It took me a while to get past the crap on my desk to get to writing Create A World Clinic yesterday.
But when I did, I got the draft of world one done.
“WORLD #1: The Dot World
Building Your First Complete World In Five Minutes”
I decided rather than do an introduction in the book, I’d walk writers through this five-minute world (and their first story idea from the course), to show the first step in the worldbuilding process, and why worldbuilding is for EVERY writer, not just SF/Fantasy writers or folks who do historicals.
I think this will be cool. Writers will be able to preview the book on Amazon or Barnes & Noble, and with just a pen and paper, be able to do the complete first exercise before they even buy the book.
1599 words yesterday.
And what’s even cooler is that, while demonstrating the technique, I got a short story idea I’m going to write. I’m tempted to do a collection of short stories using any keeper ideas I get from writing Create A World.
So that was yesterday.
Today, more World!
252 – plugging away even though I don’t feel like it right now. Nope – not at all. :/
2,000 words today during editing. Total: 71, 300. A serious hair-raising scene, too. Woke me up this morning.
Love it when that happens – very exciting! =)
It took me a little while to understand how important setting/world was in my stories set in the here and now. But when you get that a person’s setting really influences who they are, you see how important it is to develop that in your story. Your world makes you character who he is, whether it be on Mars or Middle Earth or downtown Pooksville, ME. Someone from Manhattan will have a different worldview than someone from Iowa.
Good luck, and thanks for putting so much effort into your classes/clinics!
😀 I was thinking about this last night. Worldbuilding is the difference between Jennifer Cruisie’s Welcome to Temptation or Fast Women, and every generic Harlequin Romance you ever read.
It the difference between Stephen King and the cookie-cutter horror that preceded him and followed him.
It’s the difference between my Secret Texts or Cadence Drake novels, and every Tolkein wannabe or Star Trek/Star Wars/Battlestar Galactica clone heading toward the waste basket on a editor’s desk right now.
A story told in a specific place, a specific time, a clear and compelling now, reads as real and memorable to the person turning the pages.
Worlds that don’t matter to the writer don’t matter to the reader, either.
So, so true. Why go through all that effort using ideas and worlds someone else has already done when creating your own is so much fun?
Holly wrote: “It the difference between Stephen King and the cookie-cutter horror that preceded him and followed him.”
So you can world-build in the real world? Stephen King set his horror in Maine, where he lived. Another good example would be “Lovecraft Country”, the mythicised New England of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories.
Mr King always said ‘write what you know’ and he did. But sometimes that advice needs to go further in art of the world-building. I have read Holly’s books and they remind me to sometimes ‘create what you don’t know’ 🙂 That is part of the huge appeal to world-building 🙂
Stephen King set his horror in Maine. But not in generic Maine. He set it in specific places, like Castle Rock. His places live and breathe because they’ve been worldbuilt.
Stephen King’s Maine is like Jennifer Cruisie’s Ohio. They are invented places that capture the essentials of a specific facet of the locale that heightens the reality of the story and brings place in as a character of its own.
If you’re writing in the here and now, you MUST worldbuild if you hope to have your stories live for your readers.
One of my favorite world creators is Barbara Hambly -especially her historical New Orleans stuff. Love the Benjamin January series! Of course Alexander McCall Smith hits a modernizing Africa dead on too. I can feel it, smell it, taste it – I am THERE.