Tips for writing and worldbuilding

[Matterplay1]

Many of these may not apply to the actual EG articles, as the entire point of most of OA is to satiate the fan desire to see the details of a world.
[url=http://io9.com/7-deadly-sins-of-worldbuilding-998817537
]The 7 deadly sins of Worldbuilding[/url]
http://io9.com/does-the-phantom-menace-h...1026016172

Since we're a work-in-progress we don't entirely avoid the pitfalls on this list though we've made a very good beginning.

We've done a pretty good job with 1 and with 2, but the secondary note under 2 mentions something we could use a lot more of: lives of ordinary people. We spend a lot of time talking about transapients, a little time talking about the lives of famous individuals who were not transapient (or who started out as 'merely' sapient/sophont), and almost no time talking about 'ordinary folks'. By the way, for those who like to dig into 'ordinary life' for a period I recommend the works of the historian Bruce Trigger. It's a little dense, because it's geared to other historians, but for instance his book 'Ancient Egypt: A Social History' is a good antidote to the 'kings, priests, armies and public works' view of early Egyptian history. For a broader view, 'Understanding Early Civilizations' gives a broad comparative scope that takes the earliest civilizations across a range of the world (Valley of Mexico, Classical Maya, Inka, Yoruba-Benin, Egypt, Southern Mesopotamia, Shang China) and looks for common elements in the lives of the people who lived there and then.

We've avoided items 3 and 4 but with a few exceptions we've done so only in a limited sense. We've often implied or stated that polities and cultural groups are diverse, so we're off the hook there, but so far we are short on concrete examples of that diversity.

Item 6 could use a lot more work, as we're all well aware. I mean to address this myself in the near future, with some items on what it's like for a human (or someone similar) to take a walk, or take a meal, or listen to the sounds in the neighbourhood, or use 'the facilities' either in a public or private space, or carry out other mundane activities.

In general, our answer to a question about the setting has often been to discuss what the archailects or the lesser transapients would do, or do about it, rather than to consider what life is like for the vast numbers of ordinary sophonts whose lives are largely unaffected by them because they are beyond the range or beneath the notice of the setting's transapient 'macrobes' as our own microbes are beneath the range and notice of humans. We have many more vignettes to paint and stories to tell.