Last week I attended the Algonkian Writer's Workshop. I signed up for the conference in February, naively believing that my novel The Sea Knife would be finished by June. By May, I stopped working on my novel, except for small tweaks. My first draft was not working. For my second draft, I decided to let the conference dictate the way my novel would go. And it was a good thing that I did.
One of the main messages of the conference was "let your pitch be the tail that wags your novel dog." The pitch, as defined by the conference, is the catchy one or two paragraph summary of your novel. and the point is that if you can't write a good or sellable pitch - your novel is probably too boring, too confusing, not marketable or has already been written. My pitch was jumbled. I had pieces of plot intermingled with a world that I hadn't yet figured out.
So for the last week, I have been world building on www.mindmeister.com.
I didn't start by using a mind map. I started by first pulling ideas out of my head with no structure, then using a questionnaire that I pulled from http://www.sfwa.org/2009/08/fantasy-worldbuilding-questions/ , and finally organizing things on mindmeister.
There are a lot of good reasons to just world build:
1. A fantasy world needs consistency and rules - otherwise it won't be believable.
2. How can I immerse my readers in a world that I have not immersed myself in?
2. World building is helping me see the overall meta plot that I want to achieve. It is an investment for the future.
3. It is helping pinpoint an antogonist because she is actually defined by the rules of my world. What is the worst way possible to to use the world rules? It is also helping me define my hero, my mentor and the other players of my plot.
4. I now can understand the groups of people in my world and why they might have issues with each other.
I used to get frustrated every time I wasn't directly writing. Now I understand that the actual writing is a just piece of a much bigger process. Writing is the way to communicate how mind-blowing my concepts are, but if I don't understand my concepts, neither will anyone else.
Important as worldbuilding is, I still do it too much :-) I have to limit myself to a few key questions and answer the rest as I write.
ReplyDeleteMindmeister looks awesome. Thanks for linking to it.
The pitch is NOT the tail that wags the dog. THIS IS FALSE.
ReplyDelete