World Building and Writing: Finding the Balance
When I started writing Dream Sparks, I began with the world building. I did a lot of world building when I was younger, and had a habit of creating characters without having a story to put them in. Dream Sparks was like that, where the story came together in bits and pieces. Some of the characters (like Franca and Alex) were created years before the universe that Dream Sparks takes place in was made. I mentioned this in another post, but when I was in college I had a day where I was feeling very discouraged. I didn’t feel like doing my homework on my break, (I did do it later at home) and instead decided to do some world building.
I didn’t have a story in mind, but started designing planets and places. Hayventh was the first one, with Pike III being made next. I didn’t have a lot of details for them storywise. I added pictures of the flora and fauna for these planets to a page I had for them in Scrivener, then slowly added the settlements. As I continued writing the story over the months, I found myself spending more and more time world building. I would have some days where I didn’t write. I came to the realization that if I kept doing that I wouldn’t get my story out at all. But at the same time I knew that my story needed the world building, and didn’t want to stop doing that. Dream Sparks is the book that I learned how to write a book with, and I knew that this was part of the learning process. I had to learn how to balance world building and writing if I wanted to finish my novel. It felt overwhelming at times, because I had so many ideas, but I knew I was going off on tangents by developing world building around all of them. So I started researching, pondering, and learning, and here’s what I discovered.
World building often adds more than what fits into a novel. That being said, I do believe that it is very important for the author, even if it surpasses what’s written in the story. I wanted the world of Dream Sparks to feel like it ran on it’s own, with or without the main character’s influence. To do this I made four different timelines. One was the history of Gunner’s people: where they came from, and how they moved to Ohniran. As that timeline continued it started becoming too vague. It was good for the overall events of the world, both for the past and the future, but it only did well as a big picture of the universe as a whole.
When it came time for the two brothers to enter into the story, I set up two timelines. One was made as if the brothers had no one else step in to change things, and continued until one of them died. The other timeline included the crew and Franca, and showed where those characters would make an important impact on the plot. The fourth one was made to help me visualize how what Franca was doing in the beginning of the story lined up with the other timelines, as the first fourteen chapters felt very isolated from the rest of what was going on in the universe. The rivalry between the two brothers had already started before chapter one had began. While these timelines where important to me, they served no purpose being put into the finished novel. Sometimes world building serves as a guideline for the author more than anything else.
Another thing I learned was to stop and do world building as I needed it. This helped me a lot to avoid procrastinating on the actual writing, and it helped me to not go on tangents on something that wouldn’t appear in the book anyway. Sometimes I would take a day off just to world build when I needed to add something bigger, but those days were always scheduled in and I had to be strict with it. When it’s limited in a way where it can still grow it helps achieve balance, while still contributing to the project.
World building doesn’t have to be set in stone. This is something I did not realize at first, as I felt like whatever I wrote would be set in stone. Now I have a section in scrivener for things that I think of that don’t fit in the story yet. Most of the time I have characters and planets there, but I’ve had a few occasions where I had a full scene with characters talking with each other stored there! If something doesn’t fit yet, I save it and have found that I usually find a place for it later. Once I removed a planet from the story, because it wasn’t serving a purpose. Later I needed another planet, and it worked out really well. It’s important to figure out what is really needed and what is too detailed or too much for the story. A way that I’ve learned to discern this is by watching the flow of my writing. If the pacing starts to feel stagnant, that tells me I’m bogging the story down with too much information. There’s so much that I’m still learning about world building, I’m looking forward to posting more on this!
