As a lot of you may already know, I’m currently working on a novel. It’s been teased periodically on our Discord server and I’ve mentioned it when building the city in modded Minecraft (which is it’s own post coming soon).
But I don’t talk about the book too much outside of those things. The main reason is not wanting to spoil it, paranoia about copyright, etc. However, I’ve decided I do want to talk about it a little bit. After all, this book has been in my head for years.
So the best way, I feel, is to write weekly “logs”. It’s kind of like a development log, except I’m a writer and I’m posting bits and pieces of story progress.
In this post, I want to discuss world-building. Things such as world-building platforms, how to manage the lore, and keep all of my notes together.
Growing up, I used pen and paper. I had handwritten the whole story in a random notebook we bought for back-to-school. But then I’d have to go on the computer and type it all out. Nowadays, using pen and paper isn’t as feasible, as it hurts my wrist to spend a lot of time writing.
I’ve also tried a lot of different online platforms. For the longest time, I was trying to make WordPress work for a story bible. And it kind of did – I set up a wiki page, I arranged everything on the website, made “Articles” searchable, and the whole works. But ultimately, I didn’t like how it looked.
Fairly recently, I was messing with a Linux distro called Zorin. I thought it looked cool and sci-fi enough for this book, so I tried it out for managing this story. I researched different programs and software I could install using Docker. There are quite a few good ones out there (one called Bookstack, which can be used for a lot of different things). But ultimately, I had settled on trying Obsidian for a while.
Obsidian is a beast of a program. It’s very cool, simple to use, and very customizable. I was able to format it wiki-style in order to organize everything. But it still wasn’t scratching that itch that was bothering me.
I had previously experimented with a custom website coded to work like a mix of a wiki and a kanban board. This ultimately worked the best for me. Not only was I able to throw all the ideas on the website, but I also organized all the chapters for the book and made a way to export things. There was something about seeing my project displayed proudly on a Word document, being able to scroll on my phone, almost as if it were an eBook copy I was reading.
But when it comes to the writing process itself, I found a tool called tome that I ended up purchasing. This is actually a nifty little tool. It essentially helps you develop your story, asking questions you can answer, and giving tips on different aspects of the story.
This is a really cool resource I’ve been using to help get my ideas together. With all of these pieces combined, you’d think I’d have a lot written. I mean, technically I do?
The world-building site has almost 2,000 words in just characters, places, and lore alone. In total, having 29 entries. That’s not too bad for a book that’s been in progress for years, which I started rewriting!
I don’t have a concrete total of how many words for the actual novel I’ve written. It’s about 8525, give or take, accumulated over a few different places. That’s the running total at the moment for this writerly log.
Next time, I’m going to talk about – and work on – developing mood boards / Spotify playlists for all my characters. Stay tuned!