How to Build Your Fictional World for NaNoWriMo
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) begins on at midnight on November 1, so I thought I would transition from setting into how to prepare your fictional world in advance of NaNoWriMo.
Grab your camera or SmartPhone and head out to someplace you’ve never been before. Snap pictures of anything that catches your eye or intrigues you. Perhaps it might be autumn leaves beginning to turn their color or a fall flower now in bloom. The architecture of a building may interest you, or colorful neon may capture your attention. Don’t be afraid to take pictures of people you see, especially everyday people, e.g., a pastry chef putting the final touches on a wedding cake, a policeman directing traffic, or an inked artist taking a smoke break in the doorway of his tattoo parlor. Also, let go of the constraint that you must only take perfectly composed photographs. The purpose of this exercise is not to produce landscapes or portraits; you’re capturing fuel for your creativity. Take close-up shots of
If you’re unable to make time to go out in the world, flip through old catalogs or magazines and tear out images and words that appeal to you. Your pile of images may include nature scenes, urban landscapes, or even a dream kitchen with stainless steel appliances and a butcher block island.
If you use a writing program like Scrivener, you can import images you find on the Internet into your binder and save them for later.
A day or so later, sit down with your images and sort through them. If you already have an idea for your story, the usefulness of some images may be obvious. Put them in one pile or folder. For the others that have a strong appeal but not immediately clear as to how you will use them, place them in another pile or folder. For the rest, put them in a pile or folder as inspiration for a future project, or delete or throw them away.
Put your images and artifacts aside and come back to them on another day. If you still have no idea where your story is set, pull out your pictures and use them as fuel to create the places where your story will take place. If you have an image of an entrepreneur tapping away on his laptop in a coffee shop and a nature path alongside the river in the park, you may decide the setting of your story takes place in a startup in a city with a robust tech hub yet also near the mountains.
If you took a photo of seashells in a boutique and a middle-aged black woman sitting in the sunshine on a park bench with her eyes closed, you may decide you want to write about a recently retired African American widow who moves to a mall beach town to start over without thinking about what’s it like to live somewhere without any other black people.
Maybe you saw machinery in your local microbrewery that reminded you of an Art Deco spaceship. Perhaps a graduate student with a nose ring and purple hair works there part-time, and she inspires a slacker character who flies tourists to and from Mars.
Be open to setting your story in a place you’ve never visited. The Internet provides a wealth of sources to find imagery, find out facts, and even contact locals for research. If you don’t know details, make a guess and go with it. Don’t go down a research rabbit hole and spend hours. You can always verify information after NaNoWriMo ends on December 1.
Don’t think too hard trying to find the perfect setting. Work with what you have. You’ll be surprised at what your muse creates from any ingredients you have as imaginative prompts.
Writing, for me, is an escape. I like to set my stories in places I would like to visit and spend more time, especially if it’s often associated with a specific season.
If you know your character has a fear of heights, perhaps Chicago, with its tall buildings, would be an interesting place for your character to work and live.
Where will the majority of the action in your story take place? In the protagonist’s house in the suburbs, in airports as he travels from one city to another to give sales presentations, or in the rural countryside where he blows off steam by participating in Tough Mudder vents on the weekends?
If you’re visual, you might consider sketching a rudimentary map of the small town your big-city cop moves to after his partner is killed in the line of duty.
Put together a mood board for each of your central locations includes paint chips from the hardware store of how the walls will be painted or swatches of fabric. Paste pictures of what you imagine to be in these spaces or images of people interacting in ways similar to how your characters will behave in these spaces. Add anything that brings about emotion or feeling for these places to make them more three-dimensional for you.
If names come to you for these places, jot them down. If no names come, go with names like “Big City” or “Anytown, USA.” Names might be irrelevant to your story. Besides, the perfect name may come to you later.
Keep adding details to your world as they come to you; however, it’s okay if your world still feels like a world in progress when November 1 rolls around. Regardless of how much detail you have for your world when you begin NaNoWriMo, it will provide a rich resource to work with when you start writing so you can produce more words and spend less time staring into space and wondering about setting details. Even if you decide to change parts of your world after you start writing, never consider the world building you did beforehand a waste of time because it gave you a starting point to determine a change of scene was needed.
Remember to have fun with your world building and your writing. After all, if you don’t enjoy it, why are you doing it?
Thank you, Jef. Great information and very timely as we prepare for November!