Road Trip to NaNo: Using Your World to World-Build

NaNoWriMo is an international event, and we’re taking a Road Trip to NaNo to hear about the stories being written every year in our hundreds of participating regions. Today, Anna Huckabee, our Municipal Liaison in the Africa :: Elsewhere region, talks about using your surroundings to help you build realistic worlds on the page:

Africa, the continent formerly known as “Dark”. Yet when you live here, you find it is exactly the opposite. People are warm, friendly, welcoming. The sun shines almost every day, and it’s warm all year round. Africa is gaining a voice in the world-wide writing community—and if NaNoWriMo is any indication, that voice will continue to grow in the years ahead.

The land is almost as diverse as its close-to-a-billion residents. You can visit beaches, deserts, mountains (with glaciers!), savannah, rain forests, and jungle. There are huge, modern cities, and villages made entirely of mud huts. Some of the roads are dirt. Others are paved. Its northern- and southern-most countries receive snow in their winters, which are opposite of one another since the continent straddles the equator. There really isn’t a setting for your novel that can’t be found in Africa.

Setting might seem to take a backseat in your novel planning, but it really shouldn’t. The place your characters inhabit and interact through your plot can be just as important as the plot itself. Africa wouldn’t be Africa if there were no elephants or lions on the savannah, and soothing breezes that blow through banana leaves and sound like rain. But how do you write a unique setting? There are several ways to do this:

First, open your eyes to things you don’t normally notice: the road covered with potholes, the sound of rain on the roof.

Second, ask yourself “what if?” What if that rain were washing down a mountainside or across a desert? What would it sound like? How would it feel? What difference would it make for your characters?

Next, be willing to combine things you gather from many sources. You might see pictures in magazines that spark your imagination. You decide to combine those desert rock formations with a pilgrimage across the savannah to gather an offering of sap from the one tree that remains of its species. You might see a jackfruit and decide it’s a narcotic in your world that your characters would do anything to obtain. 

The things we see—things we can quantify from the world around us—are springboards for our imagination. They help us envision things we have never seen and build a world around them in which our characters live and interact.
Our setting is limited only by our imagination.

NaNoWriMo in Africa :: Elsewhere

Anna Huckabee lives in Uganda, East Africa where she is the Africa :: Elsewhere ML. She’s participated in and won NaNoWriMo since 2011. She writes a little of everything: sci-fi/fantasy, romance, and literary fiction. When she isn’t writing, she and her family work in a UN refugee camp with refugees from all over East Africa. Her passion is literacy for women and children.

Top image licensed under Creative Commons from Diana Robinson on Flickr.