Learning Shaxpir: The World-Building Notebook

Brainstorm your next novel by building a rich, elaborate world of characters, places, and themes.

This five-minute video takes you on a guided tour the Shaxpir world-building notebook, where you can keep track of all your characters, places, and themes. Create concept artwork, add margin comments, and weave everything together by making connections. It’s like having a private Wikipedia for the world of your Story.

This is the first in a series of educational videos we’re producing, showcasing the features of Shaxpir. We’re obsessed with helping our users get the most out of Shaxpir, so they can dream bigger dreams, and write better books!

The World-Building Notebook is included for free, for all users, as a standard part of the Shaxpir platform. Download Shaxpir today, and try it out for yourself.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Shaxpir is the perfect place to brainstorm your novel. Every book you create includes a World-Building Notebook, which helps you organize your notes, so you can immerse yourself in the creative process. It’s like having a private wikipedia for the world of your story.

To create a new character, click on the Create Content button, and choose Character from the drop-down menu. Give them a name, and write a detailed description of their personal attributes, as well as their role in the story. Bulleted lists can be helpful for quickly jotting down lots of details. Make margin comments anywhere in your notebook, just like you would in your manuscript, by highlighting the text and clicking the Insert Comment button on the main toolbar. This is a great way to remind yourself of unanswered questions or unfinished thoughts.

Bring your characters and ideas to life, by adding concept artwork to any of your notes. Just click the Add Picture button and choose an image file from your computer. You can add as many pictures as you like, and you can drag-and-drop to rearrange them. Click on a photo to enlarge it, so that you can change the title and caption. Change the thumbnail cropping by clicking the button in the upper left and dragging the corners. When you’re done, click the Close Picture button in the upper-right corner to go back to your notes.

Your notebook starts out with folders for Characters, Places and Themes. You can define new categories of notes, by creating your own folders to represent all the important elements of your particular story.

For example, let’s create a folder called “Magic Spells” by clicking the Create Content button and choosing Folder from the Notebook section.

Now, whenever you create new content, Shaxpir knows to offer “Magic Spell” as a category in your notebook.

As you flesh out your notebook with more and more notes, it can be helpful to create subfolders to organize your notes into more specific categories. You can drag and drop notes into folders, or even nested underneath other notes.

Now that you’ve filled your notebook with colorful characters and ideas, let’s weave them together by creating connections between those individual elements.

For example, let’s go back to the character we created earlier, and connect him to his sister and his friends.

First, we’ll click on the Add Connections button (near the top of the left margin). An empty connection will appear in the left margin, right underneath the concept artwork. On the right-hand side of that new heading, click the tiny plus icon, to choose a character from the drop-down menu. Unlabeled connections can be useful, but most of the time, you’ll apply a label that represents the relationship between those two story elements. In this case, let’s click on the heading, and type the word “SISTER” to indicate a family relationship.

Now, let’s add a group of friends, by clicking the Add Connections button again and typing the word “FRIENDS” in the heading. We can add as many characters as we like to this list of friends, by clicking the tiny plus icon for each one.

You can click on those character’s names, under the connection heading, to take you directly to each character’s note.

You can create connections that represent personal relationships, places of origin, thematic symbolism, or just about any other type of association or cross-reference. In our example, we use connections to show that the character Nancy Bootlace lives in “Smithwick Forest,” that she’s the guardian of “The Amulet,” and that her character symbolizes “Regret.”

As you build the world of your own story, you’ll fill your notebook with characters, places, and themes. You’ll create custom Folders representing “Magic Spells” or “Spaceships” or whatever other specialized categories you need for your genre and style. You’ll use concept artwork to explore the visual landscape of your world, and you’ll use connections to represent the relationships between all those elements.

Shaxpir gives you a better way of brainstorming, so that you can write better books.

The World-Building Notebook is included for free, for all users, as a standard part of the Shaxpir platform. Download Shaxpir today, and try it out for yourself.