World-building is where we should start. Part of your dedicated database is reserved for storing data about your world. There are a few different types of data, but that’s for another time. As part of the front-end of your World you have what we call the Building Zone. This section is for adding, editing and sometimes deleting data about your world. You build your world from here. The Building Zone is designed to make it simple and efficient to add data to your world as and when you like. The TYWE is utilised here to help you make intelligent additions (and changes) to avoid inconsistencies and anomalies. Chances are this is where you’ll spend much of your time.
Reading data from your World’s database might sound like the kind of thing you certainly don’t want to be doing. We’ve designed a couple of extra features to make this easier and more interesting for you (and your fans…); these are our built-in Wiki-Pages feature and our Interactive Map feature. Let’s have a look at those now.
The Wiki-Pages feature gives you the ability to read the data in your database in the style of a Wikipedia article. The TYWE intelligently reads your World’s database and auto-generates a Wikipedia-style article for you. In plain English, your World gets its very own Wikipedia, but you don’t have to write a single word on a single page or ever have to make an update directly to it. Any changes or additions you make in the Building Zone are automatically handled by the TYWE when a Wiki-Page is opened. Neat right?! This feature is great for you to remind yourself about a character, culture or country without having to read an endless list of database tables and rows. (It’s also a great feature for your fans…)
The Interactive Map feature is the first instance of visual stimulation for your world. It could be considered similar to Campaign Cartographer in that you do use it to plot out the coordinates for some data-types (regions, settlements islands etc.), but there is far more to it than that. Just as the Wiki-Pages feature uses the TYWE to read your World’s database and output a nicely written article about a character or a famous battle, the Interactive Map feature does exactly the same but in a visual way. An example of this; you could tell map to load up the lifeline of a character, and it would walk you around the map (in real-time) pointing out the major events for the character (in terms of location). As an author, knowing where your characters are at a certain point in time is crucial to the continuity in your novel. Once again, your fans can also benefit from this by being able to find on the map the many settlements, rivers and regions you’ve created to help them get a sense of perspective when reading your novels.
All of these features we’ve mentioned are geared towards helping you build the world you will write your novels about, but there’s one more point we’d like to make about this before we continue.
You might be thinking in black and white when it comes to your novel and the world it’s set in. By this we mean there is fixed point in your In World Time, where your “backstory” stops and your novel begins. Your theory is that the novel continues the story of the world, with anything before that being “history” and anything after that being the murky depths of the future. We understand this point of view, but we’ve designed the TYWE slightly differently.
Your World actually has its own timeline, and time is an important component when adding data. Take a moment and think about the following questions:
How many prequels/sequels are you planning to write after this first novel?
How much of the world you’re creating is mentioned in the novel, and what’s going on in the other parts?
What about the idea of writing a new series set 1,000 years before/after the time of your current novel?
When you start to ask yourself these questions, you start to get an idea of In World Time. This first novel you’re planning to write might be set in the year 3245, so what’s happened for the first 3 millenia? A year down the line you might decide you’ve had enough of this series, and you want to start a new one in the same world but in a completely different part of it in the year 1297.
The TYWE is designed to accommodate this very situation. When you use our writing/publishing framework (more on that later) you’ll be asked to specify the In World Dates when your novel begins and finishes. We’ve designed it like this to make life easier for you in the long-run. The way we see things, this might be the first novel about your World, but 10 years down the line you might have published 20 novels, and a bucketload of short-stories, and you’ll want to make sure there is proper continuity throughout all of them.
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