New novel & worldbuilding

At the end of 2017, I had finished the draft of my novel, and was feeling kind of lost. I had been working on it for a year, I had finished NaNoWriMo with it, and suddenly it was done and off to beta readers.

I had this writing momentum I didn’t want to lose, but I didn’t know what to work on. So I dipped back into something I had started years earlier. In 2012, Readers’ Digest invited people to submit their ultra-short stories on Twitter. One of my submissions was published, and I took this little snippet and started writing a story.

I abandoned that story, and picking it up again last year, after so long with a novel, felt weird. I struggled with it. Maybe my brain had rewired without me realizing it. Whatever the reason, I decided that there was nothing for it but to turn that short story snippet into a new novel. The novel I wrote last year was more magical realism than anything, but this one is looking like a sci-fi/fantasyish/mystery sort of hybrid. I’ve read a fair amount of genre fiction, but have never attempted to write anything substantial in those areas myself. And, as it turns out, I’m enjoying it quite a lot.

Okay, I’ll be honest: I just completed the first chapter the other day. What had been occupying my brain up ’til then has been the research, the worldbuilding. I examined the small amount of actual narrative I’d written for the short story, and realized that I couldn’t go on – I hadn’t figured out how the magic system in this world worked. I didn’t know what made these people leave Earth. And then – it was a spaceship. How many people lived in it? What did they eat? How did they get water? What jobs did people have? Who kept the peace? Was there peace?

As I did more research into the backstory of my little world, I realized that this spaceship couldn’t look sleekly futuristic. No Star Trek, much as I love it. So, then I had other considerations: What animals would exist and why? What would peoples’ homes look like? Will every area look the same? If not – how would they differ? How would this environment influence the characters and the way they act?

As with my previous novel, I found Pinterest helped me to find more concrete representations of the vague threads of ideas I had swirling around in my brain.

And when it came time to decide the all-important question of population growth over time in my city-ship, there was only one option:

I haven’t gotten to the map-drawing stage yet, but oh, I will. When I was in middle school, I wrote a couple of little books set in a fictional town. I spent some summer afternoons happily drawing each character’s street, their house layouts, even the layout of their local mall (I was twelve). And, in a strange way, this worldbuilding reminds me of those pleasant afternoons, sitting on my bedroom floor, leaning against my door so my brother wouldn’t come in, getting completely lost in this entire creation process.

Despite the novel I just completed, I have been a short story writer longer than anything. I got used to the constraints of that format, even though my stories were on the long side. When I wrote my last novel, I had to really work at internalizing the fact that I had more time now, that I could do more things. Now, with this next novel, all I have are things to create and invent. There’s something slightly infuriating about that sometimes, but it’s also more than a little addicting. One idea rolls into another idea, which rolls into another, and everything seems possible and fun and worthy of investigation. I can’t recall thinking about a writing project so constantly, so excitedly, in years. During my Humber mentorship I discovered how much I enjoyed the process of unpicking the knot of yarn that a writing project can turn into. It’s deeply satisfying, feeling a writing problem unfurl and begin to carry you along again.

At least, it certainly feels like the complete opposite to the state of mind I was in in 2015, when I wrote a post with the dramatic title I quit writing!

Worldbuilding resources that helped me: