thanks for the mention, @GregShmedley , and oh geez, where do i start
i think it's important to be a diligent student of history and to have clear cut real world historical inspirations for your fantasy setting. creating an entire world from scratch is a large undertaking, and you can be at it for years if you let yourself get lost in it (which i admit i have, at least somewhat). but if you know your history and you have an idea of what parallels to it that you want to have, in essence what that does is it lets history do some of the work for you. it doesn't all have to come from your own mind. put your own spin on things for sure, don't just copy paste real historical events wholesale, but if you let history do some of the work, your setting will feel more realistic and logical for it. readers will read aspects of your world and think, hey that kind of stuff happens in the real world, and they will appreciate that.
also it's very important that your setting and worldbuilding feed into the plot and the character histories, and vice versa. i've seen people so focused entirely on worldbuilding down to the most intricate, trivial detail, and when you ask them about what kind of story they want to tell in that setting, they just kinda go "i dunno". that's never good. worldbuilding feels awesome when you are doing it and making good progress with it, and readers will appreciate well-made, intricate worldbuilding, but it's only a backdrop. it's not what they are going to be reading your book for. the characters and the plot are what keeps readers interested. so i think it's best to develop all of the above at the same time and be constantly aware of how each one feeds into the other, so that the aspects of worldbuilding you create and present in your narrative will have significance and be presented for a reason.
but of course that doesn't mean that you should never think about the minor, trivial details that will never actually make it into the narrative. there will most likely be a lot of stuff you have to figure out that will be for you and you alone. it's not stuff that the reader will necessarily need to be explicitly told, and it may or may not be demonstrated or hinted at at some point in the narrative, but it is stuff that you as the creator of the world will need to know in order to have a foundation for other, larger aspects of the world that the reader will need to be explicitly told at some point. the trick is being able to tell the difference, and figuring out exactly when and where and in what quantities it is appropriate to introduce aspects of your worldbuilding into the narrative.
whenever you introduce some of your worldbuilding into the narrative, there needs to be a point to doing so, there needs to be some significance it has to the narrative or to a character. and it needs to be timely, so either introduced at the time when whatever it has significance to is going on, or if you want to introduce it at some earlier point as a method of foreshadowing some greater significance at a later point, it still is best to have at least some minor significance to what's going on.
lastly i want to say that there are definitely plenty of resources about the subject online. i for one am a huge junkie of writing craft videos on youtube. i'm pretty sure almost every youtube channel i subscribe to for writing advice has done at least one video on worldbuilding, if not more. a few are dedicated entirely to worldbuilding and different aspects of it. some of the ones i subscribe to and would recommend are:
Artifexian Brandon Sanderson Chris Fox Ellen Brock Hello Future Me Just Write K.M. Weiland Lessons from the Screenplay Mandi Lynn Reedsy ShaelinWrites Terrible Writing Advice
also, going off of the earlier statement about being a student of history, i do enjoy a few history-centric youtube channels as well which i think have helped me along in my writing process as well:
BazBattles Epimetheus Historia Civilis History Matters History Uncovered Simple History
thanks. the borrowing from history makes sense, the story I am thinking of writing takes place in the real world so that is particularly good advice for me. i guess the question is how much non fiction and fiction to have in ratio. i struggle a lot with plotting stuff, I don't have the best eye for story. but details like organizations and persons have always interested me in fiction.
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"Why is ontology so expensive?" - JH [Is this live?][Joyless planet...]