A Love Letter to the Index Card Writers

Something shifted for me recently. I've been world-building long enough now that when I watch movies and television, I don't just watch them anymore. I study them.

I rewatched Game of Thrones recently, trying to get into the new one — couldn't quite do it. Then we watched Dune, which I read decades ago, long before the first film, and I'm not apologizing for that timeline. And sitting there watching these enormous, intricate worlds unfold on screen, I found myself thinking something I never thought before: how on earth did they keep track of all of it?

Before I started world-building myself, I just appreciated the story. The dragons, the politics, the sand, the prophecy. I took it all in and enjoyed it. I didn't think about the infrastructure behind it.

Now I can't stop thinking about it.

I store 99% of everything in a digital corkboard — and yes, I said corkboard, because I'm of a certain age and I find I actually prefer the visual of it, even in digital form. Descriptions, pictures, character notes, timelines, all pinned up where I can see them. I back everything up on external hard drives and keep them in the safe. I have a search bar for when I can't remember what I called something. I have all of this, and I still sometimes lose track of where a character is supposed to be and when.

Now imagine doing all of that with index cards. Physical ones. That you wrote on by hand. That you had to file, cross-reference, not lose, not spill coffee on, and somehow keep organized across years of writing.

I have enormous respect for every writer who built a world before the digital age made it manageable. The Frank Herberts, the Tolkiens, the people who had filing systems I can only imagine — rooms full of cards and notes and maps drawn by hand. Stephen King wrote about a character in Dreamcatcher who had a perfect filing system inside his own mind, a little room where everything was stored and retrievable. I have a good memory. It is not like that.

These writers were the original architects. The original designers of storyboards and world building before either of those terms existed as we use them today. They built entire universes out of paper and discipline and sheer force of will, and they did it without a search bar or a cloud backup or an undo button.

If there isn't a building somewhere dedicated to them, there should be. And since I can't build one in reality, I'm building one here. Consider this blog post a small digital monument — a permanent award, on record, for the original architects of world building. They earned it. Every index card of it. 🐉

Dune also taught me something else that I carried directly into my own world building. I was young when I read it, and I remember going back and forth to the glossary constantly just to follow what was happening. It was worth it—Herbert built something extraordinary— somewhere along the way I made a quiet decision that I didn't want my readers doing that. I wanted them in the story, not flipping to the back of the book.

So in the Young Adult Series for Dragon World, when my character Tupi needs something that looks like an iPad, it's called a dragon tablet. Cell phones are Bifrost communicators — a nod to something familiar, dressed in the language of the world. The technology in Dragon World is advanced and stems from somewhere magical that honestly even I don't fully understand, and I'm not going to pretend that I do. But I want readers to recognize it well enough to keep moving. A glossary is a speed bump. Dune showed me that, and I built my world accordingly.