Fun fact: for a while, whenever I read the word “worldbuilding,” I’d miss the “l,” and think it said “ wordbuilding .” This led to no end o...

Thoughtful Thursdays: The Wonderful World of Worldbuilding

Alexa Mintah

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Fun fact: for a while, whenever I read the word “worldbuilding,” I’d miss the “l,” and think it said “wordbuilding.” This led to no end of confusion on my part, though I guessed it had something to do with making up fake words. What that had to do with a contemporary story, I could not imagine. 

But one day, while browsing GoTeenWriters, I finally caught the “l” and understood, “Oh, worldbuilding.” 

And my life was finally complete.

Anyways, we’re not actually here to discuss my lack of proper eyesight, my repeated misreading of words, or whatever it is that caused me months of confusion. We’re here to talk about worldbuilding.

I’ve mentioned before that, during NaNo, me and one of my besties wrote a story together. One of the coolest things about that experience was, excepting some go-to word choices and sentence structures, we found we have an almost identical writing style. Including the fact that we’re both pantsers.

Pantsing Becoming Brave was a ton of fun. Difficult, confusing, full of uncertainty, random inspiration, plotholes, and I-have-no-idea-what-we’re-doing-so-let’s-just-write. But it was definitely fun.

After we took a break and went back to edit though, one of our biggest problems came when we realized we didn’t know much about our storyworld. As pantsers, we just kinda winged the whole thing, so we had a rudimentary idea of how our society worked, but we were pretty fuzzy on the details.

As we were mulling over how to fix this problem, I remembered I’d gotten Storyworld First by Jill Williamson a few months before, and I suggested we read through that and see if it generated some ideas.

Yes, I’m sure you can see where this is going. It’s a bit of a shameless plug/review for her book, but what can I say? It helped us a lot.

jillwilliamson.com

This book was amazing for fleshing out our storyworld. We learned about our apocalypse (an animal one, to be exact), how our government works (it’s a sort of socialistic, totalitarian polyarchy with a president), their current tech (medical’s advanced, vehicles behind; the explanation is too complicated for a parenthetical), and even the accents of people in our story (one group talks slower, because they have it easier and, as Rebecca said, “can afford to be frivolous in their speech patterns,”; the other has a life to live, a rather hard one, so their voices are more clipped: they say what they have to say, and move on).

To be clear, none of that was specifically in Mrs. Williamson’s book. But Storyworld First was a great resource to kickstart our imaginations, help us develop the story, create all kinds of brilliant plot bunnies, and fill up all kinds of plotholes.

Also, as Rebecca said when I told her about this post, it gave our characters several opportunities to sucker punch us with unexpected feels. Painful as that was, if the reveals created feelings in us (and we’re heartless), we imagine they’ll create even more in our readers. Which is, more or less, what we’re trying to do.

Now all we have to do is finish edits and get all the new coolness in there. Which, unfortunately, Mrs. Williamson cannot do for us. Rats. Any of you willing to do it instead?

Kidding, kidding. Sort of.

Have any of you read Storyworld First? Or another book by Jill Williamson? What’s your favorite writing resource? Comment me!

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