Wednesday Wanderings

Notes from a worldbuilding ...

The world creation aspect of this project has certainly taken me longer than in the past, but it's not because of the quantity - and believe me, I have one set of world notes that clocks in at around 50,000 words, as long as a short novel, so quantity is a thing I have been known to indulge in - but rather because life keeps getting in the way.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been doing some things differently this time around.  Rather than defining a few global elements and then narrowing down to individual countries, I've spent a lot more time discussing trends, tendencies, and, "some places are X, some places are Y."  This means that as I get into writing up descriptions of specific locations, I'm defining where each falls on various spectrums ... and I keep finding that I need to circle back and add more detail.

This is a little irritating to me; I'm not usually this disorganized.  Also, it means that I'm not always putting the information in exactly where it makes sense.  For instance, it makes more sense to have something minor like currency after discussions of larger elements like technology and gender bias, but that's not where it fit in.  Of course, since I'm not writing an RPG guide (or for anyone but myself), and since Word has a handy-dandy Find function, it only makes a difference to my anal-retentive side.

And now you might be wondering (or more likely, you're not) why I can't just put the information anywhere.  It has to do with the way I write.  Even beyond narrative flow, my sentences in stories tend to connect to each other, a chain of logic and poetry.  It's why I often find it so difficult to add sections to my stories:  it's artificially forcing another link into the chain.  Of course, maybe the logic falls apart a bit here in that I find it much easier to cut, but it's easier to remove a link and connect the remaining ends ... maybe.  I'm a writer (harper / chef), not a jeweler.

Right now, I'm reaching the point where I'm setting up two rival nations whose struggle (or more particularly, the struggle of the people representing them) will play a part in the plot ... and one of my goals is not to make it too symmetrical.  I don't want them to be too perfectly opposed.  The real world, after all, is not so neat.