Building a Real World in Fiction
Close your eyes and imagine the drawing room scene in which Darcy proposes to Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice. Now imagine the Tea Party scene with the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland. What about the scene in The Shining in which Wendy sees what her husband Jack has been typing all this time? Now think of a vivid scene from a novel or memoir from your reading. Can you picture everything clearly, as if you’re watching a movie?
World building is not just for fantasy writers. All fiction writers and memoirists must build our worlds, whether the world is Edwardian England, an imaginary land through a rabbit hole, a haunted hotel in Colorado, the world of your 1970s childhood, or the world we’re all currently living in. When we do this, scenes come to life and readers truly enter the world of our stories—and don’t want to return to the “real world” again.
In this weekend workshop, we will:
Introduce the concept of world building.
Study a few examples of well-built fictional and autobiographical worlds.
Learn how to create a history and timeline (backstory) for our characters.
Visualize our worlds, using various techniques.
Learn techniques that will help us create vivid scenes—and then put them into practice through exercises.
Discover the just-right balance between exposition and dialogue in scenes so that they come to life.
Be a member of a supportive and stimulating community of writers.
Write!
The class will consist of a combination of lecture, discussion, writing, and sharing. We will do various exercises throughout the weekend to work on world building, and you’ll have the opportunity to receive verbal feedback on your work. Writers may bring work from home to work on or generate new material—or both. This class is appropriate for writers of all levels.
We can’t wait to enter into your fictional or autobiographical worlds!
In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our weekend; workshop writing you bring from home.
