Thoughts on Worldbuilding: Stoking that Spark
This is mostly drawn from 10+ years of cobbling together worlds, both completely original worlds as backdrops for sometimes very short-lived projects and fan-regions for Pokémon. (I did a couple, but most of the documents were sadly lost to several moves between computers. I need to try and recreate some of this down the road.)
One thing that I found is very important to stoke a spark of happiness when you work on your region.
Why don't I start with anything else surrounding worldbuilding? Because... that can all happen in good time.
First: you need to know HOW you work best.
Do you work best when you work through the night (not strictly recommended, but you do you ;) ), is it best for you to work in small bursts? Do you need fixed times to work on it or is it better to sometimes just take a spontaneous spot out of your day to work on this? Are you highly organized or are you chaotic and loving it?
This is important to consider whenever you work on something like this. There might be a ton of different softwares out there to help you keep everything organized, but you need to find your own jam for this.
Second? That you might accomplish more if you step back regularly than really stick to a strict pace.
As much as it is important to know how you work best, it is important to know that you need to rest sometimes. I find it best to do both during times of lulls and during times of high productivity. Throw a lid on it for a moment, let that new primordia world soup stew for a little. Gently tuck it into a back corner of your mind, take a moment to rehydrate, do something else, return to it later.
Third: reexamine what you did. You might surprise yourself.
This, I found, helped me most when I got stuck on something and couldn't quite put my finger on where I could go, or where something was lacking. I have sometimes let something sit for weeks or even months, then came back to it and clearly could spot gaps where I first thought that this was covered good, or realized that I had already done good enough work where I thought: "This is not enough."
Distance, with anything written, can help you notice many details that you were unable to spot when going over everything with a fine-comb tooth obsessively.
Stoking that spark of happiness might sound like one of the very base things to do, but it can be vital to carry you through a slog in the world-building, when you need to re-sort character relationships, reconsider the order of events, notice weird stumbling blocks you somehow worked into the whole concept that might have tripped you up and can be done away with.
This was just a first small musing from my side... might add more over time. All slow and mellow, since real life is crazy.
Catch you on the next thoughtful post.
