NaNo2010 > Worldbuilding 1
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Housekeeping
Two things I’d like to mention before diving into the first of the posts on worldbuiling.
1) NaNoWriMo.org
You can create an account on the NaNoWriMo website. It’s completely optional, but it does give you access to some word count widgets, their forums, and (most importantly) the motivational emails they send out throughout the month.
You can also link up with other NaNoWriMo participants for fun, creating a friend network.
My account is under the username “tamimoore” and can be found here > http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/621134
2) Disclaimer
I am not an expert. I’m just a writer, trying to do my best to learn from past mistakes and share both the mistakes and the wisdom with others. There is no such thing as “the right way” to plan a novel. This series is “the way Tami is planning her novel this year.” At best, I hope to learn from this process and find out what works for me and what doesn’t. At worst, I’ve spent a lot of time and tossed a lot of useless words up on my blog.
This process may not work for you. It may not even work for me!
I hope it works for both of us, though. <3
Why Worldbuilding?
My husband loves worldbuilding.
I love characters and scenes.
He daydreams of societies and magic systems and cultural details.
I daydream abilities and conversations and interactions.
If you’re like me, the thought of spending a few weeks doing worldbuilding is PAINFUL. You want to get started now! You’ve got all these great ideas and you don’t want to spend too much time fussing with background details that may or may not even make it into your novel.
It may feel like a betrayal to set your beloved characters and plots aside, but it’s vital.
Without a solid foundation, your story is off to one heck of a wobbly start.
Ever read a series where the author lost control of their characters abilities and powers? Ever read about a particular magic and wrinkle your brow, wondering how such a thing even makes sense? Ever read a book written by an American about a country that you live in and feel betrayed by the lack of realism? If you’re a horse-lover, ever read about a character leaping to the back of an untamed stallion and galloping full out for hours and hours?
Worldbuilding Matters
Worldbuilding matters if you’re writing a fantasy and building a new world or layering a magical system upon the existing world. You will lose your readers if your magic makes no sense or if your society has running water and paved roads with no reason for it.
Worldbuilding matters if you’re writing a historical novel. You will lose your readers if you write an independent, feminist character set in feudal Japan. Your medieval peasant better not be eating corn chowder. Don’t know why that’s a problem? I’ll bet some of your readers do.
Worldbuilding matters if you’re writing a contemporary novel. You will lose your readers if your mis-represent existing cultures and locations. Just because you read a spy novel and heard about the Berlin Wall, that doesn’t mean you’re qualified to write a novel set in Germany. Your typical high school student doesn’t speak fluent French. If your character does, find out why.
No matter what kind of novel you are writing, worldbuilding matters.
What is Worldbuilding?
Worldbuilding is the act of defining the laws and rules of your setting.
Worldbuilding is, at its heart, asking questions and then building upon those questions until you have a solid world to thrust your characters into.
How does something work? Why does it work that way?
Start Asking Questions
Start asking questions about your world. If your story is set in the real world, start doing research on any setting you will need to know about. The closer your story is to your current life as you know it, the easier the worldbuilding will be.
It’s actually harder to worldbuild about a real place you know little about than it is to build a fantasy world. Why? Because when you ask a question about your fantasy world, you get to make up the answer. For a real place, you have to do research and make sure you get the answer right.
Good Questions to Ask
What is the climate where your characters are? The terrain? Is it rocky and desolate? Does it rain every day?
What is the political climate of your nation/world/people? Democracy? Monarchy? Religion-based? Are people from all classes chosen to become part of an elite team, or does birth determine a strict caste system? How do rich people stay rich?
What about laws and law-breakers? Who keeps the peace? What happens if you steal an apple from a fruit vendor? What happens if you kill someone?
What do your characters eat? Where do they get their food? Do they trade with other countries or nations? Who grows/gathers the food?
How about women? How are women treated? Perhaps they can’t walk the streets without veils and an armed male guard. Or maybe they can be found wielding a blacksmith’s hammer and drinking the other men at the tavern under the table.
Do you have a tale of forbidden love? The biggest obstacle to your character’s happiness shouldn’t be realizing they have feelings for this other, forbidden person. “Forbidden” means that society itself frowns on the relationship. What happens if they kiss in public?
What is normal for your society? If you have a character who doesn’t fit that “normal”, why are they different and how will other people in the world react to their difference?
Example 1
If your character rubs a lamp and the lamp gets shiny (real world physics and rules), that’s worldbuilding.
- Why does the lamp get shiny?
- If your character doesn’t have some kind of metal polish, then your character is a wizard and you didn’t realize it.
- How does polish work?
- Why is your character rubbing the lamp?
- Where did the lamp come from?
If your character rubs a lamp and a genie pops out, that’s worldbuilding. Because this is DIFFERENT, you should start asking even MORE questions than you did in the above question. Those of us writing fantasy stories have more work to do.
- Why did the genie pop out?
- Does a genie pop out of every lamp, or only special ones?
- Would the genie pop out for anyone who rubbed the lamp, or only The Chosen One or someone who rubbed in just the right way?
- How does the genie get IN the lamp?
- What’s it like for the genie while they’re in the lamp?
- Are they stuck in a smoke form, or do they have their own tiny world inside the lamp?
- How do they leave the lamp – in a cloud of smoke? Is the smoke colored? Does it have a smell? Why?
- Where did the lamp come from?
- How rare are genie lamps? If they’re super-rare, how did your character end up with one?
Example 2
Saying that you have an enslaved tribe of minotaur-like people in your fantasy novel is not enough.
- Where do they come from? Do they have a homeland?
- Why are they enslaved?
- Is it only minotaurs who are enslaved?
- Do they fight back against being enslaved?
- Are some of them freedmen? What kinds of jobs can the freedmen have?
- How do non-minotaur characters react to seeing a minotaur?
- If your main character bucks the system and is anti-minotaur-slavery while every other person in the book sees nothing wrong with it – why? Why would your character, who grew up in the type of society that would enslave an entire race of cow people, raised by folks who saw nothing wrong with it, have a completely and totally different world view from the rest of their characters?
The Best Thing About Worldbuilding
The best thing about worldbuilding isn’t that it gives you a solid and believable background for your novel.
The best thing about worldbuilding is that it twines itself around your story until you cannot possibly write your tale in another setting.
Remember our minotaur example? Maybe the main character is striving to free minotaurs. Maybe his reason for having such a different viewpoint from most of his society is because when he was a young, he was kidnapped by slavers from another country. While in the care of his kidnappers, he was treated as chattel, the same as the minotaurs are. He was rescued, but he can’t stand to see the yoke of slavery on anyone now. Your character now has depth and a history that you wouldn’t have if you’d not done your worldbuilding.
Stained
For my NaNo2010 novel, my spark was a character with a magic power and a particular physical manifestation of that power.
From there, I started asking questions.
- How strong is her magic?
- How common are people with magic?
- Does the color of her manifestation matter with regards to her magic? Why and how?
- Do I have any opinions on her past – was she born wealthy or poor? Does that have any significance?
- How do people react to those with magic?
- Why does she have magic when other people born around her do not? Where does the magic come from? Is it genetic or environmental?
- What is the political society like where she lives? (this ties into my answer for “how do people react to those with magic?”)
- What is the political society like in places NEAR where she lives? What about far away? How is trade done?
- How do those differing political climates result in misunderstandings, tense communication, or war?
And so on.
Write it Down
Take the time to type up or write down your questions and your answers to them.
If you’re like me, you’ll also want to go ahead and start your “Story Bible” now.
Story Bible
Your Story Bible is your reference and the encyclopedia of all your story planning.
My Story Bible is in wiki format, because branching and unexpected growth is part of how I think. I start out by making very broad categories and then following each category into more and more specific information.
I typically have a “Characters” section that I branch down into each specific character as well as a list of mentioned characters that I add to as I write. Major characters get a character sheet along with a personality profile and a history. Minor characters get basic details and mentioned characters get one or two words.
I also have a “Societies” section and a “Place Name Glossary” and a “Term Glossary”.
Build your Story Bible in a way that works for you. I’ve found that I lose details about characters and societies if I don’t write them down, and it takes only a moment to do so. It’s easier to build a Story Bible framework now and add to it as you write than it is to realize you need one halfway through your novel and try to generate one after the fact.
What You Should Get
Your goal in this exercise is to ask enough questions that the world starts to feel REAL to you and you start getting the inklings of conflicts or plots or characterization quirks. You should have a history and hooks to build a character’s backstory on. You may actually get ideas for several plots – several places where the world is on the brink of change, several conflicts that matter because of your worldbuilding rules. This is a sign that your world is alive.
At the end of my process, I will have maps of a few places scribbled out on paper (probably in crayon – every time I look for a dadblasted pen at my desk, all I find are crayons), some naming conventions for people and places (do I use apostraphes? Why? What do they indicate? Why do some words have apostraphes and not others? Note that “because it’s pretty” is not good worldbuilding.), in-depth society notes and a variety of other miscellaneous worldbuilding info.
Not all of it will make it into the book. Heck, I’d be surprised if even half of it did. The rules are there, however, and the world is made richer and more believable for my having that knowledge.
What You Should Not Get
You should not finish the worldbuilding process with this exercise.
Why? Because just as worldbuilding affects your character and plot, so too should your plot and character affect your worldbuilding.
Ideally, as you start to hang the other story elements against the world backdrop you’ve started, you should see more places to ask even more questions and make sure things fit properly.
I will not have every question answered. I won’t even know all of the questions to ask, but even more than that, I want to leave parts of worldbuilding open to my own interpretation as I write. I want to leave room for surprises and inspiration.
Over-Building
Beware the temptation to over-build; you can research a book to death.
Research and world-building can be never-ending processes. Never forget that the point of all this work is to write a book. Much like when I had homework I didn’t want to complete and ended up cleaning the apartment three or four times, research can be used as a tool to avoid writing.
When are you done worldbuilding? When your world feels alive and breathing and its heartbeat is familiar to you.
Some authors take years to build a world, painstakingly mapping out every single vegetable and creating new recipes and languages. Some authors build the world as they write, constructing it around themselves and their characters.
Personally, I don’t like either of those approaches.
Admittedly, I’m more of a planner than a pantser (seat-of-the-pants), but when I am reading a book, I do not care if the characters stop at an inn and have potato soup or leek soup or tomato soup. I’m okay with them just having soup. I am not, however, okay with the inkeep blatantly using magic to amuse her patrons in a world where magic-users are hunted and killed. I may not care if the patrons are being served barley beer or wine, but if they’re served some specific kind of very rare wine, I’d want to know why this backwater inn had access to such a rare booze, and why the innkeep would serve it to them.
Unless the process of beer-making is central to your character or your plot, you probably don’t need to research it as part of your world-building. You can do it for fun, of course, but that’s not quite the same thing.
Assignment
Start your worldbuilding.
Start your Story Bible, if you think you’ll need it. If you like the wiki idea but don’t know where to start, I have used pbwiki (now called pbworks) in the past and been pleased with it. You can also look into the tiny tiddlywiki if you’re looking for something small and not on the internet.
For those of you with Scrivener or a similar writing software, it’s even easier. You can make your Story Bible directly in Scrivener, so it’s just a click away while you’re writing. For example, Choose‘s Story Bible is in an organized set of folders in the “Research” section of my Scrivener file. If I forget the word I keep using every time Hank swears, I can click on “Glossary”, then “Naughty Words” (Hey, may as well have fun with your Story Bible, neh?), and easily locate the word to copy/paste.
You have one week to ask and answer questions before the next NaNo2010 post.
Ready? Set? GO!
Okay, first? Cleaning house instead of doing homework, and more than once? YOU have issues, my dear. *grins broadly*
Seriously, a most excellent article. It’s that whole world-building thing that has me cowed. And that’s why I set the first part of Darklight along California’s Central Coast: I know the area fairly well, I know the climate (so I can say the week before Easter is unseasonably warm and dry, instead of miserable). However, the second part of the story…ugh…that will take some work.
As you may remember, I started a wiki on your recommendation. Recently, however, I’ve moved everything to Scrivener, in the Research section: Character sheets, plot scenes, you name it, I can create a file there and have everything in one place, which in turn minimizes the time it takes to check, add, or modify something. (Also, I didn’t care for the layout of PBWiki…it wasn’t intuitive for me, but of course, YMMV.)
Again, wonderful stuff, and a good checklist for nascent worldbuilders to use to ensure when something falls off a table, it goes down, not up. ;)
.-= Steve Hall´s last blog ..O, Canada! =-.
@Steve
The bathtub needed scrubbing, what can I say? *winks*
You sound so depressed about the worldbuilding for Darklight. Be excited! Just start asking questions, it’s easy, and there’s no wrong way to do it. =]
You need to write a book on how to write. Seriously. I would buy it and make anyone who liked to write buy it.
EXCELLENT post, my darling. I love taking a lot of time and building my characters and fashioning them down to their quirks and birthmarks but my world is usually a little panster-esque. Sure, I may come up with some cool-sounding foreign words but that would be it usually so this is extremely helpful in giving direction.
Well done.
@Tristina
*laughs* I’m hoping my planning this time round will negate the extensive rewrites (which I am learning a lot from!) on Song of Binding, but that doesn’t mean I know what I’m doing it! I still feel like I’m flailing in the dark, but this time I at least know which direction to aim.
*grins* <3
Everyone needs a different amount of worldbuilding. Even if all you get out of it is a REASON for your cool-sounding foreign words, I’d say it’s worthwhile! =]
@Tami
Not really depressed about worldbuilding; more like intimidated? I know there is some magic involved (magic, using Arthur C. Clarke’s definition: technology so advanced, it appears to be magic). However, I want to make it believable too.
There are two concepts I need to address: FTL travel (at least, I think it will be FTL) and something akin to Star Trek’s transporter. But I want both to be unique to my world, and not a rehash of something else. I also want them to have some (albeit nebulous) basis in current earthly science.
(Hey lookie there: worldbuilding in progrress!)
.-= Steve Hall´s last blog ..O, Canada! =-.
@Steve
“Intimidated” is a much better word!
Have you done research on what other people have accomplished or found out about FTL travel? Easier to know what to avoid if you know what other people have done that you dislike.
Since you know what you don’t want it to be like, write down details on that and start changing them. What about the Star Trek teleporter DO you like? What about it do you NOT like? What would the limits on your FTL and transporter technology be?
=]
I am so the opposite. I have bajilions of settings, vague plots, and particular vignettes I can incorporate, but I struggle with character design, dialog, and concrete plot events. Will you (or Quane) give any hints to those with the opposite problem?
<3 Love the post. Showing it to mah peeps now.
@Jack
I intend to cover it all, good sir!
…”cows aren’t for talking”…
@Brad-o
California says they do!
[...] twitter, Krizzlybear requested a NaNo2010 post focused more directly on worldbuilding than my Worldbuilding 1 and Worldbuilding 2 posts. Specifically, he requested more information on [...]
So I’m back…and if I’d reread this article before I joined NaNo… *grin*
So yeah…worldbuilding. I’m tired today (lack of sleep; mowed the lawn; afternoon blahs) but it is part of tomorrow’s agenda. May I borrow your husband for a bit? (I have excellent beers! or wines.)
I also need to find a mapmaker. I believe there are resources online that can help you develop maps…need to research that some as well. (Yes, I need a map–for me, if not actually included in the novel.)
.-= Steve Hall´s last blog ..How to Redirect Blogger to Your WordPress Blog and Update Your Blogger Identity =-.
@Steve
Some day I will learn how to use mapmaking software. For now, though, the learning curve is too steep for me. A crayon map is good enough to keep me honest, and takes a lot less time to build. =]
.-= Tami´s last blog ..Sketchthings =-.