Wolf

Worldbuilding

While I love worldbuilding, I don’t typically do it in advance. Most of it is spun up as I go, as it’s needed, and so I am actively discovering the world as I go.

With the original Twilight of the Wolves, this was less true. I’ve had the shape of the world in my head for years and years. But even with that, much of the specifics came about as I went.

But the broadstrokes that remain true:

• There are two suns, a red and blue one
• A year on the planet is 800 days, so about two earth years
• There are eight seasons in a year
• Different cultures reckon years differently
• Every year includes a season of twilight, when both suns remain on the horizons
• The goddess of Death is universal across cultures
• Creatures called Deathwalkers collect the dead around the world
• Magic is real and alive in the world, largely practiced by Arcanes
• Monsters, demons, gods, and other species wander the world

Those are the general bits. Much more comes out in specific details throughout the novels. The various cultures, the layers of history, and so on all dictate aspects of the novels.

Speaking of novels, in 2016 I wrote a 400,000 word novel set in this same world called Songs of my Mother, which fleshed out much of the cultures of one of the primary nations at play in Twilight of the Wolves. It was written almost as a redemption of Twilight of the Wolves, though it began as a short story that just kept expanding.

While I didn’t consider a timeline between these novels at the time, I’m now considering it a prequel set about 500 years before Twilight of the Wolves. But because of how narrowly focused and specific that novel was to a single location, there’s tremendous freedom and flexibility available to me with regard to worldbuilding.

Stranger, despite having written Twilight of the Wolves already, the worldbuilding continues to take shape. Even just tonight, I had some big ideas about some massively important concepts to the world and the novel, much of it having to do with the layers of history and the meshing and sloshing of cultures.

On top of that, as I turned this novel from an experimental postmodern epic fantasy into a more straightforward heroic fantasy, I decided to add a magic school. No, more than that. I decided this magic school was going to be the centerpoint of the story.

This was the flashing moment in the shower that turned the entire novel inside out.

But rather than have this be an ancient institution for magic and all that, it is instead a new concept and a new institution. This helps build a nation as well, and cities and culture and even theology.

And this is something I think worldbuilding should do. You should follow along these little changes and developments and extrapolate out from there, recognizing the ramifications of your choices on your world.

The Structure of Writing this Novel

It’s been one of the strangest experiences, writing this novel, because I’ve really never had an approach like this. It’s been quite cyclical and iterative in ways that have surprised me. I quickly wrote six or so chapters, then went back and added about ten chapters before chapters one and two. Chapter seven, which I began by writing about 500 words, is a chapter that I somehow still haven’t reached even after writing 70,000 words in this novel.

Despite knowing this novel, the shape of it, I do keep discovering more and more about what this is and what it needs to be. And so I find thousands of words to add to existing chapters or multiple chapters that slide in between other ones.

Just last week, I returned to the beginning of the novel and had to build in a plot thread because of something I did around page 200.

But this is part of the fun, and it’s also because I’m intending to do something that I’ve never really done before, which is to layer and layer and layer a chapter. The goal isn’t for a chapter to accomplish one thing, which is more how I wrote Songs of my Mother, but to accomplish multiple goals at once.

You ask yourself, what makes books like Game of Thrones stick with people. What makes people come up with fan theories. And part of that is creating clues while also making interpretive space for the reader.

And I think part of that is in layering concepts and narrative threads. And this requires an iterative process, where I keep circling back to build and expand and deepen the novel.

And so for these first 70,000 words, I’ve been in this process. I write fifty pages, then return back to that first page and turn fifty pages into seventy or a hundred. And on we go, ever forward, though sometimes slowly.

Anyway, I suppose we’ll treat that as catching up to where I am now. From here on out, I’ll try to be more specific and linear, though I may twist and turn and wander here and there.