World-Building – About – NaNoWriMo Editorial Hub

What is World-Building?

The world of your story can determine what kinds of challenges your characters face, and can reveal so much about the things you want to explore with your writing. Settings aren’t just a backdrop for your novel; they can establish moods, inform details about your characters, and reflect what you notice about your own world.

A lot of people tend to think of world-building as something only fantasy and sci-fi writers have to do, but the truth is that every story relies on elements of world-building, even ones that are set in the real world. This July, we’re partnering with Camp NaNoWriMo sponsors 4thewords and World Anvil to bring you tons of information, resources, and events dedicated to helping you build a strong world for your story.

Where to Start:

If you want to participate in the full World-Building Camp Track experience this July, our friends at 4theWords put together a short step-by-step guide to help you take advantage of everything that’s happening this month, across all three writing communities:

View the full summary and check-list.

Below, we’ve included some options for NaNoWriMo goals you might want to use to work on world-building. These are just suggestions, so feel free to modify them in a way that works for your writing practice! The world-building resources listed on this page will be available at any time, so you can always set a personal writing goal for yourself at any point during the year.

Suggested Goal #1: 8,000 words

Throughout July, World Anvil will be releasing weekly batches of world-building prompts to help you think about the history and structure of your story’s world. Each week, we’ll share the eight new prompts. You can use as many of them as you like; we’d suggest aiming to write around 250 words per prompt. 8 prompts per week x 4 weeks x 250 words per prompt = 8,000 words total.

Suggested Goal #2: Write for an hour per day

Although the NaNoWriMo site currently only supports word-count goals, you can use our conversion chart to track the time you spend writing. If you count every minute you work toward your goal as one word: 60 minutes per day x 31 days = 1,860 minutes = 1,860 word goal.