Step 5: How to build a world in one week.
(this is all part of the One Novel Three-Month challenge. Click here for more info)
I'm a day late! Shit! Between social media, managing the blog and website and like, the rest of my life, I suppose something would fall through the cracks eventually.
I'll have to double-post to make up for it soon.
I feel flippin' great.
The main reason is that I've had a lot of time to myself today, enough that I've had a good few hours of writing. Which has enabled me to break through and finish Chapter 2!!
Not only that, but I've written 10k words…
But I'm only just past Chapter 2. Egads. A problem this might be. I think the story-ball will really get rolling by the end of Chapter 3. That's when the plot will achieve some real momentum. Is that too late however? Quite possibly. Chapter 1 will probably become a prologue, since there is a timeskip between it and chapter 2.
Anyhow I thought I'd reveal some of the more bonkers elements to what I'm doing.
I was fool enough to pick Epic Fantasy (or some such) as my genre for this challenge. This involves world building. Lots of world building.
Normally this takes an inordinate amount of time. World building is like filling in gaps that never cease to all be filled. There's always something else you can add, write about, clarify. There are so many methods to go about this.
Now I've got a lot of experience (for a non-published novelist) worldbuilding. Through writing but also through running tabletop RPGs. But today's method is…I don't even know what to call it. It's world building on steroids by leveraging as many third party apps as possible.
SPOILERS AHEAD for the novel, and also a look behind the curtain that might be disappointing to some. But for the word-perverts like me out there, or budding novelists, behold my bent method for creating an entire world in less than a month.
Base the world on the real, specifically, the history of the East India Company.
Now the thing is, as far as I know, post-colonial-fantasy isn't a super large genre. Which means I can take the most famous story of colonialism ever told and frankly, mirror a lot of the cultural elements and large scale shifts that occurred. I've reskinned the British to The Isles and India to The Twilight Empire and borrowed other things, and most importantly, the STORY is my own, as well as the characters, the magic system etc. but the template begins there. I am not designing my own world on the back of a space whale that is floating through the cosmos and utilising glass as their most basic building material. I'm not inventing a race of halflings that grow on purple trees.
Maybe one day, though.
Create a cast of characters. Using apps.
So this is where it begins to get bonkers. This is what my notes look like (I use OneNote):
The houses are created by basing the factions off of John Company, the board game (which is up to 6 players, hence the houses) and then…
I used this to generate a family tree: https://www.rolegenerator.com/en/module/familytree
I used a dice simulator (https://rolz.org/tools/mini) to roll randomly for which branches of the family tree 'mattered' at the beginning of the book, as Chapter 2 involves a game of lacrosse-cricket-skeet-shooting I call 'headers' and so I need players and spectators.
Then I used this to generate names and modified them: https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/victorian-names.php
Then I used this https://donjon.bin.sh/5e/random/#type=npc to generate random NPC traits as inspiration for characters. For example, someone might 'carry a dagger around' and so I'll interpret that as them being conniving and backstabby, or maybe like…actually always carrying a dagger around. If someone's INT is high I say they are smart. Now there isn't a huge variety of traits in the generator so I have to interpret and be inspired by them, but I'm good at that shit so hey.
Then…to simulate the time between Chapter 1 (prologue) and Chapter 2, and how the Company proceeded, I actually played a turn of John Company in Tabletop Simulator https://store.steampowered.com/app/286160/Tabletop_Simulator/
And filled in the various roles with characters in the company and interpreted the actions as narrative
(warning: massive plot spoilers follow)
All of this DID TAKE AWHILE. But it's much, much faster than scratching my head. Its speed-world-building. Its idea generation at the rate of crack cocaine. And I'm yet to proof read the pudding and find out if it truly works, not until the book is unfinished. I did however have two teams of six players, spectators and a supporting cast off stage by the end of chapter 2. Which is pretty neat.
Tomorrow I'm going to write about POETRY, as that is more my wheelhouse. And hopefully double post as well.
Thanks for reading as usual.
And write on!
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