I've done a bunch of pre-writing work on my novel and am about ready to start the actual writing. Problem is, I'm not sure where to begin telling my story. I would like to jump right in at the inciting incident, but I'm not sure if I need to introduce my world and characters first.

I haven't read much contemporary fantasy - I like the classics (George MacDonald, CS Lewis...) - so I don't know how it's most often done. The classics seem to build the world first most often.

What do you think?

Jordan
Http://heavenlyprincess.wordpress.com

I jump into the inciting incident rather quickly myself. If you look at Tolkien and Lewis they use settings that are fairly easy to characterize. The children are in a large house during the war. Frodo is living carefree in the Shire. I think the setting partly defines who the characters are and how they'll react to things. Frodo longs for the return of peace. Edmund was spiteful at school. The intro doesn't have to be too huge just a bit to let us know who the characters are.

I like to jump straight in, personally, and introduce world building and characters as I go along. I feel it makes it more interesting and grabs the readers interest more, though I'm sure that can happen both ways. *Agrees with everything Rin said*

I think it can go either way. With my story, I take a couple chapters to get into the real action, so that my readers can see how life was for my characters before their world got turned upside down. Personally, I prefer it that way. But I know a lot of people who would disagree.

If you don't start off with tons of suspense, you have to make sure there is something that keeps people reading. Something has to hint at the action to come, if that makes any sense.

Also, don't info-dump. One nice thing about jumping right into the action is that you don't have many chances to insert whole paragraphs with nothing but "telling".

Thanks! All your answers have been very helpful!

Jump right into the story. (I say that, based on her description, this is what PrincessOfTheKing does; "the story" doesn't necessarily begin right when things get particularly scary or complicated.) In my opinion, worldbuilding is like the frame of a cloth model, work that you do to make sure the story holds together, but that should only be visible in the shape of the parts of the story that we see---the actions of the characters and what they encounter. It's effectively what we would call "research" if we were writing science fiction, detective, historical fiction, travel, or other stories---for those we'd have to look up various details about the setting, milieu, or subject of the story or (if we just made them up instead of researching them) risk getting called out and corrected in public by an expert who knows better than we do, and (more importantly) if we didn't do our research our story would be likely to sound fake because we hadn't immersed ourselves in the setting, era, or subject. With fantasy, generally all this begins in our heads, but that doesn't reduce the need for everything we write to make sense given the rest of what we know---but, on the other hand, most readers don't want to read dissertations about details of the world, they want to read a story.