Sybal Janssen asked Lois McMaster Bujold:

My reading friends frequently have lively debates about the elements that create a literary world that feels as if it really exists. In my reading experience only ten per cent of the books I have read possessed those vivid qualities. As both a reader and writer of such books, what element(s) do you feel coalesce to create a living breathing world? So far our debates though long and loud have come to no conclusions.

Lois McMaster Bujold
This is too complex and individual a question to be answered in a paragraph (or possibly at all), so commenters are invited to chime in below.

But briefly, for myself as a reader, the writer/artist can sell me almost any kind of world-building if they have convinced me of the reality of the characters, and get me inside their heads for some sort of gripping interiority. (Granted, my foray into manga and anime has lowered the bar for world-building logic.)

As a writer, while I know readers will forgive or overlook much in a work that just delivers up the right emotional set-pieces, I don't want them to have to. (If a work doesn't deliver up the emotions, there is little point in reading it; one would be better off spending the same time reading non-fiction. Not that non-fiction isn't selected and edited to be a kind of fiction in its own right.) So the attention I spend on world-building is actually in support of my characters.

Ta, L.

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