Fictional Worldbuilding Wiki-Style

In this post, I want to talk about worldbuilding wiki-style. That is, a way to be proactive when it comes to taking on a massive project such as a space opera series or fantasy trilogy. But first, I want to talk about the bigger skill writers should learn to acquire, and to do that, I have to take a side path.

Last year, I took a free Gale Course through my local library on writing, and learned a technique that I should have been using to write stories all along. Something that, in retrospect, I knew about, but because it was in a different area of writing I didn’t realize that I could apply it to writing short stories.

The bible. Not the big-B bible, but the story bible.

TV-show writers use them. It’s the book about the series that contains the details you want to remember while you’re writing episodes. They’re not long, somewhere between 50 and 70 pages.

For example, this article by Valerie Kalfrin at Screencraft describes the basics of what a show bible or series bible should contain.

(If you’re writing science fiction, you must click over to this article. She has a link to the bible for the “Battlestar Galactica” reboot that is fascinating. For authors of gritty police and crime stories, there’s another link to “The Wire” series. So long as were talking about great shows, here’s one for Vince Gilligan’s “Breaking Bad”. Learn from the best, I always say.

In that case, why are you talking to them?

Shut up, I explain.)

Anyway, while I knew that show bibles are important to TV series, and you should have one in the works for book series, I didn’t realize that I should have one for short stories as well.

It doesn’t have to be elaborate. It could be limited to names of characters and proper names that you want to use consistently. But if I’m writing a 20,000-word novella about, say, a zombie outbreak at a rock concert, it would be useful to have in an authoritative place the correct spellings of the faux-rock groups I’ll be abusing. If I was going to call one of them the X-Teens – in honor of the group I danced to at UNC — I’d want to make sure it’s capital-X-with-a-dash-capital-T X-Teens and not the Ex Teens or X Teens or Ex Teanzs.

So what does this have to do with worldbuilding wiki-style? Well, if you’re going to write this information down, it has to be in a way that’s easy to recover when you need it.

After all, Tolkien’s papers about Middle-earth, including early drafts of “The Lord of the Rings,” were published in 12 volumes. It’s well-known that George R.R. Martin and J.K. Rowling have filing cabinets full of material about their worlds.

(At the other end of the spectrum can be found the late Terry Pratchett. During public appearances, he bragged about destroying his papers, saying that graduate students will have to find another job than root through his papers. His family even publicly ran over his computer hard drive with a steamroller as a way of putting paid to his 10 unfinished novels.)

How to Build A Worldbuilding Wiki

When it came time to build this list, I had one overriding factor in mind: simplicity.

After all, you could download MediaWiki, the same software engine that powers Wikipedia, install it on the host server that runs your website, learn it’s coding for building pages, and you’re off.

But how many writers know how to get into their websites back end (no dirty jokes, please!), and run the installation software? That’s pretty simple. I have a PeschelPedia site that I play with. But then you have to learn how Wikipedia codes its pages. And you want to make sure that no one but you has access to the material. The last place you want to put that stuff is online!

So I wanted it to be so simple that I could teach my dear wife how to use it. Unlike me, she hasn’t been working with computers for most of her life. She knows how to use Microsoft Word and the smartphone’s ability to call people and run credit card sales through Square. That’s about it. The last thing she needs is anything that requires her to take a class in to know how to use.

So here are my suggestions:

1. File Management

How about using something you already know how to use? Create a new folder. Call it “Series Bible”. Inside it, create a bunch for folders for text files on a particular subject, such as Characters, Locations, Cultures, Religions, Animals, and Story Ideas.

Think of these as buckets, designed to catch material on that subject. “Story Ideas,” for example, covers everything from one-sentence images to full outlines you were compelled to drop everything else to write.

When you gather enough information in any one folder, you can create sub-folders. So when you have a hundred files in your Locations folder, you can create the sub-folder Cities and move the appropriate ones there.

The only problem with this method is that the pages cannot be linked like in a wiki. But that’s why we’ll discuss alternatives, right?

2. Microsoft OneNote

This program, part of Microsoft’s Office suite of programs, is designed to gather information, whether text, drawings, art, or audio. They are stored in Notebooks, which consist of Sections that are divided into Pages.

Although there are a lot of complicated part to OneNote, the basics are pretty easy to master once a couple of conventions are understood. For example, that the main screen displays a Page, while the Notebooks are listed down the left-hand side, the Sections across the top (as tabs), and the Pages down the right-hand side. Only the Sections from the current Notebook are displayed, while only the Pages from the current Section appear. If you want to add, rename, or delete a Notebook, Section, or Page, you right-click along that particular side. A menu of options will appear.

To turn it into a wiki where you can click from page to page, you have to create them. In OneNote 2010 and above, it can be as easy as wrapping the page title within doubled square brackets, like this [[example]]. If there is a Page by that name, it will link to it automatically. (In my version of OneNote 2007, I have to copy the link and paste it where I want.)

Next week, we’ll look at three alternatives: modifying an existing program (Scrivener) and two wiki programs.