This is my nineteenth time doing NaNoWriMo. Dang. NaNoWriMo is an abbreviation of National Novel Writing Month and the challenge is to pump out 50,000 quality-optional words in the thirty days of November.
In my head I’m composing a retrospective come December about all the great settings I’ve created over the last nineteen years that never found a story (so there’s something you can look forward to). This year’s effort may or may not qualify.
It was about 35,000 words in that perhaps the actual story began. All that stuff before? Things happened to people, people learned things, but it was all in service of defining the world these people live in. It was all world building.
It is a high compliment in my circles when someone says a writer is a great world-builder. There are big ideas (the world is actually a ring that goes all the way around the star) and subtle ideas (busy busy busy).
But a quick word to all you nascent writers that hang on my every piece of advice: World building is not storytelling. World building is the writer’s process for defining an interesting setting that creates a context for a great story.
For the love of Calliope, don’t spend pages telling me about the rules of magic in your story, or tell me about the vampire’s society, or draw me a fuckin’ map. Show me the world through your characters’ eyes. Tell me what they taste, what they feel, and how the world touches them. Chances are those people are going to change the world, so it’s their view of the world that matters.
You can (and should!) write all those other pages, and draw your maps or whatever you need. Just don’t make me read them. I don’t want to sit through a dissertation about your clever world. If it’s a swamp, start me with my boots in the mud and we can go from there.
35,000 words in, I had maybe 1000 words that could one day be published. But I was really starting to know where Malika lives. Now at 40,000 words, I have one potential plot and one unrelated story. Awesome if I can bind the two, but that seems a reach right now.
But as of 35K, I am definitely making somewhere.
