Hi there! Recently I have been playing with the idea of writing a book. About a week ago I started to develop my ideas and write them down but I ran into a few problems I was hoping to get some help with. The first is names which I'm sure is not uncommon. How do you keep track of all the names of places and places and people or even artifacts and civilizations? I have nearly 20 already and I'm not even done with writing my ideas for humans not to mention everything else in my mind I haven't gotten to yet. Which leads me to my second problem which is I feel like I have two much information. I have developed the history of this world from the start to nearly 1000 years into the future but I'm not ready to write a whole series. How do I learn what to cut out and what to edit or shrink? The last question I have is about keeping things fresh and logical. In a fantasy world that has never existed, how do you keep people engaged, they don't have the information and do t know the thought proces behind this world so they just have to go off of what I write and if that ends up being confusing or too lengthy and detailed they would lose interest. Thanks for taking the time to read this, hope for some good help from everyone!
don't cut out information. Set up a document/folder or two and start arranging things. Make a character folder where you make your character templates. You can find a 46-question quiz about your character, somewhere on the internet, and you can use it to help fully form your characters. That's a good start. But i'd probably work with the world-creating and history before characters. Do the same thing as with the characters: organize the geography, the list of countries, the alliances, the towns and such.
What you have is an entire world, and an entire workspace to go with, which is a good palette to work off, but what you must be careful of, as you have already stated so yourself, is being overwhelmed. What you need to do is extract a single story, a single meaning, from maybe a few of your favourite characters, and build around them. Don't try and put too much into your first book, they key to writing a first book is something controlled and simple. Pick an aspect, or meaning you want to draw out from your story, and base the plot around that. You may have to ignore other factors on the other side of your fictional world, but sometimes sacrifices must be made. By this once single factor I mean things for example, one family conflict, one development of a relationship between people or groups, one evil monster that needs to be slain, one personal conflict needed to be overcome, one end of story goal that you can focus the entire thing around. For a first go, try not to build too many sub plots, maybe one or two, but make sure they link together to this main factor you want to work with.
Something I find very important with writing is knowing your end goal in two ways. 1. The end goal for your characters. 2. The end goal for you. I am a hypocrite when saying this, because sometimes If I have an idea I write and write not knowing exactly where the characters are going (But if you can establish that initially the better. Number 2 is very important, I always have a goal for myself for writing a work. I think, when this is finished, I want to leave the readers thinking/feeling "this" and that is what drives me. Normally I at least have half an idea of where the characters are going, for example, even when I free write, I think, "I want this character to develop into this by the end" and "I want this character to die at the end" or something like that, even when I'm not sure what the driving plot is.
So pick out the key things you want to achieve and focus on that. Pick those key characters and be ruthless with the others who aren't needed and put them in the storage bin for something else.
As for keeping track of things, I know I am terrible at being organized and making neat graphs, so I normally have a little note or empty file where I just write all of my notes and names in at random. When I was writing my first novel first draft, I kept a list of all the character names at the bottom (Just below where I was writing) so I could go and look at them evey now and then and the list would stay below wherever I was up to. IT was VERY helpful. If you are organized, you might like to devise a system.
It sounds like you're in the lovely stage of development.
No piece of information, no matter how mundane it seems, is tossable. Ever. Even if you never use that information, it stills goes into the development of your world.
Organizing your notes is going to be totally up to you, and how you think. I have myriads of notebooks, just full of random splurges and ideas that I wrote down as they came to me. But I also have a few organized spreadsheets (they are sooo helpful at times, so don't let the nerdiness be a turn off). Character sketches are helpful to peg what you originally designed a character as, and to keep them consistent throughout the book.
Maybe just set up a Word doc, and title each category, like: Humans, Locations, Events, etc., and then organize what you have that way.
As far as the stories themselves go, don't worry about how much you "have" to write. Let the ideas flow freely, let them arrange themselves in nice, neat little lines, or lovely chaotic, misfit ramblings, but just let them pour in as they please. The larger a repertoire of ideas you have to build from, the better chance you'll have of being able to assemble a single, cohesive story. That doesn't mean you'll force every idea into a single PoV, or that you'll only get one PoV. And you'll have ideas that you don't get worked into the story. That's okay. Those things are necessary. They flesh out the world in a way that you, as the author, may only get to see, but because it exists and you've seen it, you'll be able to describe the world and your story in a more real way. It will have history to it, a depth and a breadth that you'll (consciously or unconsciously) end up working into the story. Maybe you won't even reference these side stories that you'll have encountered, but they'll be there, the invisible foundation to your world-building.
All of that to say this: don't focus on removing the dross ideas until you have a firm grasp of what your story is, and where it's going. The only "irrelevant" information is what you don't need in the story, and it's only irrelevant to the story itself. (That's why there are almanacs for invented worlds.) You'll only really be able to tell what you don't need once you start writing.
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