If you’ve ever had a go at running a home-brewed Dungeons and Dragons (or other RPG) campaign, you’ll know that world-building is one of the most fun elements of it. At least, it has been for me. Building a map, plotting the trade routes, developing the races present and the cultural differences between each region. No detail is too minute. You never know where the players will go or what information they may want. Preparation is paramount.
My late father-in-law spoke of the seven P’s.
Prior planning and preparation prevent piss poor performances.
I’ve taken a similar world-building approach while writing my first novel, the first two chapters of which you can read here!
The story takes place on a space station mid-journey between Earth and the only other planet we’ve found that supports intelligent life. Luksha. The station itself is an immense rotating cylinder, which is built up as a sprawling metropolis on the interior surface. It’s made up of 16 distinct ‘districts’ across 4 ‘quadrants’ and is home to over 2 million people—humans and Lukshae alike.
Now, there are a lot (A LOT) of things to consider about this fictional setting if I want it to be plausible. It doesn’t have to be 100% believable, but if it’s plausible then there can be enough suspension of disbelief for it to work.
How does it function?
How do people get there?
How does it sustain life?
What does transport throughout the station look like?
So many aspects of its existence need to be explained in order for the story to seem like it takes place that logically could exist. Answering these questions has to be one of the biggest challenges of writing this book.
But, as I said before, it’s also a hugely fun and satisfying component of the process. So much so, that sometimes it can drag me into a rabbit hole of prep work and planning when I should be just writing the story.
Plancrastination - a productive way to avoid actually writing.
On the other hand, all this world-building and planning is absolutely necessary, maybe even the parts that don’t have a place yet in the story, and that are hard to see where they might even be relevant. For me, that kind of thing can sometimes inspire a passage in the novel.
So when does plancrastination become detrimental to the entire effort?
At what point is there too much detail in a fictional setting? Is there such a point?
I look at works like LOTR, The Expanse, and Dune, where the level of thought and design of their respective universes is far beyond a huge proportion of their contemporaries.
At no point do any of these three suffer from that explosion of detail.
Maybe Dune.
But even still, that story is set 8000 years in the future. There’s no way to tell it without a vast amount of explanation.
Anyway, I’m getting off-topic.
When I started the book, I had 2 document files. One for the actual body of text, another for notes, plans, background bits and pieces etc. It was very easy to procrastinate by scrolling through everything I had written, getting distracted by a new idea and letting it lead me away from my original goal.
There’s also the fact that we’re travelling around Europe in our van, so there’s always some new and interesting thing/view/place to intice me away from tapping on my laptop.
Ali Schiller and Marissa Boisvert, two accountability coaches, said there are 4 types of procrastinators:
The performer, who works well under pressure but struggles with the whole ‘starting’ bit.
The self-depricator, who are extra hard on themselves and call themselves lazy when really, they need a break.
The over-booker, who is convinced that their chaotic schedule or lifestyle is the reason for their inability to produce, even though the chaos is mostly created by them.
The novelty-seeker, the ones who start things and rarely, if ever, bring them to bear.
I’ve spoken before about starting things and promptly running out of steam, in my first Substack article, Amateur to Author. I definitely fit into the novelty-seeker archetype.
Schiller and Boisvert propose the solution to this behaviour as writing down your ideas on sticky notes and holding off on persuing them until you’ve finished what you’re currently working on. Something I’ve been trying to do with a piece of glorious software.
One magical night, my partner introduced me to Notion and all the wonders therein. Granted, I’m not using Notion to its fullest potential, but I’ve found it to be an excellent app for gathering all my thoughts in one place. And, not only that, but have everything be easily accessible without having to scour through a mountain of exposition or explanations of the practices of a fictional culture.
In my Novel Plan page in Notion, I have 2 callout boxes at the top, one for the main characters, and one for setting. Each entry in these boxes is a link to its own page where several pieces of information are neatly formatted and easily accessible. Some even have further nested pages, like the Khalo Station page. It contains everything I’ve established about the station itself, and also a separate page that details the contents and characteristics of each district, again, very neatly formatted.
Below my 2 callout boxes, I have a bullet-pointed outline of my whole story adhering to, and veering from The Story Circle structure that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.
And that’s pretty much it. It doesn’t sound like a great deal but all that neat and tidy formatting took a lot of time and effort, especially the part where I had to sort through everything I’d already written and pigeonhole every piece of information.
It took a long time. Maybe, it’s time I could’ve spent working on the main text. Maybe with the time I spent on getting my thoughts in order, using Notion, I would be a few thousand words ahead of where I am now.
Maybe?
Ok, there are a lot of questions in this article, and I guess I’m hoping that someone will offer some solutions, or just pat my head and tell me it’s ok.
I would argue that there is some value in procrastination. In order to be productive, you have to take breaks. Get up and walk around, go make a coffee, or just lay down for five minutes. Get that pommodoro thing happening for you. I think that plancrastinating helped me to get my ideas in order while providing a bit of a distraction from the mammoth untertaking of writing a book. I also think it’s helping me become a better writer. Not realising the benefits of structure and planning was what had held me back before, and I’ve found that they are ESSENTIAL for telling a long-form story.
Otherwise, I just get lost in a wash of ideas, losing focus and direction.
Like wandering around in the dark.