A world of my own

And what I mean by that is, it’s all in my head.

Which tools are the best for worldbuilding, as a writer?

If you’ve ever done an online search for the above question or something similar, you’ll likely already know how many tools and techniques exist for this.

Scrivener, Campfire, Notion, Trello, World Anvil, Notebook.ai, Evernote, OneNote… is a list of tools I have either directly tried to use while writing my novel, or have at least looked into.

Some of these are free, or have free versions with ads. Others are subscription based, either for the whole thing or per module, and yet others are “buy the licence once, you own this now”. Which means some are incredibly expensive, especially for someone who hasn’t yet made more than a couple of hundred quid over several years from their writing.

And when I say I’ve tried a good chunk of these, what I’m really saying is… none of them worked.

And you know that meme from Charlie in Always Sunny where he’s trying to explain something and he looks like a conspiracy nut connecting lots of clues together with red pieces of string?

That’s kind of what I think of when I think of the term “worldbuilding” — because it’s an incredibly complex thing to try and hold together.

A world, I mean.

This is true if you’re writing a fantasy/sci-fi world with various races, languages, cultures and social norms as well as new governmental structures and wild naming conventions for planets, dragons or mountains. It’s also true if you’re writing a crime thriller set in a post-industrial mining town that exists in our real world and will therefore be recognisable to several thousand potential readers who actually live there.

Either way, you want the “world” of your book to be believable, consistent and appealing. Or at least, I do. I don’t necessarily mean appealing as in “I’d want to live there,” either, because like, my first novel is partially set in literal hell, but I still want it to be appealing to read about.

I mean, I have no urge to actually live in the cyberpunk hellscape that is Night City from Cyberpunk 2077, but I still find that setting massively appealing, you know?

And — as I’ve mentioned before — I sometimes get overwhelmed by my novels as I’m writing them. My current project feels right now like 60,000 words of fragmented glass, jagged and treacherous to pick up and properly scrutinise. I can tell, looking at the pile of them on the floor, that if I knew how to stick them together properly they’d be beautiful and I am so looking forward to seeing that final product. But that’s a long way off, and right now all I can see is a mess that might cut my hand open if I’m not careful.

So you would think something like Scrivener or Campfire might help, right?

Wrong.

I’ve tried! And I know many of my friends adore Scrivener in particular, so I suspect it might be something to do with my brain chemistry rather than the technology itself that’s at fault here. It’s a powerful tool: you can write scenes, chapters, backstories, and character biographies. You can add maps, images, and research notes from websites. You can move scenes around via drag and drop, instead of having to cut and paste and pray you don’t lose anything. And then you can download your document in a beautifully formatted manuscript when you’ve finished, either to send to your writer friends or to your editor.

But to me, that’s part of the problem.

When I get an idea for a story, I get like a tingly feeling in my wrists and at the back of my knees. It’s usually only a tiny seed of an idea to start with: a flash of a scene or a character or, sometimes, a world. For example, I have this image in my head of a futuristic cybercity with flying cars and glamorous soirees, but my character (who I know nothing about yet) isn’t up there. They’re down on the ground looking up at the undersides of these flying cars. Down on the ground, it’s dirty and grotty and dangerous, and there’s a dead body lying in my character’s way.

That is all I have for that idea, but when I think about it, my wrists tingle.

But I won’t do anything with that idea, except maybe scribble it into the Notes app on my phone, or email it to myself. I guess I could create a project for it in Campfire, but I don’t know enough about it yet to do anything like that. It’s nebulous, only semi-tangible.

What will likely happen next, in either a few months or a few years, is that I will wake up one day and start writing that story, or one of the others I’ve emailed to myself. I will suddenly know who that character is, who the dead person is, and what the name of the city is. I might or might not know why they’re dead or what the theme of the story is (it’s usually class with me, letsbehonest). I will begin to type, and I will keep going until everything I’ve subconsciously decided about the story is out of my head and in a Word document instead.

And then I probably won’t touch that story again for a few more years, until I’ve filled in more of the blanks.

As you can see, my process is highly, highly interior. I tend to have four or five novel ideas swimming in my subconscious at any given time. Right now I’ve got secret current project in there, alongside the Ghost Diary, an alchemy-infused cult thriller, a series of mediaeval-esque fantasy romances and this sci-fi noir. My priority is secret-current-project, but try as I might I can’t only focus on that. Sometimes while I’m washing up I might suddenly realise why one character chooses that day to go get a tattoo that changes the course of her life. Or I’ll be almost asleep and suddenly I’ll understand exactly how a killer from a different story was able to hide the murder weapon from everyone. Or, or, or, I’ll be reading a London Review of Books article about pirates and suddenly I’ve got a brilliant motivation for a side character to choose a deeply unsuitable husband and become a main character in her own right.

What I won’t do is write any of these thoughts and ideas down.

Isn’t that ridiculous? I’m just carrying all these points around in my head, like that Gerda Mayer poem about the lines being like a saucer of milk.

When I do come to write, it all comes out in a rush, but it’s not a cohesive draft. It’s one of those shard piles, like I mentioned earlier. It’s a mess of backstory and worldbuilding and dialogue snippets and interiority and past tense in with present and lush paragraphs of description that will never make the final cut.

But by the time I’ve got all that, it’s far too late to then untangle it all and fit it into a different tool. It would just be procrastination to write a character biography for everyone with a speaking part. I know this because I’ve used it to procrastinate before. I’ve spent hours, weeks even, tapping out geographies in Campfire, or splitting my fragments into neat, self-contained scenes to slot into Scrivener. I’ve made timelines in Notion. Added cover pictures to my cards in Trello. Built folder after folder after folder in OneNote.

And none of it gets my book written any quicker, because all of that content already exists in my head. I know what colour my main antagonist’s eyes are, and I don’t think it’s going to come up so I don’t need to note it down in a Character Module, and that ten minutes I spent faffing about with that is ten minutes I wasn’t writing a bridging scene between two major plot points.

So, sometimes I feel like I’m missing a trick by not using these cool, made-for-writers companion apps. I see my friends having fabulous success with them and I wish I could be so logical, so considered. I wish I could do my plotting in a sensible timeframe and add details to a worldbuilding module to refer back to as necessary.

But I can’t, so I’ll be sticking to my tried and true methods, I reckon: daydreaming, and panicking.