Nanowrimo 2016 Worlds

Well, quick question: what sort of worlds and world building are you doing/have you done for Nanowrimo? I'm usually starting to come up with ideas this time of the year, and I've varied from 3 months' preparation to "whoops tomorrow's Halloween maybe I should start planning".

Not sure what I'll be doing this year yet though. Anyone else doing much?

Considering doing more then slow prodding on the idea I have been tinkering with for years now. I have a hard time now trying to find what I want to change and it is time to make good on it. Mostly it is down to refining points I need to do so I can use it in writing.

Build worlds to serve your story, not the other way around.

I've found that following that rule during Nanowrimo more often than not leads to an incoherent world or story, particularly when it's a fictionalized world.

The opposite problem, of course, is overplanning - with the same general result born from different causes. (Where the world and details are too different from reality, that it's difficult for the writer to properly explore it within a 30 day time limit.)

My experience is that you've got to find a happy medium between the two for Nanowrimo, which all depends on your (individual) writing style. Getting an idea early and letting it percolate for a month seems to work for me.

That said, I think I'm going to go with a (serial-)murder mystery as a prequel to the story I wrote last year, which ended up taking place in an foreign country and not the homeland I'll probably explore this year.

Yeah, I think starting with your worldbuilding is actually a good idea. To quote Tolkien: "I wisely started with a map and made the story fit... the other way about lands one in confusions and impossibilities."

Be careful you don't fall into "worldbuilder's disease," where you spend all your time writing backstory for a tiny little tribe no one is ever going to see rather than actually writing your story.

Oh indeed. I think the big part of my problem is that I enjoy tinkering with the world too much. It is just too much fun sometimes and I spend a fair bit of time while strolling on patrol or at home thinking about it and scribbling down notes.

Now I need to add writing a Weird War Two campaign to the pile.

edited 23rd Jul '16 6:56:08 AM by TuefelHundenIV

Creating a world to suit your story is only a problem if you don't know what you're doing. To wit, I recently watched the Hobbit movies, and got it in my head to write a story about humans attempting to restore and repopulate an abandoned dwarven mountainhome. Here's my thought process:

• Why are the humans trying to restore the mountainhome?
  • Because it's a giant walled kingdom, and a nearly impregnable fortress.
    • Why do the humans want an impregnable fortress?
      • Because their kingdom is being pressed on all sides by apocalyptic threats, and the king believes that the dwarves' old fortress-city is their only hope of survival.
        • What kind of threats?
          • Well, for variety, let's say there's a plague, a natural disaster, and a foreign invasion all happening at once. The kind of cocktail of madness that would make people wonder what they did to offend the gods.
            • What's the plague?
              • Immortality. People can't die, but still feel the pain of death. They lose their memories, and become mad wraiths that attack anyone who comes near them. Basically the undead curse from Dark Souls, but with some other cause in this world than in Lordran. I'll make up something later.
            • What's the natural disaster?
              • Monstrous wolves are coming out of the western woods, raiding farms and eating people. The masters of woodland lore say that even worse things are coming. Could be the trees themselves killing people, could be something else. I'll leave the question open for now.
            • What's the invasion about?
              • Horned raiders in black ships, striking all over the south coast before retreating. Basically Viking raids, at the worst possible time. Where they're coming from or what they're like as a people is immaterial. All that matters is that they're wrecking everything, and can't be bargained or reasoned with.

• Okay, what was the mountainhome's name?
  • Ulstur, the Jade Home, so-called because its streets are/were paved with slabs of jade.
    • When was it founded, and by whom?
      • Centuries ago, by the dwarven king Kragoom.
        • Did the city have any distinguishing features?
          • Ulstur was built into a mountain that stood alone in the middle of a fertile plain, called the Green Mountain by the local humans due to its mythical origin. The dwarves enclosed the outlying valleys in a vast, towering wall of smooth masonry, and sheared away the slopes of the mountains's outlying ridges and peaks, to produce steep, unclimbable heights. With all the city's farmlands enclosed by the great walls, or based in terraces dug into the heights, and only one relatively small and easily-sealed gate allowing entrance and exit, Ulstur was effectively impregnable, and could outlast any siege.

• What caused Ulstur to be abandoned?
  • Uh... let's say one big disaster, followed by a number of lesser disasters that made recovery impossible.
    • What was the big disaster?
      • A plague struck the mountainhome, called Jade Lung, due to the fact that it turned victim's lungs to jade, suffocating them. 90% of the population died; the remaining 10% either avoided infection or proved to be immune for some reason.
        • What made the city's recovery impossible?
          • When word got out that Ulstur was underpopulated and underdefended, human looters descended on the place, and started carrying off everything valuable they could find. Gang warfare soon followed, in which many priceless buildings and artifacts were destroyed, and many locals lost their lives. Then, long after the city was picked clean, a dragon took to nesting on one of the mountain's ridges, and became a menace to both the locals and neighbouring human lands. It was eventually killed by a human hero, but not before it burned down even more of the mountainhome. At this point the surviving locals decided that Ulstur was a lost cause, and all left to resettle among the humans. The city has been totally abandoned for a century since.
            • Why has no-one tried to restore Ulstur before now?
              • Superstitious fears that the city is cursed/haunted, plus proven fact that strange and dangerous creatures have taken up residence in the city since its abandonment. Normally the humans wouldn't dare touch the place; it's only under the recent pressures that they've become willing to take a chance on it.

And on and on and on. Do you see how every aspect of the setting I've defined specifically relates to the narrative I intended, and conflicts involved in it? Do you see how everything revolves around setting up the situation, justifying the characters' behaviour and decisions, and putting obstacles in their way that they need to overcome? I don't go off on wild tangents detailing the lay of the world's continents, or the many different races that inhabit them, or the languages they speak. I keep the scope and focus of my worldbuilding absolutely, totally restrained.

At the same time, I leave a lot of stuff vague so I don't write myself into a corner, and can easily change the setting if I have a good idea later on. For instance, I haven't decided on the hows or whys of the immortality plague, because that would have a massive effect on the outcome of the story (the characters would really struggle to restore Ulstur and ride out the end-times inside, if the plague was airborne and could just float straight over Ulstur's walls, for instance). Once I've decided how I want the story to pan out, then I'll decide how the plague works. But for now, I'm sketching out the big picture first, and leaving the fine details for later.

And because the setting is both restrained by the needs of the narrative, while also extremely vague whenever it can get away with it, it's all completely coherent and consistent. There's nothing stopping anyone else from doing the same.

Well I build my worlds after creating characters and atmosphere but my best world was actually built with symbolism driving the plot and world itself

Inspired by Zootopia, my next world will be a world of evolved animals.

Mine will be a picturesque town up in the foothills of the Alps, where dolls come to life. I've already established a hierarchy/class system among the dolls, depending on what they're made of (porcelain dolls being at the top, then other clay dolls, then plastic dolls, then wooden dolls, and finally ragdolls), and come up with a few character concepts. The same story also includes a Death World inside of a mirror, where magic energies are concentrated yet no living creature can thrive. The town also has a huge focus on the arts, being home to toymakers (of course), painters, songwriters, chefs, etc.

I had originally come up with a unique world to have a main character explore for the Na No Wri Mo, but I chickened out at the last second and am now attempting to write something in an already established world with more relate-able aspects than would have been in the unique idea.