Hello, darklings!
Nanowrimo is complete, and I wanted to share two things I super love when I go into nanowrimo with a fresh idea:
World Building and Rough Drafting.
I adore world building. I love to immerse my imagination in new environments and strange, new worlds. I love seeing them in movies, playing through them in video games, reading about them, and I love creating them.
I love how fantasy worlds lets us create new peoples and cultures. I enjoy thinking how certain species would adapt to their biomes. I like the challenge of figuring out interactions, governments, food chains, environmental challenges, and more. This stuff makes me giddy to create.
I could go on and on about things I do to create worlds, but I’ll spare it for other posts that deal with just that subject. Just know that to make a convincing world, people, and/or species, your best bet is to study some biology, geography, and history. National Geographic is great for all of this. Nature documentaries, too. Absorb other people’s created worlds. The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, the Dark Crystal, Star Wars, Star Trek, Subnautica, DnD, Witcher, and just anything you can get your hands on will help you expand your imagination to new horizons and ideas.
I love the puzzling of making things work. What can be believable while being fantastical? What can pull my readers into an adventure that transport them to a new place entirely? What problems can I create for my characters in this setting?
Just adore it to pieces. When it comes down to the sitting and writing part, the rough draft is definitely my favorite.
Now, it’s not my favorite part to read, because of all the glaring errors, but it’s the stage or story writing where it is pure muse-dom and idea rambling. I get some great nuggets by getting out of my own way and just writing. There’s no stress for perfection. I don’t have to reread something ten times to figure out how I need to fix it. There’s just blank pages and notes and worlds of possibilities for how this new writing journey is going to surprise me.
Mind you, rough drafting is still work! It’s simply much easier work for me than trying to make the puzzle pieces fit. While not effortless, it takes less effort for me than organizing, trimming, adding to different pages, or hunting on the Word Hippo site for just the right word to use. Admittedly, most of the time, my first draft is so messy it gets a complete rewrite.
But it doesn’t change my love for this stage where, sometimes, I’m just as curious what will happen to the characters as any reader would be.
Stay safe and warm, my little crowlings, and build some worlds.
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