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.

There’s More to Your World Than People and Places

WorldEmber is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s easy for me to sit and write and write and write. I can make new world-building articles as easy as breathing. But to maintain a focus and purpose with my world-building can be a challenge. Especially in December when the nights are long, the sun is weak, and my seasonal depression is prone to take hold.

When I sit down to write, I like to take stock of what I’ve done. Like when a show starts with “previously on…” it reminds me of where I left off, and usually gives me a clue of where I need to go next.

But just as often, it will also tell me where not to go next.

Too Much of a Good Thing

Looking at what I’ve done so far, it’s clear to see that I’ve been focused a lot on geography. Nations, buildings, and other places have dominated my WorldEmber writing. In part because that’s what I know best about my focus, Crossroads Island.

And, in part, it’s because I’m judging the geography category. This has my brain churning through all the different ways to use WorldAnvil’s Geography template.

This unbalance toward places sent me to look at the WorldEmber challenge page to see which templates I had not yet used. I knew going in that it would be only a couple, but I was actually pretty shocked! Of the 23 available special category templates, I’ve only explored a handful and most of those were landmarks, locations, and buildings!

Explore the W5H

Every Saturday, my Quick Six column gives you six themed world-building prompts built around the concepts of who, what, when, where, why, and how. I do this to help myself — and hopefully you, too! — look at my world from different angles and expand into new places.

For example…

I’ve been focused on locations around my main location. Great! Now, I need to expand my viewpoint with the rest of the gang.

• Who lives and works in these places?
• What happens there? What sorts of things are made there or can be found there or need to be imported to there?
• When are some important dates in the histories of these places?
• Why are the important?
• How does that history affect the present, how does it manifest in the daily lives of the people?

Perhaps you’ve been focused on developing characters. Take a step back, and look at the what, when, where, why, and how of those people and their lives. And don’t be afraid to twist the questions!

Try to avoid generic details about what they look like, when they lived, where they were born, why they matter to the story, and how they make a living. Hopefully, you’ve already included that in their character profiles.

Wrapping the Day

A frequent touchstone in this community is the idea that there’s room for the entire universe in every fictional world. Don’t be afraid to fill that space!

As I write this, I am sitting at 13,631 new words of world-building toward my 50,000 word goal.