Mystery is Acceptable in Fiction

If you’ve ever been overwhelmed by the sheer amount of detail included in the first few chapters, you’ve experienced frontloaded worldbuilding. This is a common mistake in eager writers who put a lot of work into their worlds and characters. When a writer does this, they want to share so much because who else would appreciate this if not readers?

(Yes, I was guilty of this when I was younger!)

How do you keep from overwhelming the reader this way?

You can sprinkle in details like it’s elemental magic or there are schools of magic through characterization, character observation, or brief summary paragraphs.

Having an exposition giver as a character for a human or otherwise outsider character could clue in the reader and the outsider character to how these things work. These explanations can be comical, serious, something in between, whatever fits your work!

Another solution is to focus on a character for the opening chapter instead of the world they inhabit. Reframing the chapter on who a character is, what’s happening to them and around them, and why we should care about this journey they’re about to go on can hook a reader in and keep them turning pages.

There is also the point that you don’t need to know how everything works and neither does the reader! (Nor do the characters!) You can have a Science Fiction story with technology that is impossible by modern science standards (like fold fusion). Or you can have super-fast computers and internet without knowing how your internet works, or what each part of a computer’s insides are called.

World details are interesting, but they shouldn’t be more important than your plot and characters.

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