Hey guys! So, last week I said that I was going to write on Map Drawing – Sites VS Paper. I’m kind of going to talk on that but I have slightly altered the topic. So, when I started thinking about the topic a bit more to decide how I would write this I came to a sudden realization that should have occurred to me before I announced this topic. I had heard to writers using world building websites to build their world, but I personally had never used one. So, of course, since I had never used a site I preferred the paper kind of map. So I decided that if I was going to write an opinion piece comparing the two types then I should probably actually have used the other kind before. So I did some research (which as I mentioned before I hate but am pretty good at it) at found some world building websites. So this post will be less of a VS piece and more of a here’s why I like paper and then a review of a really cool world building site that I found.
So, on the topic of paper maps. This is the way that I have always drawn my maps. I sit down with a paper (sometimes several) and I write out all the details of the world. I write what the country or countries are like. The culture, the magic systems, the economics, all the details of any extra races that exist. I develop all the characters that exist in my world and then I add any extra details about the world that I may have forgotten. Then I draw the map. In my mind the culture, magic systems and economics of a country are always affected by the geography of the nation. If I decided that my country exports limestone or some other building stone, then I will make sure they have mountains to mine quarry’s from. Things like that are what I keep in mind when I draw a map. Here’s a good example of a couple of the maps I have drawn.
I also hang them on my wall. (That’s what the yellow is). I hang it on my wall because then I don’t have to unfold a paper every time that I need to see that map. I also decided that I would transfer my maps and info. I have a small little notebook with a cute little clasp with blank pages. I will redraw a map from a book into my notebook and then right after it I will write an expert with all the information about the countries, economy, magic system etc. Its made it really handy to access not only the map but all the information.
So when it comes to drawing maps by hand on paper I really enjoy it. Its fun to see a world that exists only in my head to grow into a real place that I could use in a book. Some of these places don’t even have stories attached to them. They just popped into my head and so I wrote them down.
On the note of sites I tried a whole bunch of them this week and I found one that I really like. It doesn’t really have any examples and I apologize. I have two accounts on this site and I’m a paranoid writer so I’m using my second one with none of my important character info and world info on it. But its really cool nonetheless. Its called Notebook.ai.
Here’s my second account. 😊 On the left there are all sorts of tabs. I haven’t ever really used the discussion tab its for writing forums. I’m sure that it will be really helpful when you need the forums but I haven’t used it in the 3 days I have had the account. The scratchpad tab is actually really nice. It’s a small little tab for you to write little notes.
The universe tab is where you build your world. You click on it and you can add a world. I already started into one of mine (I accidentally created it twice when I was on my mobile and pressed the wrong button. Whoops.)
It starts like this. You can click the create tab and then it will pull open all the details like this:
This area is really cool. As you can see I have written in the overview. I haven’t really gone into detail on this tab which I could I just haven’t gotten around to it. The tabs break down the areas that you need to build. It has premade questions and areas to add so that you don’t forget any of the important sections of world building.
The tabs kind of look like this. The rules tab has areas to write about the physics, magic and technology of this world. You can leave them blank or you can fill them out with as much info as you feel that you need. The one downside I see to this would be that you don’t get all the follow up questions. I would probably fix this by having a world building question sheet pulled up in a different window while I was working here so that I wouldn’t forget to add something.
The next tab is the characters tab. I haven’t really done a ton in these tabs on either account but in the other one I have built a little bit in each tab. When you go to the character tab it looks like this:
I think my favorite tab in this area is the social tab. You can click on it and add links to other characters you have created in the relationship that describes them. Then you don’t have to rewrite the character bio of another character into this one.
The next tab, location, is really handy if your characters spend a lot of the story in a specific country in a world of multiple countries, a certain city in a story of multiple cities, or there are important landmark places that your characters stop at.
The part of this that is really fun. In tab cities you can create cities to link to the country location that you have built. Its really fancy. Here’s a picture of linking the cities together.
The items tab is really interesting. When I am world building I don’t really mention any specific items that would be important to certain characters but after looking at this tab it became apparent that I actually do kind of write stuff like this but never write a sheet for it like I do for my characters. There are always some sort of item that is important. In my sci-fi novel that I am currently working on the main characters whole life gets turned around by an AI cube. With the item tab I could create a description page for it.
The cool part of the item tab is that you can link your item to a type of magic that you have created for your world.
There is this special little tab over here that I have not experimented with yet. It looks kind of cool but having only three days to mess with this site I don’t have everything else figured out yet. I want to do some more experimenting too.
There are a few issues that I have already spotted with this site but all in all I think its mostly just a decent site. I think I will be testing this site some more in recent days. I probably won’t switch all the way over to sites but I will say that out of all the sites I found and tested out I really enjoy Notebook.ai and would really suggest that people who are really interested in website world building to check it out. Even if you aren’t super interested in it you should still try it out.
Alright guys! Sorry this post didn’t turn out to be exactly what I promised it would but at least I wrote it on time! I hope that you will try out Notebook.ai and then tell me what you thought of it. I love to hear opinions on the things I enjoy. Hopefully sometimes soon I will be able to write a review for the new updated version of Zenwriter! The post for next week will be on the Common Misconceptions of Writing and I will mostly be using one of my favorite writing books as a reference. So hopefully you guys will join in with me next week. See you next week!