Now that I’ve gotten the analysis of Naomi Novik’s Uprooted out of the way, I want to devote my next project toward the practice of worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding is hard, because doing it well feels like a Catch-22: you either spend a bunch of time meticulously planning out every detail of the world without knowing which features will be relevant to the story, or else you dive into the story and end up putting a lot of [insert magic here] throughout every scene as you inevitably realize that you haven’t visualized the world nearly enough. Since fantasy novels lean heavily on worldbuilding, you might as well have not written a draft in the first place.

The idea I am toying with is that perhaps there is a middle ground. Rather than worldbuilding upfront or diving into the story first, what if there were a way to explore worldbuilding in ways that are directly related to the plot?

That’s where worldbuilding vignettes come in. For me, these are small mini-stories (~250 words) featuring characters in the final novel dealing with the fantastical elements of the world. I was inspired by this idea from reading Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, which features many vignettes from side characters who appear only once, and whose purpose is to flesh out the world and how it works. With that said, the characters featured in each vignette may not feature prominently in the final novel, but centering the story on them in the particular vignette allows for a quick-and-easy way for me to visualize worldbuilding-in-action, not merely as abstract ideas.

Indecisiveness is a persistent problem for me as a writer, so having a completed story about an aspect of the world (no matter how short) is crucial for helping me to stick with that idea and not waffle from it later. Hopefully, by collecting enough of these vignettes (20-30 total), I can build enough of a framework of the world to feel confident when I start writing the novel proper.

My next post will talk about the particular novel idea itself, and hopefully, I’ll be able to do about 10 vignettes before the month ends.