The Daily Life: An Exercise

For this exercise, you will need three things: yourself, a pen, and a notebook. That's all. Three simple things. Four if you're doing this when the post goes live and it's seven in the morning. If you're up that early, a "but first coffee" is more than allowed.

What you're going to do is observe yourself as you go through a day in your life. You'll catalog your morning routine, your breakfast, your commute, and so on. Or, if you don't have a commute, what you do instead. Basically, you're taking inventory of your life and what you do as you go through it during a normal day. Or maybe a not so normal day. But you're going to do it for one full day and keep the notebook close to you. Anything you do, no matter how big or small, should go into the notebook.

Now, at the end of the day, maybe after dinner or the kids are in bed, open the notebook. I want you to star the smaller things, like what you had for breakfast or what you feel is just a small detail in your life, and give an exclamation point to the bigger tasks that you did during the day. You're going to focus on the stars and that will help to give you a background into what a daily life of your character could or couldn't be.

For my second world-ers, I encourage you to do this as well. Maybe, instead of a bowl of cereal, there's something else that you come up with for breakfast. Or maybe it's just going through the motions but not describing what's in the bowl. What's important is to have an idea of how you go through a day, either normal or not so normal, and then you have a bit of background that you can use in your novel.

Mundane? Yep. But sometimes the best way that we, as writers, can make a novel richer is by going through a task like listing what you do during the day.

Until next time, keep on plotting (and writing!).

Week 4: The Daily Life

Hey guys! Welcome to the last week of world building. Next week, we're going into the characters and plot and everything else that goes into our novel for NaNoWriMo. For now, we're going to go into the ideas of daily life. You might take a lot from your own life and that's okay. Unless you're doing second world, it's going to make your novel better, especially if you're setting your novel where you live. That's going to help you with this part of world building.

The biggest problem, if you're doing real world or Earth AU, might be fashion and education. I say this because it will cut into your time if you want to focus a bit on them. You need to look up the national trends and, even then, you could be wrong. What's hot at Fashion Week in NYC could be a dud in Colorado. Best thing you can do is research, research, and then research some more. Talk to people who live there if you don't live there yourself. Now, education, like everything else, is going to vary even city to city in a single state. I can tell you that the high school education I got about sixteenish years ago was considered one of the best in the suburbs. Now, I'm not sure. So, again, research. Research is a good thing but it is a time suck.

However, you'll have a fine good backbone of a novel.

To the second world-ers reading this, your most difficult section? The calendar. Are you going to base it off of the calendar we have now (easiest), twiddle with it (medium), or create something new (hard)? You've got to think up holidays and feasts and all that other things. Now, it's not hard to do. Say you want a food based holiday that has a message of community, like Thanksgiving. You can do that and call it something about the harvest. It's not really all that hard but, like above, it's a time suck. You can research but you have to be careful not to outright copy what another person has done. You can like something but then you'll have to twist it to how it will work best for you.

So, I wish you good luck with the daily life section of world building. It is the last part of the world building that we'll be doing and I can't say if I'll be going back to it come October. Until next time, keep on plotting!

Exercise: Daily Life from Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions by Patricia C. Wrede.