We have two weeks to go to November 1st. If you are planning to participate in a writing quest with a specific goal, now is a good time to consider the world in which your prospective story might be set.
I like to sit somewhere quiet and let my mind wander, picturing the place where the opening scene takes place.
Is it indoors? Are we out in the wild? How can I write this? A few notes about my thoughts will help.
A good way to develop the skill of writing an environment is to visualize the world in your real life. When you look out the window, what do you see? Close your eyes and picture the place where you are at this moment. With your eyes still closed, tell me what it’s like.
If you can describe the world around you with your eyes closed, you can create a world for your characters.
The plants and landscape of my fictional world are partly based on the scenery of Western Washington State because it’s wild and beautiful, and I’m familiar with it. The wild creatures are somewhat reality-based but are mostly imaginary.
Remember, we don’t have to immerse ourselves immediately. All we’re doing is laying the groundwork, ensuring plenty of ideas are handy when we start writing in earnest on November 1st.
Religion is a large part of my intended story, and some things are canon, as the first book in the series was published in 2012. The tagline for this series is “The Gods are at War, and Neveyah is the Battlefield.” The war of the gods broke three worlds, drastically changing the landscape of Neveyah and offering endless opportunities for mayhem.
The novel I intend to finish this year is set at the end of the first millennium, while last year’s effort was set in the second century after the cataclysm canonically known as the Sundering of the Worlds. This means the world is very different. The forests and wildlife have had a thousand years to rebound, and while some areas are still struggling to recover, most of the west is lush in comparison.
I live only sixty-five miles north of Mount St. Helens, so I have a good local example of how things look after a devastating event. I also can see how flora and fauna rebound in the years following it. Mount St. Helens – Wikipedia
Even if ecological disasters, technology, or religion aren’t the center of the plot, they can be a part of the background, lending color to the world. In Neveyah, my fictional world, the Temple of Aeos trains mages and healers who are then posted to local communities where they serve the people with their gifts.
Those communities are autonomous as the Temple doesn’t run them, but just as in real life, somebody is in charge of running things. In Neveyah, a council of elders governs most towns and cities, and the Temple is run the same way. We humans are tribal. We prefer an overarching power structure leading us because someone has to be the leader.
We call that power structure a government.
When you create a fictional world, you create a culture. As a society, the habits we develop, the gods we worship, the things we create and find beautiful, and the foods we eat are products of our culture.
What does the outdoor world look and smell like? Mentioning sights, sounds, and scents can show the imaginary world in only a few words.
What about the weather? It can be shown in small, subtle ways, making our characters’ interactions and the events they go through feel real.
Once you have decided on your overall climate, consider your level of technology. Do some research now and bookmark the websites with the best information.
- A note about fantasy and sci-fi food: climate and soil types limit the variety of food crops that can be grown. Wet and rainy areas will grow vastly different crops from those in arid climates, as will sandy soils and clays versus fertile loams. Look up what sort of food your people will have available to them if your story is set in an exotic environment.
I will be pantsing it (writing stream-of-consciousness) for the month of November, which means I will be writing new words every day, connecting the events I have plotted on my storyboard. I never have time to think about logic once I begin the challenge, so the storyboard is crucial to me.
To show a world plausibly and without contradictions, we must consider how things work, whether it takes place in a medieval world or on a space station. Don’t introduce skills and tech that can’t exist or don’t fit the era.
For instance, blacksmiths create and repair things made of metal. The equivalent of a medieval blacksmith on a space station will have high-tech tools and a different job title. Readers notice that sort of thing.
Society is always composed of many layers and classes. Rich merchant or poor laborer, priest or scientist—each occupation has a place in the hierarchy and has a chain of command. Take a moment to consider where your protagonist and their cohorts might fit in their society.
Maybe your novel’s setting is a low-tech civilization. If so, the weather will affect your characters differently than one set in a modern society. Also, the level of technology limits what tools and amenities are available to them.
What about transport? How do people and goods go from one place to another?
Many things about the world will emerge from your creative mind as you write those first pages and will continue to arise throughout the story’s arc.
Consider making a glossary as you go. If you are creating names for people or places, list them separately as they come to you. That way, their spelling won’t drift as the story progresses. It happened to me—the town of Mabry became Maury. I put it on the map as Maury, and it was only in the final proofing that I realized that the spelling of the town in chapter 11 was different from that of chapter 30.
A hand-scribbled map and a calendar of events are absolutely indispensable if your characters do any traveling. The map will help you visualize the terrain, and the calendar will keep events in a plausible order.
Next week, we’ll take another look at plotting so that we have a starting point with a good hook and a bang-up ending to finish things off.
Credits and Attributions:
Wikimedia Commons contributors, “File:MSH82 st helens plume from harrys ridge 05-19-82.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:MSH82_st_helens_plume_from_harrys_ridge_05-19-82.jpg&oldid=912891712 (accessed October 13, 2024).
Wikimedia Commons contributors, “File:St Helens before 1980 eruption horizon fixed.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:St_Helens_before_1980_eruption_horizon_fixed.jpg&oldid=575896084 (accessed October 13, 2024).
I was a dedicated municipal liaison for the Olympia, Washington Region for twelve years and a regular financial donor, but I walked away after the organization’s implosion last November. I will get my 50,000 new words in November but will not sign up to participate through the NaNoWriMo website.
Set your goal, keep a record of your daily word count or pages edited, or whatever, and let National Novel Writing Month be your month to achieve your goals. I have had buttons and stickers made as rewards for our region’s writers, and we will have write-ins as we have always done.
The answer to question number one kickstarts the plot: who are the players? Once I know the answer to this question, I can write, and write, and write … although most of what I write at that point will be background info. The answers to the other questions will emerge as I write the background blather.
They share some of their story the way strangers on a long bus ride might. I see the surface image they present to the world, but they keep most of their secrets close and don’t reveal all the dirt. These mysteries will be pried from them over the course of writing the narrative’s first draft.
And what if you are writing poems or short stories? Graphic novels? We will also go into preparing to “speed-date your muse” when embarking on those aspects of writing.
Setting: Does the setting feel real?
Be prepared for it to come back with some detailed critical observations, which may seem harsh. Any criticism of our life’s work feels unfair to an author who is new at this. And to be truthful, some authors never learn how to put aside their egos.
Worse, perhaps they were familiar with a featured component of the story, such as medicine or police procedures. The reader might have suggested we need to do more research and then rewrite what we thought was the perfect novel.
I went out and bought books on the craft of writing, and I am still buying books on the craft today. I will never stop learning and improving.
Learning the craft of writing is like learning any other trade, from cooking to carpentry. It takes work and effort to become a master.
Title: Indian Summer by William Trost Richards
Who is the antagonist?
Consider cogs: they are engineered to interlock with each other, and when they move close enough that one cog interlocks and turns another, they move other parts of the mechanism.
Each hiccup on the road to glory must tear the heroes down. Events and failures must break them emotionally and physically so that in the book’s final quarter, they can be rebuilt, stronger, and ready to face the enemy on equal terms.
Confrontations are chaotic. It’s our job to control that chaos and create a narrative with an ending that is as intense as our imaginations and logic can make it.
This happens because my characters have agency and sometimes run amok. Thus, in the second draft, I examine the freedom I give my characters to introduce their own actions and reactions within the story.
When the writing commences, the characters make choices and say things that surprise me. They can do this because I allow them agency.
Fortunately, they are rescued by Gandalf. While he is hiding, Bilbo discovers several historically important weapons. One of them is Sting, a blade that fits Bilbo perfectly as a sword. This is a positive consequence, as the blade is crucial to Bilbo’s story and later to Frodo’s story.
It follows that certain words become a kind of mental shorthand, small packets of letters that contain a world of images and meaning for us. Code words are the author’s multi-tool—a compact tool that combines several individual functions in a single unit. One word, one packet of letters will serve many purposes and convey a myriad of mental images.
I want to avoid that sin in my work, but what are my code words? What words are being inadvertently overused as descriptors? A good way to discover this is to make a word cloud. The words that see the most screen time will be the largest. 
endured
Sometimes, the only thing that works is the brief image of a smile. Nothing is more boring than reading a story where a person’s facial expressions take center stage. As a reader, I want to know what is happening inside our characters and can be put off by an exaggerated outward display.
I was divorced from hubby number three in 1997, and oddly enough, things became much easier financially. I was able to get by with only one job, even while raising my last teenager. (See? Everyone has a soap opera life, even famously unknown authors.)
Artist: Samuel Bough (1822–1878)
Another arc takes the protagonist on a journey that can end several different ways, all of them taking our characters down a winding path with many choices, roads not taken. They also are altered by their experiences for good or ill.
Knowing my intended word count helps me create a story, from drabbles to novels. For me, it works in stories with a traditional arc as well as those with a circular arc.
In a circular narrative, the story begins at point A, takes the protagonist through life-changing events, and brings them home, ending where it started. The starting and ending points are the same, and the characters return home, but they are fundamentally changed by the story’s events.
Word choices are essential in showing a world and creating a believable atmosphere when limited to only a small word count. I had challenged myself to write a story that told both sides of a frightening encounter in 1000 words, give or take a few. I wanted to expand on the theme of dragons and use it to show two aspects of a place whose national symbol is the Red Dragon (Welsh: Y Ddraig Goch).
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 