First, some other people’s Preptober-related links:

Find Your Story Plot By Asking These 7 Questions
NaNoWriMo Triage Center: Helping You Get To 50K
Some Writing Worksheets
5 Ways to plot your novel

I was all ready to start this post with “Oh bog, I forgot technology”… and then I remembered that I’d covered it in a handwave in the basic questions post.

So, with technology handled, at this point, I look at my story, and see what I need to know to get it started.

My protagonist starts out at home, so, as mentioned in the Family post, I need to figure out what that looks like.

Here’s a bit of my process in picking family type:

I was super tempted to go with line marriage, because I’m a Heinlein fan and because I’ve never played with it before (the basic concept: a group marriage continues to add spouses over time, so that the family never ends as a unit). But the premise of my story is that it’s based on YA tropes, and attempting to find a line marriage to join wouldn’t fit the young-romance sort of thing well (brb, adding that to my what-to-write-later list in my bujo).

On the other hand, I want to play with some non-“traditional” relationship types, so it can’t be just “man/woman all the time,” hetero-monogamy.

The only other thing I know going in is I don’t want a dead/absent/checked out mother. Divergent had its flaws, but I really liked that there was an active, involved mother figure.

I ended up settling on extended family living arrangements with group marriages of three to five being common. This provides more family support, less duplication of both effort and things needed, and the ability to easier cover for a missing family member, should the government or other circumstances call them away.

So that’s her home life. Things I’ve already picked because of the nature of the story fit in here, too.

For instance:

Their government does yearly testing on people, although I haven’t figured out when it stops. Students gifted in a given area are tracked into that field. Schooling is directed by that testing, leading students into very specific areas. There is no opting-out of the testing, or of the directions it sends one.

This gives me: a governmental, nationwide educational system. A testing system, and the authority to carry it out. Adults who have been tracked into fields they are capable in.

It also gives me the question: what happens to people who aren’t skilled in anything? What about people who hate what they’re best at?

Also, what about people who are skilled in several areas? Or people tracked their whole life into something that’s made obsolete?

No answers yet, but I’ve found that often questions (looking at you, kelkyag, inventrix) stretch and build my world the most.

What parts of your world does your story dictate you understand? What parts of the world are themselves dictated by the story?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1184360.html. You can comment here or there.

All right, so far I have:

• An urban-fantasy post-apocalyptic setting, several generations (probably 2-400 years) after a major catastrophe.
  
• Magic which is limited in scope but, within that scope can be very powerful. It is only wielded by 5-10% of the population, and only about 10% of them have any formal training. Exactly what it can do is going to depend on the story for the moment, as will how it works.
  
• The government of [country] is intrusive, totalitarian, and controlling, although it loses some control in the remote areas. It covers a country approximately the size of Texas. It is not necessarily malevolent but it is intent on being in control.

Places to go from here include:
The Physical World

• Geography: what sort of place is it? Are there mountains? Lakes? Islands? Oceans? Is it flat and boring? Hilly and gorgey?
  
• Climate: How much weather does your main location get, and of what sorts (obviously not an issue on a space ship, unless you want it to be)

The Governmental World

• How much does the government interfere with people’s day-to-day lives? Do they even notice it?
  
• How granular is the government? Are their regional leaders? How far down (state/town/ village?) do the governments go?
  
• What are the leaders called and how do they become leader? (Queen, hereditary; Innermost Circle, wealth-boosted meritocracy; President, representative election by proxy votes).

Where I’m going first:
Family life: What is the family structure, and how did it come about?

• Who did your protagonist(s) grow up with? Is this common?
  
• Who is responsible for child-rearing? Education? Punishment? (are children punished?)
  
• What age is adulthood?
  
• Marriage? Does it exist? How does it relate to child-rearing, if at all?
  
• How much is the state involved in the government?

• Potential family units include:
  
• Polygynous: One husband, many wives. Common in fantasy. Not my fave.
  
• Polyandrous: One wife, many husbands. (See Wikipedia). An option that intrigues me here is fraternal polyandry.
  
• Polygamous: all the spouses, everywhere! Group marriage, in this case, since polygamy covers both of the above options. This includes Line Marriage, a la Heinlein.
  
• Single-parent households.
  
• Extended families as a household (Addergoole’s Shahin, for instance, grew up in an extended family of her mother, her mother’s sisters, and her mother’s mother).
  …You know, all of these are based on a dual-sexed human species. If you’re going alien… well, you’re well outside of my expertise, but have fun! Five-pointed marriages, anyone?

I’ll note here that what kind of upbringing characters have had will color what they expect out of their life — what partners they may or may not be looking for. Is their family (or their government) going to arrange a marriage for them? How do they feel about that? Are they looking for a partner, three partners, a line marriage to join? It may not be their primary consideration, but even the lack of a consideration is worth a note.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1183173.html. You can comment here or there.

After a brief conversation with Rion the other day, I thought I’d talk about limiting scale.

The thing about worldbuilding in a fantasy or sci-fi world is that your space if effectively limitless. On a fantasy world, you might only have one planet, but you also have the possibility of other planes (or underground worlds, or sky-worlds, and so on).

Sometimes, that’s a bit much, and you want to keep your characters in one place and/or just focus on a small area of world-building.

Starting with Sci-Fi, ways to limit your scope include:

• Write something set on Future Earth/Future Other Planet without FTL travel or with really expensive FTL travel, so that people are mostly stuck on one place.
  
• Write a bubble city/something stuck under a dome (or a sky city, belt city: a self-contained metropolis, at least)
  
• Start with a claustrophobic setting: set in a quarantine, or stuck in a locked-down megacity (think Dr. Who, the episode in the flying cars in the perpetual gridlock)

• Set the story on an island nation. Maybe a very small island.
  
• Your nation is isolated from the rest of the world, if not by water, then by mountains or desserts or a very very tall wall, or possibly by walls and regulation.
  
• The portals are cut off. You can only access other worlds (or other cities, or maybe even other blocks) by two portals that open sporadically and otherwise just lead into the bathroom.

The smaller you dial things down – a bunker! A single room! A closet! – the less you have to flesh out about the world outside.

Of course, your characters still live in the world outside, unless they’ve spent their whole lives in this closet (and, even if they have, someone has fed them, someone has spoken to them, we assume. They’ve interacted with something in the world). That means you will have to determine some things: for instance, how their names work, why they are in a closet, etc.

(If you want to write feral children, more power to you, but from my research, this would be an immense challenge, and outside the scope of this particular article.)

But, by pulling the scope in, you’re buying yourself some time – if your character has never seen the next city over, then the most you have to do is give secondhand descriptions of it.

(Come to think of it, Inner Circle and Addergoole both have a lot of limiting-of-scope going on: In Inner Circle/Jumping Rings, you generally move slowly through the rings of your city, if at all, and most people never travel to another city. The government and the walls limit the first, and the monsters and raiders of the waste limit the second. And in Addergoole, you have people ignorant of the “world as it really is,” stuck in an underground bunker with only a few other examples of their species.)

Of course, if you don’t want to limit scope, you’re free to make your world as big as you want to.

For my YA Para-Drama, I haven’t yet decided to narrow the scope, but I’m starting with an insular nation that does not talk much about its neighbors, preferring swords to plowshares. And I have a young student, at a training camp/school, which limits her ability to move around a bit.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1182076.html. You can comment here or there.