Worldbuilding: Striking the Right Note

Does your world have sticky notes?

Doesn’t have to be the bits of paper with extremely weak glue that we know and use. (Though that could be awesome.) Could be holographic computer icons, or color-coded feathers jammed into the rolled slats of an ancient bamboo scroll, or strands of beads bookmarking a roll of papyrus at certain layers. What matters is that someone doing creative or experimental work in your world has a way to do messy organization; to loosely tie together bits of info to look at later or compare, maybe when no one sane would ever mix those two or three (or more) sets of ideas. Maybe especially then. Creativity can’t thrive in either pure chaos or absolute order. There has to be a little bit of mess, of things unexpected. And there has to be a way of thinking about that mess. Fitting pieces that might work together, discarding what doesn’t, and possibly finding that the discard pile falls into a better order than the original idea. The kind of “does this work with that?” or “huh, if I put X next to Y, then what?” that works just fine when you have twenty or even forty bead vials to physically shuffle next to each other, but is more problematic when you start tossing around file-boxes of articles and several-hundred-page books.

(Note, a wise beader doesn’t just rely on shuffling vials. Tiny glass beads of one color all in a mass give you a different color impression than strung singly, and prudence advises stringing your color selection on a scrap thread for a better idea before you start really stitching. But that’s another story.)

Your sticky-note equivalent might just be a background note; story color, giving your world some depth by showing people working in it. On the other hand… those notes could be important. They could hold the formula to a vital antidote, speculations on the actual source of the Evil Overlord’s power, or the key clue to uncovering a dastardly murder.

…Or they could just have someone’s favorite quick-meal recipe. Or a bunch of exclamation points about how Historian X is wrong, wrong, WRONG about the Battle of the Ghastly Plains, and the note-taker is going to go dig around there personally… cue the Rescue, or the Chase!

The Saint (Val Kilmer) shows an interesting example of a scientist shuffling around notes for a knotty physics problem, trying to find the right order so it’ll all click. Worth checking out, even if its depiction of hypothermia is a bit off. (You don’t want to go hypothermic yourself, so you really need two warm people to warm up one frozen one. But Hollywood likely thought a threesome would be too kinky… ahem. Also note you don’t have to take your clothes off. Though if the victim’s garments are wet, you do want to strip them. Water absorbs too much heat!)

How do your characters organize their info to problem-solve? Make note!