Today I attended a talk on world building. This is the work you do before you write that novel. You don't need to finish this ground work before you start writing your text. But you should make an effort to understand it all.Create a well defined set of rules for your universe. You don't need to explain all these rules to your audience. But the characters should be bound by the rules. There are exceptions. The bad guys can be breaking these rules. They are bad after all.
Plot is a tricky subject. You don't want to jump the shark. That is, you can't immediately come out with something big in your prose. Otherwise you will have to keep trying to raise the stakes. That just does not work.
