or building a whole Fantasy world to follow in the footsteps of J R R Tolkien, it can help to know a lot of setting details, but once you do, just like if you were telling a story about your day, you have to curate them so the reader knows what's important, and that might mean some details are left unsaid, or they're just hinted at in backgrounds. In Errant, the coat of arms for the town of Joysgard is a white shield with three diagonal red stripes. You see it in backgrounds a lot. It's the coat of arms of Sir Lancelot, who , in Arthurian Legend conquered a castle called "Dolorous Guard", and renamed it to "Joyous Guard", adjusting for pronunciation slip over time, yes, the city of Joysgard was built around Sir Lancelot's castle, and I will probably never have space to outright state that in the comic, because it doesn't matter to the story I'm telling about Rekki Lune's quest for redemption. It adds some flavour though!

I think the key here is to not make the central theme one note or shallow in its exploration. Because with themes, there are branches that extend what you can talk about with the story.

I'll talk about my own work as an example. The central theme is parental abuse. It would be eh if I just had the story be "here is this parent being abusive, here is the character crying. The character only ever thinks about this and then one day decides this isn't okay and leaves." Like yes very obviously abuse= makes people sad. There's a lot more branching topics that can make the exploration more interesting and complex to readers.

My scenes and events branch off questions such as: Why would someone choose to stay in a situation like this? Why do people end up "falling for" abusive people? In a family dynamic, how does one character being treated better than others affect them (e.g the main character is treated nicely because he's young and naive, meanwhile, 01 being the oldest and most dissalussioned cult member is treated terribly for not conforming. 24 is treated well, but is still jealous and bitter of the main character not "earning" being treated kindly.) And how does this affect the character's relationships between each other? What coping strategies are used to deal with this situation? What behaviours have the characters learned as a result of being in an abusive environment? Do they end up doing these abusive behaviours themselves? How does leaving this situation affect the abusers behaviour and the other characters?

I give myself the breathing room to focus on multiple things. Like even if the characters are joking around, I'm able to establish whether they're friends, how they deal with their situation and what sort of inside jokes they have. I don't need to stick solely to "omg look at this abusive person being abusive!" Because that would be repetitive and obvious to the reader. And establishing likable and interesting characters is important in getting people invested in what they're going through. Like, some scenes are just solely character focused and don't focus too much on the main theme.

And I'd argue with the worldbuilding, I am bored by stories that have heavy extensive worldbuilding but boring characters. Like, I need the story to naturally integrate parts of the worldbuilding into the story and to inform the characters behaviour. An example I'd use is Arcane, where the worldbuilding is really important in exploring themes of classism and power. We have the cool interesting Undercity and Piltover- but how the characters upbringing in these worlds affects their world view and their goals is interesting. If it was just "boring characters just go through and battle in this cool overly built world," I wouldn't care. In that show, the worlbuilding is like it's own character, and integrates incredibly with character and theme.

Like I only really started caring the worldbuilding in my own story after I'd written the story. And I've made sure to integrate it into the story and theme. Like its another branch off from my main topic- we literally have a place isolated from outside connections, made up of a group of people in the same bubble and world-view as their leader. Like its not that surprising that a cult lives in a commune that doesn't have outside eyes on it, so that the abusive party can make up their own rules and consequences without outside authority stepping in. They also have a lack of electronics or ability to call for help, and the characters tend to have no where else to go or run to. (Helpful for setting up the horror to come) The setting is also designed to be beautiful and appealing- in my recent updates, I've been showing off how cosy and homely the place looks, with nice trees, a cute garden, open spaces. I've also taken the time to show food being prepared (yet to publish that update) and while "omg the food isn't relevant to the plot" it has been done to have the reader invested in the world and literally to gace them go "wow, this makes me hungry, I wish I was there, it looks so nice!" (Like that literally explores to my branching question of "why would you want to be in that kind of situation!!)

The world also has other details I know like "How do they grow their food? How are jobs/chores distributed? What is their schedule? Are certain people allowed to do some jobs while others can't? Like some of it can be inferred through reading the comic, like I always add Easter eggs such as a jobs sign up sheet and a small sign on the notice board that says "it's flu season! Come down to the clinic for your check up!" Like do you need to know that the cult members get regular medical check ups and that they can sign up for jobs? Not really, but I have readers who love seeing the world expanded. But all this world building would be really boring if the characters weren't interesting and I just dumped it on the reader. Like "great, you have this very in depth world but the story is boring."

I think in general, it's like taking a trip from point a and b. Like yes, you could just drive the journey straight there as intended, or you could stop by interesting things you see on the way there, look around and explore them. Like you're still on the same trail but you're taking the time to enjoy the journey. You don't wanna go a completely different direction and go off track of course, but you give yourself more to look at than just the ending location.