Let's Build a World: Day 26 - Anti-What If?

[ladyseishou]

Man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson



It's Day 26 for Nano Writers's Let's Build a World. Read over - Anti-What If? - from Stephanie Bryant's 30 Days of Worldbuilding. Time for notebooks! And today's exercise:

Look at your "mood words" list and then at your notes and outlines and ideas. Put anything that doesn't match at least one mood word (or a synonym of a mood word) onto a separate page or in a separate file.

For contradictory ideas, pick the one that you like best or, if you have no favorite, the one that best matches the mood of your piece. Put the other one into the Misfits file-- you never know when you might be able to tweak it to fit your story after all. Throw nothing away at this point, but organize your world into "things that I know contribute to what I'm trying to do" and "things that don't match but I like them anyway."

Here are a couple of sites about writer's notebooks or journals that may be helpful as you organize your worldbuilding notes:

Keeping a Writers’ Notebook

Keeping a Writer's Journal: 21 Ideas to Keep You Writing

Virginia Woolf on Keeping a Journal


Four more days, Nano Writers! Come back tomorrow for the next installment!