Worldbuilding for NaNoWriMo: Preptober Edition
How to set your worldbuilding up for Nano success
With National Novel Writing Month starting in a little over a week, it seems an opportune time to share some worldbuilding-specific NaNoPrep advice!
NaNoWriMo is celebrating its 25th year this November, which is terribly exciting. Those of y’all who’ve been with me for a while know that I love Nano. I’ve been participating since 2001, From Unseen Fire began life as my 2011 Nano project, and I’m now on their Writers Board. I’m so incredibly proud that the Aven Cycle is a Nano success story.
I’ve used Novembers and Camp Nanos over the years on all three books in the Aven Cycle — as well as a variety of other projects. I suspect I “lose” about as often as I “win”, so far as hitting the 50k word goal goes, but I never worry too much about that. Every word is a victory, but also, sometimes, what Nano shows me is that a project isn’t quite ready for full drafting yet. It still needs to bake a bit more. And that’s okay, too. All part of the process.
If you’re someone who’s been planning on diving into a project this November, and that project is somewhere in the realm of speculative fiction, you’ve likely already started your worldbuilding. Or maybe not! Maybe you’re full-on pantsing it with no plan, just a dream. But if you’ve got at least a starting seed and you want to get a little preparatory work done in the next eight days, I’ve got some ideas that might help you target those efforts in ways that will make your life easier in November.
What do you need to get started?
A perennial question for the worldbuilding writer: How much do you need to do before you actually start drafting?
The answer varies by writer, of course. Some of us compile chonky world bibles before setting down a word; some of us start with the plot and fill the world in as we go. For me it’s usually somewhere in the middle. The dolls and the dollhouse tend to come at least a bit at the same time.
The answer can also vary by project. Some may need more scaffolding before you can set to work. That may be dictated by how near or far your speculative world is from the “real world,” or by how much research you need to do.
When it comes to Nano, though, it can help to target your worldbuilding to the sort of story you think you’re working on. Me, I gravitate towards political plots, so I can’t really get started until I know a lot of details about what sort of government a world has, how it functions, and what factions are at play. If you’re doing a tightly-focused fantasy of manners, however, that might be something you can handwave.
If you don’t know any of that yet — Well, that’s where some starting seeds can come in.
Some starting seeds
Honestly, you can start your worldbuilding almost anywhere. The Aven Cycle started with a painting — and that gave me my aesthetic, my historical era, and the point where I needed to start figuring out how fantasy blent into the history. Maybe you’ve got a strong image, a starting character, a plot element you want to work with. Maybe you have something else driving you, an aesthetic or a song or an “X meets Y'“ comparison you want to chase down.
Wherever you’ve started, these are a few of the key elements that I think work well for creating a strong worldbuilding foundation. Thinking about these things will tell you a lot about the society you’re creating — and that’s where you can get a lot of good plot juice for November!
A map
I love maps, because for me, they always open up my imagination. Once I’ve got the map of a place, I start creating stories to go inside it. I want to know what the people are like over there, what the character of that city is. And what happens when people from there move to that city?
The scope of your story may determine how big a map you need. If you’re writing a sprawling epic, you’ll need something zoomed-out, but that’s far and away not the only option. If your entire story takes place within a single city, maybe that’s all the map you need. You may still want to know a little something about the world beyond — where does the city’s food come from? is it on a river? where does that river go? where do people tend to travel or immigrate to the city from? — but you might not need all of that mapped out. Your focus might be more on what the neighborhoods look like: how close the soldiers’ barracks are to the docks, where the markets get set up, how many houses of worship there are, which neighborhoods fall higher or lower on your socioeconomic scale.
Or maybe you’re going smaller still, and writing something with a tightly-focused setting. Then, your map might be a floorplan of the gloomy manor house or a sketch of the sprawling palace and its gardens.
Do you want to draw the map yourself? Generate it? Or somewhere in between — maybe take a real-world map or a generated map, and then modify it? I tend to draw my own, zoomed-out, but for cities, I love the Watabou City Generator.
Having a map may not be necessary for your story, but it can be help during NaNoWriMo. If you hit a day where you’re stuck, go back to your map and ask yourself a question about some question in it that you haven’t explored. Even just describing a new neighborhood or a far-off shore could get you to 1667 for the day!
The matrix of power and privilege
Here’s where I plug my podcast and tell you to go listen to Episode 97 of Worldbuilding for Masochists, where Suyi Davies Okungbowa put words to this concept better than any I’ve heard before. Each of your characters, like each person in our real world, exists at particular points on many different axes of power and privilege. They might be very high on some, but challenged by others.
Make interesting choices here! There’s a lot of value in commenting on the axes of power that exist in our world, yes, or in upending them. Things like race, gender, sexuality, religion, wealth — all of those are part of our matrix, and the chances are good they’ll be part of yours, too, in some way or another. Just as art is inherently political, your writing is inherently going to either reflect or challenge the axes of power in our own world — and it’s good to be aware of that.
But worldbuilding offers you the opportuinty to craft some unique axes, too.
If you’re writing fantasy, you’ll want to think about how magic plays into this matrix. Is having magical talent something that bestows power and privilege? Or is it something shameful or secret? Does that intersect with other axes? Maybe it’s fine for some genders to use magic, but not for others — a classic way of using magic to mirror gender dynamics in our own world. Or maybe it has to do with class: Is magic something privileged to the upper classes? Or do they see it as gauche, fit only for the commoners to practice? Can you make money doing it, or is that forbidden?
There’s a lot to mine there, and that was a lot of what I did in worldbuilding for the Aven Cycle. If I add magic to ancient Rome, what happens? It ties in with religion and economy — but it also has checks to its power, enshrined in the law. It made sense to me that a Roman Republic with magic would not want men of magical ability ascending the highest ranks of government. Just as they want no kings, they would not want someone holding both magical and political power. This allowed me to give my male protagonist, Sempronius, a really juicy aspect to his character: he’s an ambitious Senator with designs on higher offices, and he’s a mage who has kept his talents a secret. This complicates his life, makes him tie himself into a few ethical knots, and gives me some great plot points.
Beyond magic, I encourage you to think outside normal bounds of power and privilege. Maybe yours is a world where the ability to sing or throw down an epic rap battle is something that gives literal social and political capital. Maybe the number of freckles someone has is seen as an indication of how much the gods love them, and they can derive power from that — or, be secluded away from the world based on it. Maybe how much money someone has matters, but less than how many leaves are on the trees in their sacred garden.
This is something you can come back to a lot during the month of November. When you’re feeling stuck, examine that matrix. Is there something there you can use to throw a hurdle in your character’s path? How can they get around the blocks to the power they need? Could they be tempted into misusing their privilege to get what they want? Or might they find a way to subvert someone’s expectations by playing into a perceived lack of power? Do they encounter a new culture where the matrix doesn’t work quite the same way as what they’re used to? Poking the matrix gives you a lot of room to explore — which can, in turn, give you a lot of words to log for the day!
Societal / political structure
Thinking about the axes of power and privilege is likely to get you thinking about the way your world’s society is organized. Everything here exists on a spectrum. Is your world more egalitarian or more rigidly class-based? How much say do the people have in their government? The answers to that can be — as they have been throughout history — much wilder than simply “total authoritarian monarchy/empire” or “full and complete democratic representation”.
How deep you go into this will depend on what kind of story you’re telling. Like I said, I tend to plunge into this stuff, because it’s what drives a lot of my plots. Even if you’re not writing a political story, though… well, human life is inherently political. Your characters will have been shaped, in some way, by their society, their class, their access to how their world operates. Do they believe firmly in their place in the Great Chain of Being, or do they depend on a culture of social mobility? The answer may tell you a lot about how they’re going to make decisions and work within your plot.
Family & home
Even if your story doesn’t involve your main character’s family, they are still the product of their circumstances — and a lot of those circumstances will have been shaped by their society’s idea of what home and family look like.
A lot of this is about what is perceived as “normal” — even if that perception doesn’t match up with reality. Is a nuclear family typical in your world, or are multi-generational extended families more common? Does family even mean blood relations? Or are children raised in creches? Is marriage even a thing, and if so, what does it mean?
Thinking about families will likely get you thinking about issues of gender and sexuality. Are gender roles reflected in the family structure? Is your society tolerant or even enthusiastic about sexualities besides the heteronormative? How many genders does your world recognize? Does everyone in the society agree about all of these things?
Then, you can apply these considerations to your characters. Did they have what their society would consider a happy, normal childhood, or an unusual one? Did they feel safe or stifled within their home? What sort of a home do they imagine themselves building?
It may be more navel-gazing than you’d want to keep in a full draft of a manuscript, but having a character think through their own past, how it shapes their present, and what they want for the future, particularly when it comes to home and family, can be a great way to inflate your daily word count — and maybe find some powerful motivating forces along the way.
Those are just a few possible starting points, but I hope they provide some inspiration!
I’m going to continue doing some Nano work here, including weekly prompts that might help you get unstuck if you find yourself struggling! So if you want to get those on Worldbuilding Wednesdays in November, make sure to subscribe!