Worldbuilding Resources

Nanowrimo is only 25 days away! At the expense of all other writing ventures (read: as procrastination from editing, which is not nearly as fun as it should be), I have been plotting my novel for Nano. Since I'm writing fantasy, I've been doing work on world-building, and I've discovered a fun fact – it's way easier to build a world when you actually have a plot in mind. In the past, I have made the mistake of worldbuilding for the sake of worldbuilding. I've sat down at my computer and said, “I'm going to create a fantasy world today.” I don't deny that this was fun, but it definitely lacked something.

 

This time, however, I had the good sense to begin with a plot, and a 'gimmick', as it we, for my world – the idea of souls as a commodity that can be extracted through dance (this sounds much tackier when I write it down like that). Once you have something to base your worldbuilding off, you discover all sorts of unexpected things – do you realise that if dancing can steal your soul, you might have trouble passing on oral history? Nor did I, but these are the things I've ended up thinking about over the past few days. The lesson I have learnt from this is that your world needs something to set it apart from other worlds, and to fuel ideas about the culture of your people. (I'm not so interested in the geographic and map-making part of worldbuilding at the moment.) The thing I most dread is when you ask someone what their setting is and they answer, 'You know, it's like, a medieval fantasy world, with elves and dwarves and stuff.' Originality is, I believe, the key to rewarding worldbuilding.

 

While I was on the topic, I thought I should share some of the resources I've been using.

30 Days of Worldbuilding

This is – as the name suggests – a thirty day tutorial which takes you all the way through geography, climate and history to different plot points you might use in your story. The format makes it perfect for use during October, so by the time November rolls around, you will have a well-formed world for Nano! Yay! It includes discussion of the 'What if?' of your world – the speculative element that will set it apart from other worlds, and guide your worldbuilding to an extent, which is good, because when I first encountered this, I hadn't realised that having your own unique 'What if?' was really necessary. There's also a lot of focus on the mood of your world reflecting the mood of your story right through, which is good for creating more effective setting.

 

The only problem I found with this was that there was a lot of geography, map-making kind of stuff, which I got bored of, and am mostly not bothering too much with for this year's Nano. But if you're into map-making, go for it.

Patricia C. Wrede's Worldbuilding Questions

This is an extensive list of questions covering pretty much everything you ever wanted to know about your world, and some things you'd never even thought of. They're even sorted into convenient categories and sub-categories, so that if your world is going fine, but you just don't know what to do about transportation and communication – BAM! and Patricia C. Wrede has the answers.

 

Working through these questions from beginning to end can be a bit overwhelming because there are so many of them, and they do go into an awful lot of detail. They're probably best for fleshing out the bits of your world you've neglected, or your brain might explode. But definitely worth a visit.

Fantasy Art Resource Project

This one is oddly Biblically themed, working through the creation of your world in seven days, each on the theme of what God created on that day of the week – day four is Astronomy, for example, because that's when God created the stars.

There are a lot of very useful questions, but also information that you will need to know what building a world – for example, in the section of fashion, there is a whole list of the different factors that can effect fashion, and how they can do so. The tutorial also works through the different 'stages' of economic development, starting with the barter system and finishing (interestingly) at Communism (I don't think he was actually going for linear development from least sophisticated to most sophisticated here, but it did come across that way...), so you can work out where you want your own society to fit in without just staring at a page and going “Oh God oh God economy?!” which is probably when I would have done if anyone had asked me in depth about how economy in any society I was designing worked.

Liljenberg (the author) divides society into priests, warriors and workers – the Three Estates, if you will. While this is horribly simplistic, it's not a bad way of getting a handle on the basic values of the society you're designing, and how things will change depending on which 'Estate' is the most powerful.

One of my favourite things about this site is that several of the 'days' come with handy worksheets – one for animals, one for solar systems (if you're writing sci-fi) and one for cultures – so you have an easy way to record information. After all, who doesn't want a sheet with tick boxes for your society's familial structure, and a line to fill in their drug of choice?

This site is my personal favourite at the moment, but all three are worth visiting, and there are many more which I am yet to try out. I could be at this a long time. How is everyone else progressing with Nanowrimo planning?

An Extra Post on Editing

I've been trying to keep to a schedule of posting every Tuesday, and I do recognise that today is Wednesday, but I found something that I thought was interesting, especially in light of yesterday's post. Nick Hornby, writer of many novels which I have never read, has this to say about editing:

And there's some stuff about the whole winnowing process I just don't get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words—entirely coincidentally, I'm sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? I'm sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, there's nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound manly, backbreaking labor because it's such a wussy thing to do in the first place. The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming, or logging. (It's also why people who work in advertising put in twenty-hour days.) Go on, young writers—treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! Readers won't mind!

I don't have any comments to make on this, really, just that it's good to hear that the 'kill everything that doesn't further the plot' argument isn't universally accepted just yet.

The Woes of Editing

Since some time mid-last year, I have been pretending to edit a 100,000 word monstrosity that I wrote with absolutely no planning – where by ‘pretending to edit’ I mean that after over a year I am currently up to scene… six? I was reading around writing blogs recently, and I found an author who said something along the lines of “I like writing, but I love editing.” To which I said, “Oh God, why?” I thought this great disparity of opinion warranted a blog post on editing, in the hope of answering some questions.

I started editing by listing my scenes in a table with columns for POV, setting, key events and characters present. That gave me a chance to read of my novel and have happy thoughts like, “This is actually not bad,” and also, “What word was I even trying to write there?”

Next, I tried to write down the plot from the point of view of each key character, so I could understand what each character knew, and when. This was kind of important because the novel is a kind of spies-and-international-intrigue thing, and the lack of planning meant people were spouting pieces of information, and then being horrified to discover the same information four chapters later.

So this was all going well and good. I got a handle on my plot, and then wrote down a revised list of scenes, and got to work cutting the scenes I didn’t need, and revising the ones I did. Before I even started the revising part, I had cut about half of my manuscript, including some of my favourite characters. It made me sad. But I have told myself I shall bring them back, and I suppose at least if I completely cut a character, I can transport them to a new story of their very own.

Then I got to the part that made me sad – revising scenes. I ended up deleting whole chunks of things that were not only my favourite parts, but also the favourite parts of the two people who have read my novel for me. I did this because I figured that not only were they not doing anything for the plot, but also because they were always the things that were just a little bit ridiculous, like the sinister criminal mastermind speaking in code with phrases such as “The orange walrus howls at the hour of darkness,” an extended joke about the colour of the protagonists underwear (because I am classy like this).

I deleted all these ridiculous bits, and then I realised that the reason I had liked the start of this story was because it was just a little bit ridiculous, and the characters were kind of odd. But all the editing advice I had read – even from the very first writing book I had ever discovered, while I was still at primary school – had told me that there was a ‘making it thin’ stage, where you got rid of everything that wasn’t strictly necessary.

In order to procrastinate from this task, which was sucking my happiness like Dementor, I went online to read what other writers had said about editing. I found a piece of cheery warning, formatted thusly:

THINGS YOU LOVE WILL DIE.

So that was heartening. Feeling a sense of solidarity – at least I wasn’t the only one deleting things I loved – I went back to editing, and managed to get through several scenes feeling gradually more enthusiastic about the whole affair. But it has left me wondering – is it really necessary for things you love to die? (That sentence came out way more deep-sounding than I intended.) Am I just a wuss who doesn't like deleting things? I mean sure, some things might not aid a streamlined plot, but does that actually make them bad? Chances are, if you love something, there’s a reason. And if your readers love it too, then why should you delete it? After all, if you’re not writing to please yourself and your readers… well, I don’t know what you’re doing.

Beige Protagonist Syndrome

I mentioned last week that I had decide to cut my main character, Ink, from my Nanowrimo plans. In fact, my sister and I had a Delete-Your-Main-Character party, where we both got rid of our main characters, and upgraded a secondary character. This isn’t the first story I’ve found has benefited from this. Once you’ve got caught up in your exciting plot, your fascinating secondary characters and your shiny new setting, it’s easy to forget that your main character protagonist has to be exciting too. Instead, they end up beige, bland and overall dull. So, to save myself – and anyone else who finds themselves burdened by boring protagonists – I have compiled a list of question to indicate whether the main character suffers from beige protagonist syndrome.

Can your protagonist be described using the words ‘ordinary teenage girl’?

Of course, this doesn’t apply only to teenage girls. It also works for ‘ordinary middle-aged mother’ or ‘just your average office-worker’. If someone asks you what your main character is like, and this is your answer, warning lights should probably be flashing. If the most interesting thing you can think to say about your main character is their age, their gender, and their averageness, there’s probably something wrong.

I once figured this was okay, because of course my protagonist would be ordinary at the start of the novel, which is why it would be so much more exciting when she discovered the magical world. But I don’t think it works quite like that. A protagonist has to be interesting as a person before they become interesting as a vessel for the plot. Ordinary is basically shorthand for ‘I couldn’t be bothered thinking of a character’.

Would the plot change if you removed your protagonist?

If Harry Potter didn’t exist, Voldemort wouldn’t attack Hogwarts at the end of the school year. If Frodo didn’t exist, nobody would have volunteered to take the ring to Mordor, and then where would we be?

When reading the wonderful Snowflake Method (somehow this seems to come up in every post), Ingermason suggests “It is OK to have the first disaster be caused by external circumstances, but I think that the second and third disasters should be caused by the protagonist's attempts to "fix things". That’s a bit of a simplistic, overly structured take on the whole affair, but the point stands that at least some of the plot should be caused by your protagonist. They shouldn’t just be along for the ride.

Do you find yourself struggling to explain why your protagonist is present during key moments in the story?

This relates do the previous question. If you do, they probably aren’t connected strongly enough to the plot. Similarly, if your protagonist is only there because they begged to come along (Mortal Instruments, I’m looking at you) and the more you think about it, the more it makes sense for everyone to just left them at home, you have a problem. Your protagonist shouldn’t need a reason to be in key scenes. Key scenes should come to them.

Do you love your secondary characters more than your protagonist?

This one isn’t linked to plot, but it’s still important to making sure your main character isn’t boring. If you think your secondary characters are more exciting, chances are your readers do too. You want to write more about your secondary characters, and your readers probably want to read more about them. So why is everyone being subjected to your beige protagonist?

Of course, this goes by degrees. It’s probably okay if your main character isn’t your favourite character. But it’s probably not okay if you cringe every time you have to write a long scene about them, and invent extravagant subplots just to give your secondary characters more screen time.

Is your character having too much fun?

While other characters are feeling angst ridden and stressed, is your character really just having an adventure? Chances are they’re not invested enough in the plot. Your main character should be up there in the list of people with the most to lose if the antagonist wins. They should be on the front line of the battle against your story’s evil, and if anyone has the right to be an angst monkey, it should be them. Make sure your character is heavily affected by the plot, not just a passive observer. Motivation is important.

When you come across a beige protagonist, there are several things you can do. Character development obviously helps.. I’ve posted some stuff on the topic here and here. When it comes to plot, the easiest way to fix things is to raise the stakes for them. Your protagonist has no reason to fight the antagonist? Have the antagonist threaten something that personally matters to them.

If your protagonist is too far gone for any of that to work, scrap them. Promote your favourite secondary character. You might be surprised at how well it works.

The Pros of Planning

With Nanowrimo coming up in a mere 7 weeks, and having just entered the ‘100 for 100’ challenge over at Go Teen Writers , I have been thinking a lot about planning novels. I’m not usually a planner. I much prefer to come up with a premise, maybe a few scenes that I want to take place, and then start writing. Talking with my sister, I tried to justify my lack of planning with the following argument: 

If you plan a novel, you know that something exciting is coming up soon, and so you’re not too worried about every individual scene, so much as ‘slogging through the boring bits’ to get to the exciting plot point you know is around the corner. Whereas if you don’t plan, you never know what’s going to happen, so you have nothing to look forward to, and you’re forced to make every scene equally exciting.

Unsurprisingly, she shot my argument down like a fish in a barrel, pointing to several examples of novels which were clearly not planned, which had very dull middle sections. And she was right – when reading a novel, you can usually tell whether the author planned it before they wrote it, or whether they just say down and wrote, and tried to tighten it up afterwards. I struggle to get through the latter kind. Justine Larbestier’s How to Ditch Your Fairy was like this for me, as was Libba Bray’s Rebel Angels. Books like these have good premises, good characters, and even good plot points, but they wander. I often feel like the same events happen over and over again. As my sister pointed out: if you’re forced to make every scene equally exciting, that’s just the problem. No scene is more exciting than the rest. There’s no rising tension, there’s just a sense of plodding along through the same plot points, until you get to the end.

Against all the odds, I am beginning to see the merits of planning. I returned this week to the novel I began planning back in July using the Snowflake Method (thoughts on that over here), and I discovered something very useful – my main character, Ink, was boring.  Whereas the other characters had backgrounds that connected them to the conflict of the plot, and motivations rooted in complex backstories, Ink was described (and I cringe to write these words) as “a vaguely dissatisfied teenager” who wants to “change the world” although she “has the potential for a secure job”. It doesn’t sound like compelling reading.

So I cut her. Ink is banished to the dustbin of novel-writing forever, to be replaced with (hopefully) much more compelling characters. And you know how long it took me to cut her? Under a minute, since I realised this in the very early stages of planning. And how much time had I wasted on a boring character? Maybe an hour, at most. By comparison, several years ago I wrote some thirty thousand words about a girl named Katie who could be described with nothing more than the tags “ordinary teenager” and perhaps “flaming red hair with a temper to match”. When I realised she had no emotional connection to the other characters, and was perhaps most kindly described as “sociopathic”, I scrapped the story, because there wasn’t much I could do when all thirty thousand words were first-person, from her point of view. Had I realised my main character lacked pretty much everything except a name and a hair colour during the planning stage, I could have remedied it then.

The moral of this story is: planning isn’t all bad. The only thing I have ever written which has made it to second draft was written with no plan, but I think I have to accept that that might have been a once off. It looks like planning could save me a lot of time and a lot of effort, as well as producing better results. This revelation makes me sad, and won’t stop me from sitting down in front of a blank screen and writing down the first words that pop into my head, but it might make me stop to think before I write thirty thousand more of them.

Has anyone else had a revelation like this? Do you find planned-out novels are better than others?

(Also, the latest report on the Snowflake Method is that it can be quite a bit of fun, if you skip steps 5, 6, 7 and 9.)

750 Words, and Other Such Things

After reading a blog post which raved about it, I decided to give 750 words a go. The premise of this website, in a nutshell, is that you sign up and write 750 words a day. It’s all very straightforward, really. It’s supposed to get you into the habit of writing every day, and to stave off writers’ block.

The site has a few useful (or perhaps ‘interesting’ may be a better word) features. Firstly, it times how long it takes you to write your words, and calculates your average speed. In terms of motivation to churn out words quickly (something that one always needs more of during Nano), this is definitely a plus. It also leads to mindless, punctuation-less, sometimes even word-less drabble. But maybe that’s just me. I have never been good at producing coherent work under time constraints, as anybody who has ever read my Nanowrimo works can attest. But generally, the ticking timer is nice motivational tool.

The second – and far more entertaining feature – is that for every entry you write, the site attempts to analyse your mood and compare it to the world average. I’m not sure exactly how this works, but it does fascinate me to know I am more upset that average, but less sad. My favourite part of writing on this site is when I finish and I get to see colourful little pie-graphs and charts of how I’m feeling. (Strangely, the seven options for emotions are affectionate, upset, self-expressive, self-important, happy, anxious and sad. I’m not sure how they chose these.) It’s also interesting – on the few occasions I’ve used the site for actual creative writing as opposed to brain-dumps – to see whether the mysterious bots picked up on the emotions I was trying to include.

Also, there are badges. As a general failure at consistent daily writing, my only badge is the turkey, which comes for writing three days in a row. It goes all the way up to the space bird – a weird kind of eagle in a helmet – which you get for writing 500 days in a row. Surprisingly, the site tells me 113 people have achieved this goal. Good on them. But yes, cute badges are definitely a good addition to the site. However, they aren’t enough to motivate me, because I can look at the cute pictures without actually earning the badges, and it isn’t really the kind of site where other people visit your profile and say, “My, what a lovely flamingo that is! You must have written 10 days in a row!”

Sadly, despite its perks, 750 words is rapidly losing its appeal. I’m quite happy to write 1667 words a day when it comes to Nanowrimo, and when I have something to work on, but at the moment I’m mostly editing and planning rather than just writing, so I don't have much reason to write 750 words a day. When I started, I was writing random rants of whatever popped into my head, but it quickly transpired that my head was very monotonous, and one post started to look a lot like the other. So alas, this site is not really for me right now. (And now I wonder why I wrote a whole blog post to tell you this.) Nonetheless, I definitely think it has the potential to be revived come the madness of November. 

While I’m on the topic of such sites, however, I do have a couple of others to mention:

Doctor Wicked’s Write Or Die – with the option for your words to start disappearing if you pause too long in your writing, you can’t really go past it for forcing you to continue.

Written? Kitten! – you set a goal, and every time you reach it, your screen flashes up a cute picture of a kitten. I find that negative enforcement works better than positive, but for those of you who are into cats…

I have also heard of One Page Per Day and My Tomatoes, although I haven’t tried either of them. Has anyone else? What are your thoughts on these types of ‘motivational’ writing sites?