World building
Constructing a fictional world is one of the most rewarding and exciting aspects of writing your own stories.
How to construct a story
Today’s video is about how to build a story from the key components: world building, themes, characters and plot. Which is quite a big topic, and clearly not something one should try to cover in a 25 minute video. Yet here we are.
My 7 Pillars of World Building
When I was in the early stages of preproduction on Tales from the Triverse I ran into a problem. The serial is structured as crime fiction, with each storyline focusing on an investigation by the detectives. Sensible crime fiction writers set their novels in the real world, so that they can borrow from reality for their world building.
World building for fantasy stories
Aah, world building. Is there a more satisfying way to spend you creative time than to dive into a fictional space of your own making and detail it with a sprinkling of reality? It’s also a dangerous tempatation: a hole you can forever fall down, never to return, with no written words to show for your efforts.
How to do exposition without it turning into an infodump
I was in conversation with the inimitable Elle Griffin earlier this week, discussing the difficulty of explaining things to a reader without killing the story dead in its tracks. As Elle put it:
Building a multiverse
A couple of weeks ago I looked at world building in fantasy. Here it is in case you missed it:
World building for fantasy stories
Aah, world building. Is there a more satisfying way to spend you creative time than to dive into a fictional space of your own making and detail it with a sprinkling of reality? It’s also a dangerous tempatation: a hole you can forever fall down, never to return, with no written words to show for your efforts.
The appeal of the multiverse
Largely by accident, three out of my four novels have had multiverse settings. A Day of Faces was explicitly about a dimension-hopping bunch of teenagers, Tales from the Triverse is very portal-heavy and The Mechanical Crown hints at a multiversal backstory. I am apparently drawn to telling these stories, even though it was never part of a more consider…
Serialised fiction and internal 'canon'
I’ve had one rule while writing my three serialised novels, which can be found over on Wattpad: once a chapter was written, it was ‘official’ and could not be altered. This meant that if I accidentally blundered into a plot hole or narrative dead end, or had a character that turned out to be superfluous, I had to roll with it and find a solution within …
Try doing your world building in-universe
Hi. Aiming to send these out more frequently, while also filling them with more useful material. We’ll see how that works out. (You can of course unsubscribe at any point if you decide it’s not your thing)