As I have enjoyed my vacation over the last few days, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about where to improve my novel. Of course, the best ideas always come when you’re actively trying to leave things alone for a while. I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to incorporate more worldbuilding into my story, particularly when it comes to magic interacting with everyday life. Now, I’ve had a solid magic system built since I started worldbuilding, but details have either escaped me over time or have been written down across a bunch of documents I have no organization for. Many of my other elements are like this as well: useful but disorganized.
This is why I think it’s time for me to revert back to a tool that I discovered during the process of worldbuilding and experimented with on and off for a couple months.
Writers, may I present to you, World Anvil.
World Anvil is an online set of tools designed for writers, artists, and RPG creators alike and the worldbuilding process. This website has a lot of great components to help you make the most out of your research and efforts.
The site has templates with worldbuilding prompts to help you create your world and explore the relationship between places, characters, and laws. You can connect entries to each other to build complex families and systems. World Anvil also has features for map building and timeline creation (a feature I would highly reccomend; it did wonders when looking at my universe’s history).
You essentially have the ability to create an entire encyclopedia for your world that you can refer back to over and over again as you write.
A free plan will get you all of the basic features you need and a decent amount of space to store things. Of course, if you want to put a little money into it, you can get things like more storage and extra features. But pretty much everything you need is encompassed by a free plan.
So as I head into next week, I have plans to hop on World Anvil again and see if I can’t straighten my world out. It can only improve my writing, right?
Until next time, friends. <3
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