World Building - What it is and How to Do It

World building. You've probably heard of it before. It's a necessary part of the writing of every book. Also, world building means something different to every person. For some people, it's the creating of the actual world (Mostly in fantasy and sci fi. Thus world building.), while for others it's something quite different. The creating of all of the characters and their personalities, working on the locations and the reason that the world is the way that it is. Something that often comes with world building however, is the common "disease" known as world building disease. It doesn't happen to everybody, but it is fairly common in the world of writing. It is when you are working on writing up a world, and you just can't stop. It's more of a compulsive type of thing than a "trying to get my world perfect" kind of thing.

Sometimes it is hard for them to stop. They are literally building their world and characters for years on end, dreaming up details that will never, ever be used in the actual book. And sometimes all of this brainstorming and world building is for a single book too, not a series, or even a trilogy. I personally think that the reason for World Builder's Disease is because it gives the person a sense of accomplishment - like they actually completed something. In my honest opinion, I think that too much world building stifles my creativity. I can't create something on the spot, and that causes me to not be creative. Same with outlining. If I have too detailed an outline, then I tend to follow the outline and forget about being creative. Because I already used up all of my creativity on the outline. And readers can see that. Anyways, until next time, Write On!

The Seed Idea

When you are writing something - a novel, a short story, a poem; even a paper for school, you have to have an idea. I tend to refer to them as a seed idea, as that is basically what they are. They start out as a tiny idea, and then, as you work with them more and more, you start to discover that they are actually more than they seem. They start to sprout into new ideas; sub-plots and, sometimes, you even mix two or more seed ideas together to make an entirely new, exciting plot. You develop it, and brainstorm ideas for it, discovering what it was actually meant to be in the first place. After a while, you start to find that you have discovered an entire idea for a book - and you begin to outline a bit, creating your own magical story; arranging all of the elements into a full, developed plan. That's the bud. After a little longer of simply watching the "plant" grow, you start to work on it. You write the actual story, using the outline "bud" as your blueprint. When the first draft is completed, that is the bloom.

But, as often happens with flowers, the first bloom is not as big and beautiful as the flower actually gets. Each day, that first bloom gets larger, and more full, as more petals grow. That represents the editing process. After all of the edits are complete, and the finished manuscript is polished to it's perfection; you start to realize that, just like a flower, it has bloomed. So that's why I refer to them as seed ideas. A lot of other explanations are given, each by their own author. Each and every person has their own description of these simple ideas; and we all know that some are just a bit more complex than others. For example, a very simple idea is that a boy and girl fall in love and eventually, after a few struggles, they live happily ever after. You see how simple that idea is. But it's also a very common one. The more complex ideas are often more unique, and come from the imagination, not what other people think.

For me, these ideas start coming to me when I'm in the midst of something else. Reading, watching television, riding in the car, browsing the internet, and, most of all, when I'm writing my own work. A lot of times I'll come up with seed ideas that I think might relate to my book, though only slightly. Sometimes I end up using these in my current manuscript, though, normally, I end up writing it down in my Writer's Notebook for later use in another story. I realize that I haven't exactly explained what a writer's notebook is yet, even though it is the title of my blog. I promise that I'll touch on that soon. But, basically, it's just a notebook that I write in every day, putting down my ideas and thoughts, for use in books later on. But get this straight. It is NOT a journal, nor a diary. I'll explain that in more depth another day.

One more thing though, before I leave. I once read something about writing, that said that to create a great book, you must combine the mundane and the extraordinary. Right now, I'm calling a can of worms on that (I'll write about that later), but I feel like it fits perfectly right here. At least a really simplified example. Basically, when you combine what seems normal (a high school kid) and then add something extraordinary (his teacher, is say, a ghost, or something similar) it adds an interesting touch. I realize that this is a very old example, and, it has been done a whole lot, especially in manga comics, but that was the example that was simply on the top of my head at this very moment. So, until next time, write on!!

Double Trouble

Like I mentioned on the last post, I had started the outlining/planning stage of a new novel, trying to up my word count for Milwordy (the challenge to get a million words written in a year. Last night I was doing the math and I realized that I only have to do 3k words a day to be able to get my Milwordy. That's not bad, since I can get those words done in a little less than an hour and a half using Write or Die. I actually started trying to figure out what my style of planning/outlining was by going online and simply looking up a ton of ideas. I tried snowflake outlining, but that sort of got old pretty quick.

I also tried a basic, everyday phase outline. That worked (I was using it on my Blue Flames novel) until I got tired of writing out all of those separate stages and sort went on a fly by the seat of my pants type of thing instead. I liked that, but I don't think that I could do it for the whole novel. I'm also thinking that I could do a snowflake outline if I wanted to, and I decided that it's probably the current novel that I'm working on that's totally not working for that type of outline. And also my personality. The snowflake method has you expand your plot slowly but still steadily - my personality makes me want to describe everything in great detail the first time around. Unless I do a really, really, REALLY simplified version.

Taking those notes into consideration, I think I finally found what works for me. Or at least for my current novel. What I did for this novel (Double Trouble I think it's going to be called) is made a list of 10 plot points - you know, major parts of the story that can actually be greatly expanded. That's what I did - found 10 parts of the story I thought would be interesting enough to be able to expand to at least 5k. (I did the math and figured out that each plot point would have to be around 5k words when finished to make a 50k novel, which is the minimum accepted length.)

That wasn't it, though. I then went into a separate document and expanded each plot point, though only slightly. It wasn't too hard, and I have a full page summary of my novel. That gives me a bit more detail to put into my scenes when I'm doing my work in Ywriter, which I'm also having a lot of fun exploring. Ywriter is a free program that actually allows you to write notes, keep characters, locations, items, chapters and scenes all in order, as well as outlining, doing the actual writing, and editing, all in the same program! Check it out. So, until next time, have fun and go write something!!

100k Words!!

Hey everybody, I'm back, and yesterday I was crunching some numbers, and, since November of 2010, when I seriously started writing, I've written over 100k words!! That does include things like outlines, plotting, and simply freewriting that I've been doing quite a bit of lately, but, still, that's pretty impressive, at least in my opinion. I'm actually doing this challenge (we'll see if I succeed or not) to write a million words in a year. I started my year in November, so I actually have around 900k left to go. We'll see.

In order for that to actually work right, I have to do somewhere around 4k a day, considering that I took somewhere around a month off (December), I have quite a bit of catching up to do. I was excited though, when I found out that I actually had done 100k - I'm getting there. I'm literally a tenth of the way there when you do the math. However, if you really want to know how many words I have, I think I'm somewhere around 107k.

I don't have many more updates on the editing of my book - I did somewhere around 5 pages of my book, I'll go and crunch the numbers probably after I get off of here. I'm also starting several reading challenges, because I've found that I haven't been reading as much as I've wanted to in the past. I'm currently working on The Hobbit (I started this morning), and finally managed to work my way to the action. I found the first two chapters only a bit tedious, but, now that I'm getting to the good part, it's one of the most exciting books I've read.

One last thing, I've been working on an outline for a new book that I'm working on after the plotting is done, even though I'm starting to get a little bored of it already :( . I think what's making me so frustrated with the thing is that I'm having a bit of a problem with the MCs not using magic. And it's a fantasy. In my previous one, magic was used a lot, and it was really fun to write. I don't know. Well, anyways, go write something!