How I organise my world-building

How I use a Field Notes, Bullet Journal and Obsidian to keep my world-building ducks in a row

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

Welcome to ‘What a wonderful world…building’, a newsletter dedicated to exploring world/building across media. World-building disease is a bug and we just caught it.

I am a famously disorganised person. I struggle at the best of times to keep my reality in order, let alone the fictional world I’m dreaming up on the side. I had notes strewn across different apps I’d downloaded ‘just to try out because they might solve my problem’. I had ideas on scraps of paper stuffed in half used notebooks. I had worlds and characters and histories in eleven different places making actually using any of that information almost impossible. Something had to change.

Enter Obsidian.

The folder is dead, long live the folder

A few years back I wrote a piece about the notetaking system I’d built and how I was using it to write and world-build. For various reasons, that system didn’t really end up working the way I’d hoped. What I needed was a wiki. A central, interlinked location with entries for everything from characters to worlds and factions. Where each page can act as an evolving canon for a given aspect of my world. It needed to be quick and easy to use. Simple and not cluttered with distractions. I wanted it to be offline and AI free and I needed to be able to search it at a moments notice when I need an answer to a world-building problem when I’m writing.

So I turned to Obsidian. It’s a powerful, free notetaking app that’s widely available, offers a tone of functionality, uses simple markdown notes and is free, did I mention it’s free.

For the past year I have wrestled with figuring out the best way to organise my notes in Obsidian. My problem has always been that there are a million different ways to do things and, as such, decision fatigue kicks in and I end up spending more time thinking about what folder a character biography should sit in than I actually do developing the character.

That all changed when I discovered a plugin called ‘Tag Folders’. If you’ve used the app Bear Notes (iOS exclusive), then you’ll be familiar with the idea. Instead of using folders to organise your notes, Bear automatically groups notes based on the tags they include. ‘Tag Folders’ brings this functionality to Obsidian.

It’s not the most eligant plugin (it took me a hot minute to figure out my exact configuration - the above video helped a lot) but now that it’s setup, I have to say it’s changed the game for me. I no longer need to think about where a note should live, instead I just tag it and the plugin puts it away for me.

Bringing us back to the world-building wiki idea for a moment, I did need to think through the tags I was going to use ahead of time but the beauty of a plugin like ‘Tag Folders’ is that if I change that tag at any time, the whole organisational system updates automatically for me.

Currently, my world-building is organised under a master tag called ‘World-Wiki’ followed by tags for each element of my world including but not limited to ‘Characters’, ‘Planets’, ‘Factions’ and ‘Tech’. I then make heavy use of Obsidian’s built-in linking feature to connect notes with each other allowing me to build out a connected encyclopedia of my world. Now, when I sit down to flesh out an aspect of my world or I have a question that needs answering when I’m writing, I know exactly where to look or what to search.

Capture, organise, distil and express

One aspect of my organisational system I have carried on from my previous post is my use of Tiago Forte’s ‘CODE’ system. Code stands for for Capture, Organise, Distill and Express. It’s basically a way of thinking about the journey of a given piece of information.

While I still use this methodology, I have drastically simplified my methods.

For capture, I have a single Field Notes notebook that I carry everywhere with me. Any idea for my world goes straight in here. I will still ocasionally make use of the ‘Quick Note’ function in Apple Notes on iOS but this is rare and only in the event that I’m away from my Field Notes (I do a lot of thinking in the bath).

Organising and distilling is done via both a daily review and a weekly review. At the end of the day I open up my Field Notes and migrate any relevant notes across to a Bullet Journal spread for that day. This helps me seperate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to ideas for my world while also giving me space to expand on said ideas. I could talk at length about my Bullet Journal, but it is like my second brain. It’s where I think, ideate and work through problems both world-building related and beyond.

My weekly review sits on a Friday and consists of me looking back over the past weeks notes in my Bullet Journal to see what needs to be migrated to Obsidian. By reviewing these ideas a third time, I am able to expand upon them even more and, in many cases, this process acts kind of like a writing prompt for me snowballing into a writing session.

During this weekly review, ideas will be migrated to the relevant notes. For example, an idea about a particular worlds revolutionary past gets migrated to that worlds page where I might organise it into a section about the millitary history of said world, expanding on it in more detail.

This process also applies to research notes which get migrated into their own special notes grouped by topic, sorted under a ‘Research’ tag and then linked together with the relevant pieces of world-building they relate to in the world-wiki.

All of this is ultimately in service of the ‘E’ in CODE; express. This will differ depending on the purpose of your world-building project, but for me expressing my notes amounts to me actually writing stories contained within my world and putting the world-building to use. Some days, that expression might come in the form of me working on a chapter of a book that draws on some new piece of flora or fauna I’ve come up with. Other days it might be just expanding on the history of a given world within the world-wiki. Either way, this expression is facilitated by the capture, organisation and distillation of my world-building as well as my setting up Obsidian to reduce friction when accessing said world-building.

The final piece

Recently, I went down a bit of a rabit hole looking into the idea of Galactic Encyclopedia’s within fiction, the most prominant of which can be found in Issac Assimov’s Foundation series. Similar to Princess Irulan diaries in Frank Herbert’s Dune saga, Assimov’s ‘Encyclopedia Galactica’ is an in-world compedium of world-building.

I’ve written at length about these fictional histories and how they influence the stories they centre around. They act as a facinating device for exposition about your world while also providing potential for character, plot and deepening the richness of your setting. In the context of organisation, they also provide a fun opportunity to world-build in a narrative way.

This is the final ingredent in my system. When I express my ideas within Obsidian I do so as though I am writing that information as part of an in-world encyclopedia. This has led to some facinating results, be that spending some time thinking about why this information is being recorded and by whom as well as considering different narrative devices I might employ to tell those histories. It’s also a convinient way to withold information when even I don’t need to know a particular aspect of the world I’m building. If you haven’t tried world-building in this way then I strongly suggest you give it a go, it’s a fun way of expanding your world while improving your craft.

Whether you’re world-building for a novel, a D&D campaign or just for the sake of it, building your own encyclopedia can be just as fun as the end goal itself. After all, how does the old adage go? It’s the journey, not the destination.

I don’t want this to come across as prescriptive because this system won’t work for everyone. In fact, I’d argue that this exact combination of organisational tools is very particular to me and my chaotic process. The point I’m trying to make is that figuring out a system that works for you can really unlock your creativity and free up space in your mind to actually work on what matters to you.

I also emplore you to iterate and refine this system as you go and to feel free to pick and choose what best suits you. I am guilty of trying to force my brain to think in the same way other people do and using systems that work for others but not for me. It’s only now, as I’ve accepted that I need these layers of organisation and I need the flexibility of ‘Tag Folders’ and the creative space offered by a physical notebook that I feel like I’m on the way to a system I can call my own.

Anywho, how do you organise your notes? Any fellow Obsidan users out there got any plugin’s to recommend? Sound off in the comments below.

Want more Altered Narrative? Read my defence of the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy: