Episode 56: How do you track worldbuilding?

In this week’s episode, Crys and JP talk all about the different ways to track worldbuilding. They discuss the different apps and tools available and how they find the method that works best for them and their genre. 

Show Notes

How to Write Manga: Your Complete Guide to the Secrets of Japanese Comic Book Storytelling by RA Paterson

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Transcript

JP: Hello friends. This is episode number 56 of the Write Away Podcast, and it is the 14th of August 2021 as we are recording. I’m JP Rindfleisch with my cohost…

Crys: Crys Cain.

JP: And please tell me where you are.

Crys: I am in Denver, Colorado. So I was at JP’s last weekend. We had an absolute blast. We went to a bookstore and read a very awkward, somewhat erotic scene from a novel that involved a lot of abuse.

I have it on my TikTok. It was very awkward. There was a reason it was in the dark half locked room in a basement that I, kind of, busted into just to see. Yeah. And then from there we went surprise visit up to Wisconsin to see some friends from Puerto Viejo.

There’s a theme. Puerto Viejo-ans are all over the world. People who have visited there, lived there. And so, we see each other. We just do that. So we went to see some friends from Puerto Viejo who live actually Madison, Wisconsin. Then Wisconsin, Iowa. I loved Iowa. I was surprised. I’d never given Iowa two thoughts before in my life.

Iowa was beautiful. People were so weirdly friendly. It was lovely. And then Nebraska. The only thing I can say positive about Nebraska, I mean, it’s not bad, but it’s not amazing. It’s slightly better than Kansas, which I don’t think like that’s faint praise, right.

So, but we were in Nebraska on Small’s birthday. So we were going to do this cool adventure gym, you know, those weird things where they like hook you up to the thing in case you fall. We were going to do one of those, but it was like 90 in Nebraska. And apparently that’s like death hot for them. So they closed down.

So we went to a water park for his birthday instead, which of course was a blast, but then there was nothing else to do in Nebraska. So Priscilla was like, we’re getting out of here as fast as possible. So she drove for like four hours at night, finally parked at like midnight, and then I drove the remaining four hours to Denver yesterday.

So now we’re in Denver, and we planned on being around this area for a few days, just cause there’s so many cool things in Colorado. It’s an overwhelming coolness here. It’s one of the few places that I’ve said that if I ever moved back to the States it’d probably be Colorado. So there’s that.

Writing wise, I am basically one chapter away from being done with the romance.

Woohoo! That will be amazing. Amazing. And then I’m taking two full days off doing no worky things whatsoever. Which feels weird, but it’ll be really good. So, how was your week, sir?

JP: Well, it wasn’t as adventurous, but I don’t think that many can be as adventurous as that. That was fantastic.

No, I’ve had a decent week writing every morning and I’ve gotten a little bit farther on the Vella serial thing that I was working on with Jeff Elkins.

So now he’s going to go through edits on them. I’ve gone through edits of nine episodes and I am now working back on book three for Abe in my collaboration thing.

And I did this in the Weekend Reads, I noted it in the newsletter, and I’m going to note it here too, because I think accountability is important. I wrote there that I’m going to do 10,000 words this week of edits, because I feel like that’s achievable, but if I don’t say it, then I’m not going to do it cause I’m one of those people. So I’m taking a page out of the Next Level Authors podcast and I’m just going to just say what I’m going to do, because if I don’t do it, then I can be yelled at.

Crys: I have such a struggle and maybe this is another podcast topic, but I do have such a struggle with that tactic because it can lead me to be unhealthily productive. And so I have this pendulum swing between not saying anything and therefore not getting as much done as I healthily could or committing and being unhealthily focused on work. And I have not yet found the balance. Saying one thing that you’re going to do is fine though.

JP: Yeah. That was the thing, is I am exactly like that. I will go over the top and I’ll list like 20 things that I want to do. And in my head, I’m like want to do, but if I don’t get to, but then I’m going to be upset that I didn’t get to them.

So I was like, what is a realistic number, which is 10,000, to edit for the week, period. Now, if I do more fantastic, but that is the one thing I’m going to state that I’m going to do, and that’s going to be my primary focus for this week.

Crys: Excellent. We do have a new patron. Thank you, Christine Daigle. We’re so happy to have you as part of the Write Away Podcast family. And Christine has been on one of our book club recordings. She will be on more in the future and she’s an excellent writer as well. So, thanks Christine.

JP: We should also note, if it isn’t a surprise to everyone yet, this is not a book club.

Crys: Oh yeah.

JP: We postponed two weeks. We wanted to get a couple of people on and just timing wise, it wasn’t working.

So we’re just going to wait two more weeks. So you’ll get that hopefully in two weeks. Also side note, it’s a really good book so you should read it. How to Write Manga – RA Paterson.

Crys: Link in the show notes. Okay. Topic. You threw this at me yesterday.

JP: I did. So reason why I threw this topic, which is about Storyworld construction, and not only construction mentally, but also, how do you organize that? Because I am having like overwhelm, which is weird for me, for the serial. Cause I’m just like, where do I put it? Because for me, when I do like Storyworld construction, I am a scattered chaos gremlin, and I put it everywhere. I have physical copies of it over here, and then I have not the same over in Google docs. And so I’m just curious in having a discussion as to like, how do you organize your Storyworld and also I’m just also curious on your construction for Storyworld building.

Crys: Yeah. I’m also a chaos gremlin when it comes to this., I have not had one way that works for me. So the romance world is 20 something books in, which means that we have a lot to keep track of.

And when we started it, we didn’t expect it to ever get this big. We were like, oh, we’ll commit to six books. And then, oh, that would be fun. You know, things grow more than you think. So at one point we paid an author support person to create a Story Bible. And that’s a service they provide for authors, they have their own format, they do it in Excel. And they have a page that’s details about the world. And this one is unique to each kind of story they do. So for our particular niche, there are certain commonalities between other books in this niche. So a lot of that stuff is here, particularly the stuff that is different from other books in the niche.

Then there’s a tab for locations, tab for secondary characters, chapter by chapter overviews of books, and then for the three main characters, a page for each of them, for each book, a book list. And then they included also like a main character template so that we could extend it ourselves after that.

For the sci-fi fantasy space opera thing that my friend, Tami Veldura, and I are working on, we’ve tried several things. They started it out in Docs then moved to Trello so we had cards for everything. And so you would have, and this is the Kanban board style thing, but instead of having doing, done, planning, we would have places, different factions had their own columns. It was mostly characters, and so like the characters were kind of in their own groups. But that is also limited.

I have attempted to use Plottr a little bit. That’s probably one of the easiest ones currently. I don’t know why I haven’t used Scrivener for tracking all this cause Scrivener, like everything’s in one thing if you’re already writing in Scrivener. What do you write in, JP?

JP: So with coauthor stuff, right in Google Docs, because Scrivener’s not going to work for us. But I have Scrivener, I’ve used it before, I stopped using it. And then I just went back to it for edits for book three because I really needed that note section. And I could not get that in Word or in Google Docs.

So, I’m starting to use it again and that’s why I’m like, hmm, maybe I should just use this.

Crys: Okay, well, let’s talk about how you can use Scrivener with a co-writing situation because you can. And it’s not ideal because they have some kinky things that they haven’t worked out, but the best way is to have your Scrivener file saved in Dropbox, Google Drive, wherever, that is a shared folder. And so you both open it from there. The kicker, the thing that we flighty writer types sometimes have an issue with is you have to close the entire project down so that your coauthor can open it. You cannot both be in it at the same time. Otherwise you risk screwing everything up and losing everything.

So not ideal. And often if you’re going to do this, you just have to be very careful of saving backups, a million backups. And even when it says, oh, somebody opened this, it might be corrupted, it’ll then open it as a new one so that it doesn’t exacerbate the issue. I’ve rarely found that it actually has caused any issues. So that’s a possibility.

There so many D&D role-playing game services apps out there to track all of the world building that we sci-fi fantasy people like to do, your magic, all that. I really like them. The trouble is a lot of them are a little expensive. So committing to one is like, is this enough that I want to spend a hundred dollars a year subscription on it? Will I use it for other things? Will I just use it for 10 days and then forget about it? That’s the problem with that.

One of the other things that I have been really intrigued by, I have downloaded it, but I have not truly used. It is an app called Obsidian. And one of the things I really like about Obsidian and any kind of document-based Bible building is that they’re offline. And that’s really important to me as someone who is not always connected to internet. And Obsidian, I think actually would work really well if you both had it as a shared doc. But it is like your own Wiki, your own personal Wiki writing app. So that you can link things, you can see which things are linked, which is a thing that you don’t get in the docs as easily. And that might end up being at some point, if I take the time to sit down and figure out my personal system for that, the way I want to do it, because you just add a couple of notations in markup.

So you might use square brackets to say, Hey, this is going to be a new page. And any time I want to link to this page, I will just do these square brackets. So if you have a character whose name is Mark, you just use double square bracket, [[MARK]], two double close brackets. And then whenever you click on that, it will take you to Mark’s page.

JP: That sounds very familiar, very similar to World Anvil, which I have.

I love World Anvil, but my problem with world building is that I haven’t found something that works across all systems. So World Anvil sucks on the phone. I’m just going to say it now. It sucks on the phone. And then I think on the iPad it’s okay. And on the computer it’s great because that’s what it’s meant for.

When I’m world building, if I have that constraint, it makes me hate the system because I want to be able to be on the way to Starbucks in the passenger seat and be able to write up something really quick. And I’m not going to be able to do that on my computer or on my tablet. I’m going to be doing it on my phone.

So that’s why it almost becomes this I need the most simplistic system. But the problem with Google Docs, which is what I’ve been using with Abe, is there is a really difficult way to reference things. I’m sure that it exists somewhere, but it involves linking or something like that.

Regardless. I love the Wiki format. I hate that World Anvil doesn’t have it on the phone yet.

Crys: Yeah, and so I’m looking at Obsidian, and this is Mac exclusive, which is always frustrating, but a lot of the best apps do tend to be Mac exclusive initially. And it looks like they actually did recently put out an iPhone app.

But you’re Android, right? For phone?

JP: I’m 85% Android. Well, I don’t know what the percentage is. I guess I would be 60% Android or Windows. And then also I have an iPad.

Crys: Okay. But I’m sure that there are, I’m not sure, I wish that there were consistency with Android apps because I prefer Android when it comes to phones.

There’s so much about the iPhone that I despise just because Android works the way I think. But regardless, in this instance of Android versus iPhone discussion, that’s just literally pertinent to what we do.

Yeah and Plottr doesn’t currently have a phone app. They’ve been talking about it, but they don’t currently have one. And I think a lot of times, right now, we’re limited to having a two-step system. Like we have a, on the go notes and then we have to have a system for transferring those over into “final form”.

JP: Yeah. Which it’s fine. I’m just complaining because my problem is I’m really good at taking notes. I’m really bad at going back to those notes and making sure that they’re all organized.

Crys: I am very much the same. And especially if something is not on all of my devices, it will not get used because the moment that I have to step and use something else as a supplement, my system breaks down because then there’s a dependency on me and I am the most fallible piece of my system.

JP: And I know that I’m like at a point for the Vella Epic that I know that there’s so much information that I want to make sure that I have the right systems set up. And then I know that for Abe and my series, like this first series, we’re fine for the first six books series, but we want to expand the Storyworld exponentially because we just really like all the characters. And as long as people like the story, we’re happy to play in this other world.

But we have it all in Google docs and we’ve already run into moments where we’ll be like, oh, we wrote this portion about six months ago. And we already have a new version of that. We already have new information about that that kind of contradicts that. It works for the story because no one ever knows that old version, because when we actually came and wrote the lore in the story, like whatever that new version. But the problem is that you’re going to have version on version on version. And then what becomes the true information, especially when it comes to Google docs.

So we started transferring stuff into World Anvil. I think we gave up on it, but yeah, it’s just trying to get a system in place from the get-go that is just a wonderful unit would be so good.

Crys: Well, one of the things that’s great about Google Docs though, is that it tracks your history.

So if at any point you’re like, wait, what was that thing we once said, and then we said, no, but now I think, yes, again, and it’s gonna be a pain in the ass as you have to go back through a million versions to figure out, like, where was that? Yeah. So another thing that I’ve thought about doing, and this is the techie geek side, and I think this is what Tami and I have decided on is we are going to use a GIT repository.

If you’re not a nerd, this is going to sound like gobbledygook, but it’s version control for anything. But it’s great for writing because it’s way easier to look back and see the versions past, just like you do in Google Docs, but it’s just faster. It’s so much easier.

So we would be using documents, Word docs, Text docs, whatever it is, and it doesn’t matter. We could have a million different kinds of docs and the app will read it just fine. And then we could compare to old stuff. And I’ve thought about writing this way too. But that’s not accessible to everybody. That’s a step too far in the tech world for most people.

JP: Yeah. I think, so just for the sake of listeners, I think a free method of world building is Google docs. It’s works great for co-writing because we can both be in and out of there, we can both be commenting on something at the exact same time, which is really nice for both of us, because we really like to world build on top of each other.

But, I’m really looking back into doing Scrivener for this fantasy project, because I know you can do Wiki like style referencing to that. You can also put in like whole web pages.

Crys: You know what, kind of the merge between this, Microsoft One Note. I abandoned it a long time ago in like college because it was too much at the time, right? But now we’re used to like Good Notes and everything. And I know a few people who use it extensively and I’m like, you know what? That might be worth trying again. Particularly if you’re not in the Mac system.

JP: The one issue I had with that cause I’ve used it for world building. I love that you can access it on your phone. That’s fantastic. But there was something weird about the switch between phone and desktop and the font. And it would always stretch it way too big for the screen, you’d have to reorganize. So that part was not ideal, but it still worked.

Crys: And I was gonna say, and then sidestep from kind of exact same usage, Evernote.

JP: I used that to start. And then I had stopped using that one for some reason.

Crys: I think a lot of times like our choices on whether these apps work for us or not is personal user interface aesthetic. Like, does this work the way my brain does? And a lot of times, no. Like it could be like somewhat objectively the seeming best way to organize all your information. But if you can’t make yourself just go do the thing and use the thing, because it doesn’t work exactly the way your brain wants it to, it’s just not going to work for you.

JP: Yeah.

So, where do you start with world building? And we can go the route of like, how do you actually think it through in your head. But I remember you sharing with me images from like a journal. So do you start physically with worldbuilding?

Crys: Almost always, almost always. Because when I need to think new things, I often can’t be near my computer because it’s going to draw me to work on old stuff, like existing work, admin work, whatever it is. So when I need to think new things, I often take a journal to somewhere where I do not have internet. On the beach, whatever.

And I work in the notebook and then I get terrified that the notebook is going to get destroyed. And I take pictures of all of the pages at some point. And then they’re lost in my phone somewhere. But I know that they’re there. And so that provides me a level of security. I think I mentioned a few weeks ago that I have this problem where when I start to do that transition away from the notebooks, cause often, like I won’t have the notebook I need when I want to do the writing. So then there’ll be in two notebooks. And I was looking for a character name when we were doing our character episode and I could not find it in either of the notebooks. And it turned out that I had done the character name thinking on like a scrap piece of paper and then put it into Plottr. So that was delightful.

I don’t have any advice for not doing that to yourself because it’s part of the process of figuring out how you’re going to track something is like what works. I do need to take this character names and I think I did write them in the notebook so that there is like one true place where everything is currently held and that’s the notebooks.

And those have gone from country to country with me. Like that’s their limitation is that they are physical and I could lose them. They could be destroyed. But yeah, I start on paper almost always until it gets to the point where I need to be referencing it regularly. And then it goes to digital.

JP: There is a brand, Rocketbook, that I really like, I just don’t use it enough. But they have polymer pages, basically like a type of plastic. And you can write on them and your ink, a specific type of friction ink that is actually pretty cheap, you can buy to the store. And the pages are set up so that you can take a picture of it. And at the bottom of that page, there are about six to eight icons and you can organize those icons to transfer the image to specific locations, including Evernote. I think Trello is even one of them. Gmail. Google drive, everywhere, specific folders that you needed to go into. And if I remember correctly, you can also tag the images with keywords that you want. I used that for a really short period of time when I was doing planning stuff like day planning.

It worked really nice. I’m just a chaos gremlin, and I find something that works really nice and then I give up on it.

Crys: Yeah, I want to say specifically, this pairs really well with Evernote because Evernote has OCR recognition. So, it reads the handwritten words and then you can search them.

If that’s a system that you think would work really well for you, the Rocket Book plus Evernote, amazing combo. I stopped using them because I had the first gen that required the microwave to wipe them clean. And then I didn’t have a microwave.

JP: You know, the magic heat box.

Crys: Yeah. I didn’t have a magic heat box.

I still don’t have a magic heat box, but now I believe it just needs hot water.

JP: Yup.

Crys: Yeah, they changed it up. So now it’s wipeable. And they have, oh yeah, like, I’m definitely a Rocketbook fangirl without currently owning any Rocketbook things that I use. I own Rocketbook things. I don’t use them. And I need to get the most recent version to try. Cause that might actually work really well for me. And I can keep using it that way. I have used Good Notes in the past to do the same thing, but on a digital format. But still again, I come to a point where I need it in a typed format at some point.

JP: Yeah. I think what I’m going to do is I’ll probably do some type of writing for the world building because I’m in the same boat as you. I really like being away from my computer because I am a distracting creature of doom. So either Rocketbook or journal. And then I’m probably gonna move the Vella project into Scrivener, I think, because I think I want to write in there because the way that Scrivener’s set up works really well for serials, because you can almost break up all those pieces. So I think that’s the method I’m going to attempt, and then I will let you know how that works.

Crys: Yeah. And I’ve thought about once a world building document gets large enough, especially if you’re doing it in something like Scrivener, publishing an EPUB of it so that you have it as a reference.

Particularly once you’re further into a series and you’re not making changes as often, I’ve thought that might be a really useful way that it works with the way that our writer brains already work. But I have not done it.

JP: Yeah, there’s a really fun way to use World Anvil, where you can take a map and you can put pinpoints on it and you can hover over those pinpoints and it will give you info on it.

And I know that this isn’t exactly what you were talking about with EPUB reference, but this is more of like, you can use this world building content for your readers and you can even set it up that–

Crys: Yeah, you can publish it like a website, right?

JP: Exactly. And there’s pertinent information that can be given to the subscriber or person that’s there, for either which book they’re on or like what level. I think you can do like Patreon levels almost for it. And that’ll give them whatever pertinent information they need for the time that they’re either in the book or whatever level they pay at. But I just find that fascinating to me because I love crazy fantasy world.

And if I can have a World Anvil of that and just kind of dig deeper into the characters, like I’m always on fandom wikis, because I love learning random bits that wasn’t necessarily in the books. So I think that that’s a really good tool because I would love to move my information to that once it’s more solid and set in stone, because it’s helpful for me as a writer.

Crys: Oh yeah. And it’s that balance of, when does this become more helpful than distracting? Because of course we could play with World Anvil for hours and get nothing useful done. For the maps, can you import an image and then just like create your points? Cause I have that weird Azgaar app that I love.

JP: Yeah. So, the fantasy Vella project that I’m working on is from an older, epic that I wrote 60,000 words on and I created a map somewhere. I can’t remember where I created it. I imported it in, worked great. It was fantastic. So yeah, easy peasy.

Crys: Well, I know what distracting things I’m going to do when I sit down for long enough on internet.

JP: I think that’s the key though, schedule your time.

Crys: And this is the frustrating thing for me with something like World Anvil is, and I believe you can export it to an offline document, but I won’t be able to edit it when I’m not online. And I’m not online a lot right now.

JP: For you, because you are a computer nerd, they have like HTML upload almost. I don’t know how extensive it is, but I almost think that for someone like you, you could almost have that off page and you could just be like, okay, well I need to work on this article.

You know, you expand it out and you just work on that.

Crys: If they had a GitHub repository upload, that’d be great. Yeah. That’s something I’m going to have to set aside like two days of play for.

JP: That’s the other thing too, just for people that are listening, is World Anvil, they have YouTube videos that are between like two to 15 minutes about each little portion so that they help you figure out how to use their tools so that you’re not just stuck in the dark. I find them really useful.

Crys: Yeah. So, no firm recommendations. Cause this is such a personal, how you work question and every system has its downfalls.

JP: Yeah. 100%. There’s just too many things. There’s too many things everywhere.

Crys: Do you know if World Anvil works on the iPad?

JP: I can’t tell you a solid answer. I believe I’ve tried it. I believe it works. But I have a keyboard on it with a mousepad thing.

Crys: I use a keyboard on mine. Anyways, side question, as I’m like, I just want to go play with World Anvil, I have so much work to do. So that’s not going to happen any time soon.

Well, I guess our question for our listeners is: how do you track your world building? How do you keep a hold of it?

How do you organize it? Where is it? How do you not go insane?

JP: Because I have scraps of paper just sitting on the floor, like, oh, what’s this? Oh, it was a world built that is now on the floor. So, let us know what do you do?

Crys: All right. If you would like to join us for the delayed book club you can join us on our Patreon, which we’ll link in the show notes. And we’ll have a live recording for that, that you can jump in on.

As I said earlier, we’re reading How to Write Mangaby RA Paterson. And we have some great guests with us that week and sometime in the next month or two as the summer winds down and everybody kind of gets back to “normal”, we will have our regular crew back together again. Janet, Lon, Marianne back from summer adventure. And I’m really excited to get to speak with all of them again, as a group.

It’s been a while. Miss you guys.

JP: Yes. Yes. Miss all of you. And I highly recommend How to Write Manga, even if you don’t want to join in on the book club. There was a portion in there that they talk about Eastern storytelling versus Western storytelling and then kind of go into it. And it was such a simple little piece and I was like, mind blown.

So highly recommend.

Crys: Yeah, there’s a lot of how to write words. There’s a lot of basic how to write advice in there. He goes over the MICE quotient, which I don’t know if we’ve talked about here, but I’ve talked about quite a bit in The Author Success Mastermind. I think it’s going to end up just being a great beginning writing book for anyone, regardless of whether they want to write Manga or not.

JP: Yeah. 100%.

Crys: All right. I’ll talk to you next week, JP.

JP: Yeah, see you later.