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This week: A World-Building Exercise Edited by: Satuawany  
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| Writing exercises are the way to get your mind and imagination working together. That doesn’t mean they’ll add directly to your concrete work, but often you come up with ideas that fit right in. Working your talent in these ways hones it, however, and that’s the point. Just like doing pull-ups works muscles that help you open jars and carry more groceries in at a time, writing exercises make it easier to flow with the go when you get to the “real” writing. Plus, you never know when you’ll find yourself dangling off a cliff and thankful you had those workouts. |
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Here’s a writing exercise that centers on world-building. It’s helped me out a lot, from the general workout making it easier to fill in details on my actual worlds to feeding me a detail now and then that I really can use in my worlds. Hopefully, it can do the same for you.
This particular writing exercise requires no actual writing. It’s a mind workout.
First, pick a scene from our world---it can be anything from a picture to the view out your kitchen window. This is going to be a two-parter, one side dealing with nature and the other dealing with any manmade items. There’ll be some overlapping.
 Nature Say you’ve chosen a rather simple scene. There’s a pond, grass, a few trees, and deer with its head raised toward the viewer. Take each thing and think of an alternative. They don’t have to correlate with one another; remember, this is an exercise.
For example, let’s say the trees are old live-oaks with sprawling, twisted branches and gnarly bark. Try to think up an alternate kind of tree that would make it obvious it was not from our world.
How about a tree with bark that’s stingy and comes away from the trunk and branches. Some trees in our world (a cedar comes to mind) have a bark that’s similar to that, but take it a few steps further. Let’s have a tree whose bark is so stringy, and hangs in such clumps, that it looks like hair.
Can you think of any uses for the bark? (Birds would probably love to make nests out of it.) Can you think of any animals that might make their homes in such a tree, maybe directly in the bark? Or maybe foraging animals eat all the bark off the lower parts of the tree, giving it an even stranger appearance. What are those animals, and do they strip those tress of their bark year-round or by the season?
Manmade Items For this, you have to look no further than some corner of your house. Maybe just a shelf. (I have fun with it in coffee shops and bookstores.)
On the left side of my desk, I have a plastic container of disinfecting wipes, a brass horse, and a coffee cup full of pens. For the sake of the exercise, we say the people of some imaginary world would have things that fit the same purposes as these items. The point is to come up with some other way of filling an item’s purpose. The fun part is, you can throw in magic.
For instance, rather than these disinfecting wipes for killing the germs my flu-ridden husband leaves here, they could have a spell on the surfaces that repels germs. “Assuming they have germs,” you might say. Well, that’s fine; if that kind of thought pops up and intrigues you into following it, follow it. That’s part of what makes this exercise effective.
Aesthetic objects, like my brass horse, are almost too open to otherworldly substitutions. It’s not a bad avenue to travel, though. If it’s an ornament in the shape of some fictional creature, what about it makes it something people would want as an ornament? You can even start my asking, “Why a horse, in this world?”
This is more a mental free-writing exercise than anything else, but it’s just the kind of thing to grease the wheels when you get to work on the worlds you mean readers to see in your stories. Best thing is, nobody has to know you’re doing it.
It may take some effort at first and, because it’s a mental exercise, it could be difficult to feel like you’re making progress. You can always turn it into a tangible writing exercise, if that works better for you. It’s not a bad idea to have physical evidence of your talent’s evolution.
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A couple of articles on world-building that caught my eye:
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And some stories that caught my eye:
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Fantasy: March 06, 2013 Issue [#5551]
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