One of the things that constantly surprises me is the number of people who put a tremendous amount of pre-writing work into inventing characters and developing plot, but who never stop to consider their setting or world, apart from “They start in a city, then they go
Read more →Last week, I got a series of questions from a student who was working on a worldbuilding project. Several of them caught my attention, most notably the one that asked when it is “appropriate” to use magic that has no strict set of rules in a story,
Read more →I drove down to Chicago yesterday with my father, and I let him pick the route. Instead of taking the freeway through Wisconsin, which I have done many times and which takes about 7 hours plus meal and gas stops, we drove down the west bank of
Read more →I keep running into the problem of “the main characters seem to be the only people in the setting.” Might I beg a post on how to do crowd scenes (or scenes in general) where there are lots of people in the background? –Question from Deep Lurker
Read more →Once you have a magic system, whether it’s something that you just know feels right in the story or whether it’s something for which you have painstakingly laid out rules and structure, it’s time to actually write about it. There are three considerations that fall under “writing
Read more →A couple of years back, I was on a panel about magic systems and how one handles magic in fiction. Near the end of the session, someone asked a question about “magical maturity” stories – the sort where children go through a sort of magical puberty during
Read more →Setting is one of the things that seems to get short shrift in a lot of beginner stories/novels. Even writers who are devotees of the Tolkien School of Background and Appendices tend to focus on the history and politics part of worldbuilding, and occasionally on various aspects
Read more →The other day, my walking buddy and I were discussing the use and misuse of slang in SF and fantasy. She was particularly exercised over an author whose entire repertoire of “future speak” seemed to consist of awkward and obvious portmanteau words like “carrocoli” for a hybrid
Read more →Worldbuilding is one of those basic skills that’s important for all writers, but vital for those of us who write in totally imaginary science fictional or fantasy worlds. There are two basic approaches, the soap bubble and the iceberg. For the iceberg worldbuilders, there’s a whole lot
Read more →There are other kinds of worldbuilding besides the deep-background variety I was talking about last post, to wit, the immediate-background sort and the in-story sort. The immediate-background worldbuilding, like deep worldbuilding, is stuff that not everyone needs to do in advance. It’s very similar to the deep-worldbuilding
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