Enjoying Your Setting, Even If It Makes No Sense

Sometimes, you sit down to write your story and all you have is a faint idea of some minute character/item/place you want to include. That’s okay. Find out how NaNo Participant Timothy Wolfe managed to overcome building the world of his novel from scratch:

Generally, from what I’ve observed, worldbuilding tends to fall into two distinct categories. Either the world is designed first and the plot crafted to fit within it, or the inverse happens: where the setting takes on a more utilitarian purpose designed to reinforce the plot, the themes, or the characters. My NaNoWriMo project from last year didn’t really fit into either of these categories.  

Instead, it was based on a very specific image that kind of just appeared one day from the depths of my brain. It was a rusted out Route 66-esque gas station next to a lonely stretch of desert highway. And in the background, on the distant horizon, loomed the ruins of some enormous alien city, remnants of some ancient precursor civilization. And that was all I had to go on. No characters to work with. No context for the image. No history. No backstory—basically nothing. I had tried—and failed—before to turn that image into a full length novel and most of them kind of spluttered out and it didn’t seem possible. 

But I’m stubborn. And so I kept plugging away at it and I decided I was going to give another shot for NaNoWriMo 2019. So I went about making some basic plans—I borrowed the plot framework from an old novel I’d attempted as a teenager, I hammered out fresh outlines for the first few chapters that I hoped would provide me the momentum that would see me past the finish line, and I came up with a handful of story hooks that could hopefully get me past any writer’s block I was expecting to encounter. 

I also decided that, once I started, I wasn’t going to try to justify the setting to myself nor was I going to go out of my way to try and explain why it is the way it is. Why is all this specific brand of Americana just sort of here? What’s up with the alien ruins? I don’t know. The characters don’t know either. And the answers to those questions are going to be put on the back burner. 

“The major thing I learned about world-building is that you don’t have to justify your setting, regardless of how ‘out there’ and weird it is.”

The results ended up being really surprising. Not only did I successfully finish it, but it was the first time I’ve finished a big project like a novel since high school in 2007. And the new version ended up answering at least some of the questions that obsessed me in previous attempts to tell the story. A lot of the explanations I’d been trying to basically beat out of it sort of… answered themselves over the course of that month in November. 

The major thing I learned about world-building is that you don’t have to justify your setting, regardless of how “out there” and weird it is. And sometimes, if you’re stuck, it’s maybe better to just take a step back and let the setting exist and just be in it, with your characters without trying to brute force-answers out of it. 

I plan to rewrite the draft this year and I have a much clearer sense of my plot, my characters, and even the world. I’m not going to pretend I still know everything about how it functions and why it is the way it is, but I also know I’m not going to try to force answers that it doesn’t want to give. I’m just going to enjoy being in the moment again and enjoying writing out this really off-kilter aesthetic.

Tim Wolfe is an aspiring fantasy novelist whose main dream is to one day write fantasy novels for a living. He has finished three novels, two of which were all the way back in high school and one of which was as recently as last year, for NaNoWriMo 2019. You can find him on Twitter or on the NaNoWriMo website as Orions_Gift.

Top image: “Giant Route 66 Neon Sign” by Chuck Coker is licensed under Creative Commons on Flickr.