What challenges do you face when writing for established settings such as Ravenloft or Forgotten Realms?
At its worst, writing in a company-controlled shared world means accepting artificial and potentially story-deadening constraints based upon marketing and other non-narrative concerns. It can also mean layers of interference unheard of with creator-copyrighted projects, or even shared world projects like Wild Cards or Thieves’ World that are essentially creator-controlled. Not only are you working with an editor, but often continuity managers and other people who might not be as interested in the creation of good fiction as they are the production of marketing-focused material for the brand. It’s a creative control issue, and the contracts most often used with shared world fiction require the author to give up a lot of that control. That’s shared world writing at its worst, but that’s not to say that there aren’t terrific shared world books out there or that writers can’t do great work in a shared world. Some writers get away with telling precisely the stories they want to tell within
