A topic that comes up fairly regularly on sites where aspiring writers hang out is world building.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can read the helpful Wikipedia article.

For speculative fiction writers, this can be a matter of great importance, perhaps even leading to a sort of writer's paralysis. Do  I need to create a full world before I begin to write? Do I just wing it? What if my world building is lame?

I don't have all the answers, but I do have some thoughts to share,.

For many a year, I built worlds without writing stories. I love world building. (In particular, like Tolkien, I love language invention. . I understand the allure of immersion in this activity, and how it can compete with the impulse to write.)

But most people who love invented worlds experience them through stories, and most invented worlds yearn toward story-telling. Worlds without stories is a strategy of isolation.

So what to do? Do you stop in your tracks and work through the great list of world-building questions? Some would say no, write the stories and let the world emerge. Each writer, I think, will hear a different piper about how much to let the world make the stories, and how much to let the stories make the world.

I'd like to suggest that this chicken-and-egg problem is really the wrong problem. Instead of looking at how much world-building  comes before or after the writing or stories, we should be looking at what ties world to story, and tying that connection from both ends.

A world needs realms, economies, history, races, and whatnot. But mostly it needs a heart. The heart of a world is the central idea (or feeling, or image) that makes what you write in this world matter.

What is the heart of Middle-Earth? It is the sorrow of the Elves. They are immortal beings, experiencing a mortal world. Take this away, and The lord of the Rings unravels. Not the basic narrative, mind you, but the connection of the narrative to the world.

The heart has roots: the Ainulindale, the story of Feanor and Morgoth. And it has branches, Aragorn's being especially poignant.

Too many have emulated Tolkien's world (I'll put Elves in the woods, Dwarves in the mountains, and -ooh- some kind of Dark Lord) without emulating his creativity: a world with a special heart, and roots and branches.

If you know the heart of your world, you can write., World before or after story doesn't matter, because the theme is in hand,