World Building

No matter what kind of story you write, the process involves inventing a world. A world where girls can turn into boys, a world where vampires exist, a world where love conquers all, etc. That world has rules. Hard and fast rules, that govern your characters' lives. One of the joys of writing is that you get to invent all the details of this world to suit your particular fancy, then stick your characters into it and watch them squirm. I love that.But...(there was always going to be a but, wasn't there?)The world itself can easily slip out of control. When that happens, you find yourself writing elaborately complicated plot devices merely to justify and/or explain some detail of this cockamamie world you've invented. And now, you've lost the plot. Now it's all just tedious exposition.Or...(and this is my personal pet peeve)You make the story about the world and hinge the whole plot on some character's discovery that the rules they thought they were playing by turn out to have been Wrong. I hate that. I really hate that. It's like trying to make a story out of a fix-up job. I've committed this crime myself (thankfully pre-publication) and I cringe whenever I read it somewhere else.I'm curious what other people's plot peeves are.