KK's answer was interesting, because it highlights to me that there's something about some people I will never understand: for some people, world-building is at best unnecessary, at worst a chore.
For me, world-building is the best part of writing, indeed the primary motivation for writing fiction. I've been creating worlds since I was a child. Sometimes they're as small as a map or a question, a few time I've gone into considerably more detail (generally starting with a map of course). The hard part about writing for me is the plot. I want to show off my worlds as much as possible, and find it hard to come up with good plots that can do this.
Tolkien wrote for the same reasons I do. He solved this problem by taking a standard hero's journey narrative and throwing in a lot of exposition to show off his world. Personally, I've never been a huge Tolkien fan, but I liked The Simarillion a fair bit better than LotR because it showed of the depths of his world and reminded me of reading old mythologies.
And there are people who can build worlds and come up with interesting plots. I've often mentioned that my favorite fiction writer is Jack Vance. There is a reason for this. He and uses his world to dresses them up standard plots with so much detail that the underlying plot is unrecognizable. When I was a kid, my favorite writer was Diana Wynne Jones, who I realize now was a lot like Vance in that respect.
It seems like fan-fiction writers are driven by characters. They find a character they like, and want to have more stories driven by the character rather than the world. I don't remember much about Jone's characters, but Vance's protagonists are pretty much always bland Byronic heroes, made interesting only by the circumstances they encounter, while his side characters are basically walking plot points.
This may explain why neither Jones nor Vance ever obtained the audience I felt they deserved, Despite being acclaimed and influential in their fields, I met very few people who had read Dianna Wynne Jones growing up, and I have yet to read another person under 50 who has read Jack Vance. (Though I've always thought that Tolkien's characters in LotR were quite flat, and he's still incredibly popular.)
In fact the man who is generally considered the greatest writer in the history of English language was all about about characters. Shakespeare never invented a world or plot of his own; the power of his writing was in how he rewrote the particulars of the plots and particularly how he developed his characters. Despite this, I don't see Hamlet or MacBeth fanfiction, which tells me that characters alone aren't what drives fan fiction.
So I guess what I'm wondering is:
- For TCSers who write, why do you write?
- Do you have any authors you love you feel are incredibly underrated, and intutions about why they're not as popular as you think they should be?
- Why does every slightly geeky person still read LotR around middle school? Is it just because it's part of geek culture, or is there a valid literary reason for it?
- What makes Shakespeare great? (I've heard stories about North Koreans crying when they read translations of his work, so clearly it's not the puns alone.)