Follow along with my WorldEmber progress!

I promised you a look over my shoulder this month as I bring a vague and disjointed collection of ideas together into a cohesive piece of world-building. These resources will help you keep track of my progress through this month-long marathon challenge:

• Haly’s Official WE Progress Report — each participant gets a page that automatically collects their author information and all WE-eligible articles across all worlds into a single, shareable package.
• Haly’s WorldEmber on Argentii Index — an on-the-fly journal page and handy sidebar displaying only new Argentii WE-eligible articles.

The Endless Cycle of World-building (and Stubs)

Over and over, I say it: there is room for the entire universe in every fictional world. If you’ve spent more than a few hours digging into the deep parts of your own world-building project, then you know the truth of this, you’ve seen it in action. From the micro to the macro, there is always another thing to describe.

This ever-expanding scope of possibility can make world-building feel like fighting a hydra: the moment that you get a solid handle on a character, place, object, or concept in your world, it spawns other new ideas that now also need developing.

Some Examples

When I started this WorldEmber follow-along, I talked about shopping my stubs, first. Just like on Wikipedia, stubs are short little bits of world-building that you’ve done. It might look like a couple bullet points on the back of an envelope, or it could be a few brief sentences crammed in the margin of a notebook. (On WorldAnvil, it’s a WIP article of 50 words or less.)

More important, they are perfect springboards for expanding your world! The problem is that for every one you write, you very likely generate ideas for several — even many! — more along the way.

For example, writing about the North Docks led to stubs about Docker’s Dining and Event Space, the Old Castle, and the North Dock Tower. In turn, the North Dock Tower spawned Spur Blacklake’s Murder. This, naturally, gave birth to Spur Blacklake.

Keep it Light

This ever-expanding tree of ideas is one of my favorite parts of world-building. That passion makes it very easy for me to just build upon every idea that occurs to me. Trust me, I’ve seen me do it; it was my entire strategy for WorldAnvil Summer Camp 2023.

Having a tendency to over-develop my ideas is something that I’ve been working to curtail. I want Argentii, especially, to have a brevity of style that allows the imagination to do the heavy lifting of a haunted realm. (Just ignore me trying to ignore all of the work I have to do to inject more haunted feeling into the world.)

Beyond just style, keeping your world-building light makes it easier to expand later on. For instance, if you’re writing a story about Alice and Bruno and need Bruno to have some sort of power and influence, then you can simply make him the Duke of Bosski…

Assuming, that is, that you haven’t over-developed the Duke of Bosski and made it impossible to give that title away.

Wrapping the Day

What are the whirlpools of world-building that suck you in? What do you do to pull yourself out of the trap? Do you sometimes just give in to the rabbit hole that is your own world? Let me know in the comments!!

As I write this, I am sitting at 17,529 new words of world-building toward my 50,000-word goal.