Worldbuilding in reverse - or how pantsing a fantasy novel is just like writing a star wars prequel

So this last few days I’ve been watching Andor, because I’m slightly late to the party. And I’ve gotta be honest, it’s derailed me on NaNoWriMo like, quite a lot. But in a good way. Instead of just distracting me and making me not write as much, which is what you’d think would happen, it’s been driving me to actually create rules for the world I’m writing.

The fact I’m improvising the novel as I go hasn’t changed. I’m still making it up as I go along, or “pantsing” as NaNoWriMo’s website puts it. But Andor has inspired me to look at the implications created by the worldbuilding details I’ve already input into the book and create a reason for their coexistence.

It reminds me a lot, actually, of what writing a prequel must be like. You have certain facts about a world. You already know when you sit down to write a show like Andor [spoilers for Rogue one] that Cassian is going to die for the cause, that he’s going to be an agent of the rebellion willing to do what it takes to finish the job. The question of how he got to that point is all you can answer. And especially in a fully developed world like Star Wars, you have other things you need to factor in as well. You need to work within a particular timeline. You need to look at how old the character was in the movie, and think - okay, so how old was he when the Empire formed? How did that effect him growing up? At what point did he join the rebellion, and why? How old is the rebellion, even?

And when you’re pantsing a novel, similarly you’ll often have an endgame in mind, or a high level pitch. Mine for this book was “A priest is going to kill their God”. Everything I’m writing therefore has to lead towards that key choice. But unlike Andor, I’m not working within a previously established world. Instead, every time I make a choice like “how are the roads paved”, I have to incorporate that into the rest of my worldbuilding, and reverse engineer how that happened amongst the other things I’ve inserted into the world.

This shit is extremely fun to me, I love worldbuilding. I just normally do it before I start writing the novel. So this has been a bit of a learning curve, and Andor has helped a lot. So that’s great. I’m not even mad about being a couple of weeks behind on word count.

In other news

I’m currently experimenting with my streaming schedule. We’re still definitely going through a teething phase. But right now I’m experimenting with streaming every day. The day you get this, I’ll be going live late in the evening NZ time to play a very chill game like Dorfromantik or maybe Mini Motorways, just something I play to wind myself down. But here’s the experimental schedule for the coming week:Mon. 11am-2pm (ish) Mass Effect 1 - We’re going to finish up Tali and Garrus’ loyalty missions, then maybe Feros?Tues. 11am-2pm (ish. note this is an earlier start/longer stream than usual) Sims Legacy challenge continueWeds. 11am-2pm (ish, again longer than usual) Finish building my mansion in the sims from last weekThurs. 4pm-6pm. 100 Baby Challenge in the sims Fri. 11am-2pm (ish) Minecraft Realm, just doing whateverSat. 11am-2pm (ish, always ish) Surprise! I’ll roll a d20 to pick from a list of 20 gamesSun. (time tbd) Wind down games again

Mass Effect and Sims streams will be uploaded to youtube for posterity, but others won’t unless they’re particularly good, most likely.

Last thing

Links, in case you haven’t seen them in the bullshit that is twitter this weekTumblrTwitchYoutubeInstagramItchPatreon - If you don’t already know, every level of my patreon gets you access to all of my itch games for free, as well as chapter by chapter updates of my NaNoWriMo novel

Thanks for reading, and see you next time!