My Adventures in World-Building
A couple of weeks ago, I began to worry about the writing on my novel slowing down. As I’ve mentioned before, it ebbs and flows. A few months back, I had felt like I was writing at the speed of a car perpetually stuck in second gear – until I realized I was slowing down to create the words, terms, and phrases for my fictional universe and that specifically was limiting the creative process. Of course, that’s when the beta reminded me it’s all billable hours. (It just doesn’t feel like it.) The advice helped, though. I stopped worrying about it, and sure enough my writing picked back up again. I ended up with a lot of placeholders, and that was okay.
Now, though, I’m far enough into the story that I need names for those placeholders. Otherwise I’ll create an endless sea of pink highlights, which is what I use to point out those holes in the world-building. When I came to a natural break in the storyline, a scene I wasn’t really in love with in its initial incarnation, I started working my way back through the text to work out the details of my fictional world, Prime.
Originally the plan had been to use spreadsheets for character traits and planetary facts, but I’ve found it’s too disruptive to the flow of my writing to open another file, switch, type, and then go back to writing. The system I’ve ended up with is nothing more than a notebook and a pen. Currently I have a binder full of information. Primary and secondary characters have their own page, some get two. The planets and their cultures have pages, too. I’ve also taken up sketching out specific locations to ensure that scope and scale is appropriate. (If I start using the computer-aided drafting programs to design locales, that’s when I know the engineer has been unleashed on this story.)
My father, who has read the first act, fought in Vietnam, and he commented that I needed to blow out some more eardrums during the initial attack sequence. I need my characters to be able to hear, though. I also had a reason previously worked into my story design for why eardrums and other body parts would stay intact – it just hadn’t been revealed yet at this early point in the story. Another comment he made was that my scale for the attack wasn’t grand enough, big enough, and on that I saw his point. The sketches of the island at scale have helped immensely, but don’t expect to see them in the book; I’m not an artist, just a scratcher. There were a couple times in the book I took my dad’s thoughts on scale and applied the Michael Bay mindset for battle sequences: sometimes you have to slow things down to make them cooler.
Other settings for my story I didn’t necessarily have to draw, but having traveled quite a bit around the country and the world I have a great toolbox of settings existing in my mind’s eye. I’ve pulled out travel photos when I needed inspiration, and the capital city of Prime and Vespa’s home have come to life in my head. In the end, this makes bringing them into vivid detail for the reader much easier.
As I was looking back through some of the characters for this world-building project, I took into account people’s thoughts and ideas from various diversity discussions I’ve read. I generally buy into the notion that for the most part authors write what they know, and that’s where I feel comfortable as a writer, too. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to reflect on the possibility of including things outside my default comfort zone, and potentially revise some characters to make them more accessible to different readers. When I initially skimmed through the list, I noted I did have quite a bit of racial and cultural diversity in my cast already. Some of that I owed directly to the fact I grew up in so many different places that I have been exposed to quite a few cultures. Still, I did tweak a few things, and I hope more readers will feel like they can connect with the various characters.
My cataloguing process is almost done, and then I’ll be back to writing. If nothing else, I found a way to make the scene I didn’t love into something that feels much more epic and appropriate to the story. I also found some of my original chicken-scratch about underlying themes and arcs for the villains in this book and for the series. One binder full of notes that’s essentially as thick as the manuscript printed out, and I finally feel like I’ve got my head wrapped around it all.
It’s hard work, but I’m having fun. I can’t wait to share it with everyone!
A graduate of Duke University, Tricia is a registered Professional Engineer who designs transportation systems as a consultant. In her free time, she shows horses and maintains a website for Star Wars EU fans that creates a safe place for women and men to discuss literature and all things pertaining to geek culture. She is currently writing her first full-length original novel, a space opera based around the heroic journey of a young woman who finds herself in the middle of a deadly terrorist attack by an invading alien force. For information on the book, please check out TriciaBarr.com.
Tricia Barr's novel, Wynde, won the 2014 Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal for Best Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror Ebook. She was also part of Silence in the Library's successful all-female creator science fiction and fantasy anthology Athena's Daughters, which is available now. For excerpts and tales of her adventures in creating a fictional universe, hop over to TriciaBarr.com.
- Ten Years of Hyperspace Theories - October 28, 2024
- Hyperspace Theories: The Heroine’s Journeys of the MCU’s Echo and What If? Series - August 29, 2024
- Hyperspace Theories: THE ACOLYTE and Star Wars Brand Management - August 7, 2024
Worldbuilding is so much fun and I ran into that same problem too with my book. Everything in certain scenes seemed so…blah! I keep a binder too because it’s easier to have a pen and paper beside you to write things down for your world as you think of them.
One thing that helped me was to take that same scene and write it from a character’s point of view. It helped me pinpoint what they would pay attention to, what they notice, what they like or don’t like, etc. It helped bring depth to that scene as well as more focus to my worldbuilding (it’s easy to go crazy with that! LOL)
Thanks for the tip, Margaret. It is easy to get crazy. Depending of the pace of the scene I let more information (slower scenes) or less (faster scenes) enter into the story. I love to use smell, touch and feel, especially in fight scenes and space battles.