Prewriting: Step 4 - Creating The Small Settings

Since I’ll be spending so much of November working on my NaNoWriMo project, I thought I’d show you a bit of my prewriting process.  This is what I did during October.  This post is about creating settings - the small ones.

There are a few places that I have to get the images of what’s there.  In my last post, I talked about using Google Sketch.  It’s good for the big settings, but almost impossible for the small ones that need a bit more creativity, less structure and more of a picture.

For example, I have a world that’s created only in dreams.  Now, I’ve never actually been to that world, and I wasn’t quite sure what it looked like.  So I began doodling.  As I did, I began to get a clearer picture.  Doors.  Lots of doors.  Each one leading into a different person’s dream.

So as I doodled, this is what I came up with.  It’s just an outline, but it makes the picture clearer for me.

And of course, there’s a Rowell’s dream world.  I knew what I wanted, but the where and the how?  That was a little bit more difficult.  So, again, I doodled until I could figure it out.

Now I know what’s going on and where my characters are.