: Re: Storing WorldBuilding Information I've been writing a story and world-building as part of the process. Now it has come to a point where I have lots of information about the world and I need

@Dunderdale623

Vote Up Vote Down

Between the brief ordered spreadsheets @Liquid suggests and the detailed but time-consuming wiki you suggest, there is a third way: keep notes of what you need in a semi-organised way that is convenient.

Let me explain.

You have characters. It might be that you need to keep only certain details about them: appearance, personal history, etc. Or it might be that you need to have them sorted by families, or organisations, and list how they connect to each other. If you have superstructures that your characters fit into, filing by superstructures is very helpful.
You have locations. There's all kind of details you might find useful to keep for each: some form of map, a mood board for a general idea of what they might look like, history, local food...
Perhaps you have have a lot of details of a particular culture: core tenets, customs, ceremonies, ways of greeting each other...
Or perhaps you want to keep together all the weapons available to each side, so that you can be sure a tool is not forgotten about when it would come in useful. Or maybe it's rules of magic, and you want them together so they don't start contradicting each other.

As Lauren Ipsum states, your filing system should be derived from what you have. You have categories, and maybe sub-categories, and elements within them. Sort by those, since those are meaningful to your particular story.

My addition to it would be: adding a new bit of information, or a new category of information, should be fast and easy. Your "worldbuilding bible" is already a meta-file to your story. You should not be spending a lot of time on the meta-meta processes, such as on formatting wiki pages. And however you choose to organise your information, it should be easy to search, and easy to re-organise.

In terms of technology, in theory you could even do it all on paper, keeping separate folders for distinct categories, and separate cards with elements within them. You can have folders and sub-folders and text files (Word or similar) with bullet points. Scrivener has some inbuilt templates for keeping such information, you can use and customise those. My personal preference is OneNote, because it's flexible and free. Whatever you use, ease and flexibility should be your priorities. You don't want your filing system to limit you — you want it to help you.

(0)

Login to post a comment!