This year, writing for Camp NaNoWriMo is strange because I’m not working on a new story (or even a rewrite). Instead, I have a 61-page document detailing the world, the characters, the plots, other details about the individual stories in my series, things I liked and didn’t like about past drafts… and I think I’m to the point where I’m almost ready to stop figuring out the background of the stories and getting back into the real stories.
But creating and tweaking the story bible is a task that never truly ends. The large items, like the layout of a building or the map of a town should not change that much (unless the town gets devastated by some kind of natural disaster), but as the series goes on, the characters change based on what’s happened to them in their past adventures. Events that happen create ripple effects that affect plots of future stories. A few times, I’ve written what I thought was a good scene, only to remember that it could never actually happen because the backstory was not set up for it to be realistic.
Paying attention to matters of consistency first is so important… and can save so much time down the line.
