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I’ve always been a big fan of world building in fiction. I like stories and books that invite the reader into a richly imagined setting with its own history, cultures, and peoples, whether a fully fantastical place like Tolkien’s Middle Earth, foreboding places like Stephen King’s Castle Rock region, or a more mundane but equally fascinating realm like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. Stumbling upon a reference to places and events from one story in another, little echoes of favorite tales and hints at tales to come, enhances the reading experience and makes the suspension of disbelief that much easier.
It’s also, to be honest, both a joy for the writer and a bit of a crutch: making up places is fun, and re-using places takes away the burden of coming up with a new location for each story.
That is, until you have enough stories set in one place that you’re suddenly tasked with keeping track of the details to keep the suspension of disbelief from collapsing entirely. And then you have a whole new burden of keeping a fictional setting straight so as not to completely undermine one story or another.
Early on in my filthy hobby, I knew that I wanted to reuse some locations. The town of Wasconaway, home of the Wildcats minor league baseball team from the Winning With the Wildcats stories, was the first place I imagined as a hub for stories. I based it on some small northern cities I’m familiar with that serve as a gateway to wilderness areas of lakes and forests, and so when I had ideas for more stories set in those wilder places, like A Dip in the Lake and The Night of the Storm, it made sense to make up a few lakes near Wasconaway. And that generated a few more story ideas (like parts of Dido Reclaimed and Cassie Keeps the Curfew, and several as-yet-untold tales). But referencing those lakes — Makanogin, Nakanawidah, Windfall — demanded a map (which I generated used Inkarnate, a nice little fantasy world builder).
And when I started using all those names in stories, I discovered that I wasn’t as consistent with the spellings or geographies as I would have liked. When I wanted to have Phil, Petra, and Jessie pay a visit to Nakanawidah in The Contours of Desire, I had to drag out the manuscript to A Dip in the Lake to make sure I had the name right. Other place names, characters, and events that get referenced across multiple stories suggested that I needed some sort of a “series bible.”
The “series bible” concept is borrowed from television screenwriting. To keep track of the various details that come to light in a typical television series, the writing team will maintain a document that consists of details about the show’s locations, characters, and events. If episode 3 establishes a main character’s mother’s name, for example, you want to be sure not to give her a completely new name in episode 28. The bible can also serve as a prompt: filling in the gaps can generate story ideas, and a richly imagined setting simply begs to be expanded.
To keep the CorneliaVerse somewhat internally consistent, I use PBWorks to host a wiki. It’s a nice, easy-to-use wiki platform that lets you set up public or private wikis. I’ve opted to make my site private, as I don’t need to share it with anyone else and I don’t necessarily want readers to be poking around in the messy parts of the process.
The CorneliaVerse bible gets updated during the writing and editing process. When I add new locations or characters, I create a page for them and jot down what I know so far. And when I need to look up some “fact” about my world, I can open the wiki in its own browser tab and click through to the answer, which is much easier and faster than looking it up in one of the story manuscripts.
The wiki solves one of the shortcomings of my drafting tool, NovelPad. In NovelPad, each story is a self-contained unit. It has sections for places, people, and plot points, where you can make notes and get links to their appearances in the story, and I find those very useful in the writing process. But it doesn’t have a way to link the place, people, and plot points across multiple stories: if I want to see all the mentions of Lake Makanogin in the CorneliaVerse, NovelPad isn’t the tool to use. I would have to open each story in turn and go searching in the text or navigating through the “Places” section if I used it. (In case you’re listening, NovelPad development team, some sort of a cross-story tool built into your incredibly useful writing platform would be very handy!)
It can also be a handy story prompt if I’m feeling stuck. I can look at my map of the lakes north of Wasconaway, or at the timeline of important events in the region’s history, and dream up a little scenario or two that could expand into a story. And sometimes filling in gaps in the bible is just the right amount of writing to get me unstuck if the muse hasn’t been visiting.
I can’t offer you dirty stories as a subscriber here (you can get those as a subscriber on SubscribeStar or Ream, or get them retail). But I can offer you free behind the scenes (and at worst NC-17) glimpses of how I crafted the stories, and insights into independent publishing that you may find useful in your own journey (if I can’t be an inspiration, then let me be a warning!).
Want a cheap and easy way to support me? Buy one of my books directly on Payhip: most are just $1, some come with spicier covers than Amazon and Smashwords permit, and you get discounts when you buy more than one.
Or for just $1 a month on SubscribeStar, you can get my short story collection, The Eroticist at Play, and a different book every month.