How To Keep World Building From Feeling Overwhelming
World building can feel like an overwhelming task, but it doesn’t have to. Depending on your story, it can look like a huge project to undertake. With the audio book of Dream Sparks nearing completion, I’ve been looking back at how the world building for The Vision of Light Series began, and how I went about setting the stage for the story.
The world building started around 2016 or 2017, when I made some of the characters, like Franca and Alex. At that time I liked writing short stories that would consist of a few characters and one or two scenes. They never really saw the light of day, and were just for fun. Around that time I had a dream that is almost identical to the first few chapters of Dream Sparks. The concept from that dream seemed so interesting that I thought it would be fun to write a story around it, and put Franca (and some other characters I had on hand) in it. The story was small, and never went anywhere.
Later, around the fall of 2019, I was on a break from college classes. I got out my laptop, and decided to make a star system, just for the fun of it. I made up five planets, and assigned a general climate to them. As the semester went by I started writing about the nature that existed on those planets, along with creating settlements. When I look back at that time I realize just how bare-bones the world building was. There wasn’t a plot, there were no main characters, it was just a sci-fi themed world. As I kept working on it, I came to see that I made something that a story could take place in. Most of the short stories that I had written were fantasy stories, along with characters that were set up for that genre (this was before I learned that I could use most of my characters in a different genre with little change.) The only characters and scenes that I had on hand were the ones from my small story. At the beginning of 2020 I decided to take that story and re-write it into a full novel. I didn’t look at anything beyond the first few chapters, and started over with that. This gave me a foundation, and I started making a few of the other members of the crew. Maylea was one of those members.
As the story got bigger I started to feel a bit overwhelmed with how much I needed to make, and how much I needed to keep track of. I quickly learned that I needed to organize my world building, which I did with Scrivener. Keeping Wikipedia styled pages about characters and planets helped more than I had thought it would. It made it so much easier to reference things. Then came organizing the plot, which was something I hadn’t done yet. While it didn’t feel productive at the time, slowing down to lay out all the timelines (which ended up being three) saved me from more work later on. I did have days where I spent too much time on world building, but learned how to optimize it over time.
When world building feels like too big of a task, I first check to see if I have all my data organized. One of the biggest things I’ve learned is to only make things as I go along, whenever I need something. This helps the story to come together in a natural way, and keeps it from feeling overwhelming. It doesn’t hurt to go back and change things either. At one point I had too many planets and had to cut one out. Later on in the story things changed and I needed another planet, so the one I cut out got added back in, but had a purpose this time around. World building is what we make it, and will stay at the level we have it at until we are ready for it to change.
