My Secret Worldbuilding Weapon: Spreadsheet Sorcery

As with all craft tips, your mileage may vary depending on how your brain best stores and processes information. I imagine there may come a time when I myself need to find a different container for my worldbuilding data, but in the meantime I’ll stick with my sheets.

Why spreadsheets? 

1. Mostly because I’m a visual information processor and my eyes glaze over without clear delineations between bits of data. I love charts and graphs as large lists of information are not helpful to my working brain. I need to be able to generate and collect my worldbuilding facts in a way that feels clear and organized, but I also need to be able to reference that data quickly when I’m in a high-focused drafting or revising mode.
   

2. There's a LOT happening in my books! I use spreadsheets over the course of drafting and revisions to help juggle everything, and they keep growing or getting reorganized throughout those processes. Some sheets are just about keeping track of recurring details, which is very useful during copyedits, and some become a sort of magic system “bible” to help me track my own logic. 

If you’ve used spreadsheets for math or accounting purposes, then you may have guessed that I’m not really using the full functionality of this tool. From a technical perspective the most I do is sort, filter, or freeze my columns and take advantage of color coding, but the easy-to-use visual display of key information is priceless. By the time I finished revising and copyediting Legendborn, I had created about a dozen sheets of information and they were all stored within one handy file called “Legendborn Book One Outline.” (It started as just an outline, then grew.) Here a few examples of the sheet names from my original Legendborn file:

• LB Book Timeline - The prologue and the ~3 weeks of the main story.

• Parent and Kid Timeline - I used this to both map out the 25 years prior to Bree’s entrance into UNC’s Early College and track the previous generation’s activities and mysteries.

• Legendborn Roster and Knights - This sheet tracks the Scions and their bloodlines, their rankings, ages, inheritances/powers, personality traits, and preferred weapons. A version of this became back matter for the printed finished editions of LB and BM.

When drafting Bloodmarked, I copied the relevant Legendborn sheets over into a new file and added some additional ones that needed to be built out:

• LB Cycle Historic Timeline - From the 1700s until LB Cycle present day.

• BM Book Timeline - I discovered this was necessary during copyedits.

• Order Org Chart - A version of this became the front matter of the printed finished edition of BM.

• Power Sets (Bree’s, Merlins’, Rootcrafters’, Demons’) - The magic system(s) in these books have some core elements in common, but everyone’s access and methods differ!

When I start worldbuilding sheets like these, I think, What do the readers need to understand? And in what order should that information be delivered? and build out columns titled “What” and “Why” to describe reference points for how that information is provided. But I also add other details in column titles like “Who delivers?” and “When/How is it delivered?” to describe where in the story the information first appears and who says it. Sometimes that “who” is a secondary or tertiary character in the Legendborn Cycle, but sometimes that character is Bree herself who figures something out through experience. Generating the story’s best possible who/when/how is really the artform here. This is where generating and collecting story information isn’t enough, and writerly craft steps in!

Every SFF author wrangling with worldbuilding becomes, at some point in their novel, both an educator and a storyteller. And every reader has their own learning style. When it comes to giving worldbuilding information to readers, I would love it if I could somehow account for every potential learning style in every possible reader, but, given my background in education, I know that’s simply not possible. I borrow from the world and terminology of pedagogy in the way I aim for “just in time” information delivery throughout the story, rather than offering a heavy load of worldbuilding early in the book “just in case.” I try to carefully select the context and timing in which information is delivered so that it can be best received by both the protagonist and readers.

• In Legendborn, for example, William is a great character for sharing worldbuilding information because of his role in the Legendborn Order and his personality as a caregiver. He offers Bree the information she is so clearly lacking via a big moment in the tour of the Wall, but also provides additional worldbuilding information in key reflective moments. A good example of how I use William to give small new details is in the way he participates in the final climax sequence of that book.
  

• [Bloodmarked spoilers ahead!] Halfway through Bloodmarked, Valechaz becomes a source of information for Bree after she, Alice, Sel, and William stumble into the Crossroads Lounge. Valec is over 200 years old and the captain of his own domain, so to speak, which makes him a really fun “authority” figure. (Valec would love/hate to be referred to as such!) Since he operates in opposition to the Order and its mission, his perspective feels super juicy and necessary for Bree to absorb on her journey. We’ve never met anyone—or any cambion—like Valec, so learning from him is a fresh experience and because of his backstory, he gets to say things we’ve never heard before.

More on worldbuilding in issues to come! Leave a comment below if there’s a topic I’ve discussed that you’d love for me to dig into more deeply.