Worldbuilding: The Case for a Compendium
Worldbuilding is, perhaps fittingly, a massive, all-encompassing topic that’s easy to get lost in. When you have a world’s worth of detail to develop, it’s hard to tell, not only where to start, but also where to stop so you can shift focus to your actual story. For some writers, developing a setting might even be the end goal. Regardless of why you’re embarking on the endeavor, at some point you’ll likely find yourself asking the question “How do I keep everything organized?”
Enter: the compendium.
In this post:
Whaddya mean by “compendium”?
How much worldbuilding is necessary?
The summary approach
The list approach
Where to house it all?
Next in the worldbuilding series…
Whaddya mean by “compendium”?
Well, according to one of the most trusted editorial resources, Merriam-Webster, the word “compendium” has two primary definitions:
a brief summary of a larger work or of a field of knowledge : abstract
a: a list of a number of items
b: collection, compilation
Either definition can be used as a methodology for creating a compendium, which is used to fill out and organize the world. I’ve used both approaches and often switch back and forth depending on what I need.
But beyond the definitions, a compendium could look like anything you want it to. Compendiums already exist for a ton of media. Any fandom wiki page you’ve found yourself scrolling could be considered part of a compendium. Roleplaying games with a built-in setting have swaths of information on their worlds for players to reference. Compendiums really are just collections of information about a particular topic.
At the end of the day, when I say “compendium,” I mean all of the notes and drafts, every effervescent thought you’ve had about your project’s setting that you could possibly bring under one roof.
How much worldbuilding is necessary?
We won’t get into too many specifics here on what to put into your compendium (that’ll be a later discussion), but sizing up how much you need or how much time you want to spend on it is a good place to start.
Different writing projects will require you to know different levels of detail about their settings before you start them. I also wouldn’t suggest you try to nail absolutely everything down before starting a project. Planning is great, but part of the fun of the creative process is what you come up with in more spontaneous moments.
If you’re like me and you like to have at least a general idea of the world before diving into it, here are a few questions to ask yourself:
What is the scale of the world itself? Is it a pocket dimension, an island, a whole planet? The bigger it is, the bigger your brushstrokes may need to be, at least to start with.
In what part of the world does your plot take place? Knowing lots of detail about the world at large can be handy at times, but if the primary action takes place in the attic of your main character’s house, it’s unlikely that you’ll need to know the geography of the whole planet.
Are you building a setting that you’ll revisit in the future? If you’re planning on writing a whole saga, or setting multiple different stories in the world, then yes, taking the time to draw more detail can be handy.
Alternatively, you might just find worldbuilding fun on its own. I actually consider it a hobby of mine, and, admittedly, I’ve only just started writing a story set in the world I’ve been working on for over a decade now. Other folks like to discover the world they’re building as they write, which can feel a little more organic.
Ultimately, no one methodology will fit everyone, so have fun with it. Try playing with the approaches described to find the flow that works for you.
The summary approach
To me, the summary approach is picking a particular topic, as niche as you want, and just going to town on it. This is when you can bust out the lectern, the whiteboard, the slideshow. If you’re the kind of person who dreams of giving a Ted Talk, this might just work for you.
My own personal journey with this approach began as a way to flex my creative muscles, building out the mythology of the world bit by bit, story by story. A lot of it was really flash fiction, or sometimes just bullets on the particulars of certain cultural practice. If you looked at my notes, they’d probably look a lot like I wrote them while attending a lecture (which may have been true for some of them… just not a lecture on any subject related to my imaginary world).
Think of these notes as the wiki entry on a specific element of your world. You get to dig into the details as much as you’d like. Sometimes thinking of a real-world resource can help you format your notes. I’ve started an atlas of my own setting, for example, which details the geography and layout of the world, along with relevant settlements like capital cities or other landmarks.
The list approach
For those of you who don’t like to zoom in as closely as that, or want a way to wrangle all of those elements, the list approach might just be the ticket.
Sometimes snippets of our world come to us, not yet fully formed and needing a little shaping. Other times, they never go beyond what Tolkien called “unattainable vistas,” little bits of lore that are mentioned but never fully explored, and which serve to suggest a rich, living world beyond what the reader sees. However they manifest, storing these articles in a master list can make organizing your world less of a headache. Starting with the list itself can also be a creative exercise in its own right.
It’s been my habit to record everything I create in a detailed glossary of my setting. It’s a much more zoomed out view than the notes I have on all the minute details, and it provides a good overview of what areas I have and haven’t covered. Because a lot of my notes are digital, I can also link the list items to their full note counterparts, if written. Otherwise, sometimes just coming up with a list of things (like character names, for instance) can be a source of inspiration for what to work on next.
Where to house it all?
As I mentioned, I store a lot of my notes digitally (though not always). These days I mostly work with Google Docs because I can organize everything into folders, share things easily with others and link different documents to one another. I’ve also previously tried Microsoft OneNote and Evernote, both of which have great tagging functionality. There are tons of awesome tools out there to record and sort your thoughts.
But sometimes, when it comes to creative writing, nothing beats the old paper and pen. Your collected notes might form a little library of sorts. Or, if you’re like me some years back, putting everything into a three-ring binder can also work. (Tip: use tabbed dividers to make referencing different materials easy.)
The choice is yours, and there’s really no reason you need to stick with one system the whole time you’re doing this. If you wind up doing this for a while, you might have the opportunity to test out a few methods.
Next in the worldbuilding series…
If you liked this guide, I’m happy to report that I’ll be looking at more worldbuilding topics in future posts, starting with religions and deities. I’ll be sharing my tips and tricks for developing some of the biggest players to inhabit your world and the people who worship (and sometimes defy) them.
In the meantime, stay tuned for my other musings on the relationship between authors and their work, the rules of creative writing and ways to improve your authorial voice.
Mary Kehoe provides structural, stylistic and copy editing services for a variety of written works through her agency, Elixir Editorial. From time to time she dabbles in her own writing projects which tend toward the speculative genre.
She is a member of both Editors Canada and the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), as well as a founding member and former chair of the Toronto Arts & Letters Club writing group. A longtime lover of the English language, Mary is passionate about supporting writers on the journey to inspire the world.
