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Approaching Your World-Building Through Two Perspectives

Creating a new world for a story is intimidating! Sometimes it feels like as you’re writing, you’re tacking on world-building details that get buried in your draft.

I’ve also re-read my work and felt like the characters were vivid, but their world was blurry. There are a few ways to help your work when you come across these problems.

Perspective 1: Zoom In From Outer Space

Imagine looking at your world, country, city, or any other location from outer space. Create a new document or grab a fresh sheet of paper and start taking notes as details come to you, like:

• Is your world mostly water, land, or a mix of both?
• Do the inhabitants of your world survive on oxygen?
• Is your protagonist more human or an otherwordly creature?
• Where on that planet or in that country does your protagonist’s story take place?

After getting these ideas down, you can zoom in a bit closer. Ask yourself questions like:

• What’s the geography like where your protagonist lives/experiences your plot?
• How does society operate in that location? (Are there economic classes, politics influencing their lives, discrimination holding them back, etc.)
• Who fits best in that society, who doesn’t, and why?
• What does your protagonist like about that location and what do they not like?

Zoom in further if you want to start your world’s backstory. You should be able to answer things like:

• What local or national history created that societal or political system?
• Did any historical event take place that influenced your protagonist’s current life? (Maybe their grandparents relocated after a regional drought devastated their farms and others nearby. There could have been a national tragedy or success.)
• What is your protagonist’s personal history with the area? (Are the fond of their hometown because it’s where they were born? Did they move there as a kid and meet their antagonist?)

This method is best for people who love to plan their work. Enjoy learning about the world that influence’s your protagonist’s journey and remember that it’s okay to start writing at any point!

Perspective 2: Start With Your Protagonist

You can also start world-building by focusing on your character. Address details of their personality like:

• What is their normal routine?
• How does their routine work with or against their local society?
• Do they enjoy their current lifestyle?
• What’s most important to them?
• What do they believe in, outside of themself and their abilties?

Then you can start asking the most important question—why.

• Why does your character never eat meat?
• Why doesn’t their current life serve their interests?
• Why do they have the relationships with friends and family members that they have?
• Why do they have their specific set of values?
• Why does their life start changing at the inciting incident of your story?

The “whys” will lead you down natural paths to expanding your new world. It’s better suited to people who write without planning—just make sure you keep a record of your answers/world-building details along the way!

Play Around With Your World Building Routine

Creating your first in-depth world is a challenge, but it will come much more easily with practice. Try both perspectives in your writing to see what works for you!

aye-write:

A Quick Guide to Varying Sentence Starters

One of the things that really winds me up about my own writing is looking back and seeing a multitude of sentences beginning with “I” or “And” or “But”. I’m a messy first-drafter as it is and I do a lot of line edits, but it’s still takes up a significant portion of my time going back to change things. 

So, I’m here today to share with you the ways I try to vary my sentence starters and some tips and tricks for drafting and edits” 

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We all know why it’s important to vary your sentence structure, and by extent, your sentence starters. Besides obvious intentional things such as creating tension, or specific mood/tone/atmosphere, we should be aiming to varyhow we start sentences to keep the reader engagedand not it being repetitive.

This is especially important if you, like me, write in first person and begin a lot of sentences with things like “I was” or “I am” etc. Or if you have a habit of beginning sentences with characters’ names. But what other options do we have? Here are five general categories that I like to use:

ING WORDS
Coughing, she pushed her way through the blaze. 
Smiling, he leaned in for a kiss. 

SIMILIES (and other techniques)
Like the chattering of a typewriter, their eyes flittered over the group in front. 
Sweeping in like a dove, she cut through the awkward conversation.

PREPOSITION
(beside, near, with, across, around, out, at, in, etc.) 
On the starter’s whistle, I pushed forward. 
Under the heavy fog, the streetlamp glowed valiantly 

CONNECTIVE
(Because, but, and, despite, after, before, etc.)
After he left, I slipped the dagger back into its brace. 
But I wasn’t about to give in now. 

ED WORDS
Distracted, she let the ice cream fall from her hands. 
Stunned by his words, they stopped in their tracks. 

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Obviously you can make these examples much more complex and attuned to your own styles! There are lots of other ways you can vary your sentence openers, these are just what I personally use - so hopefully you can get some use of them! 

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Hints and Tips!

• Use the highlightingtreatment! Go through your WIP and focus on your sentence openers. Select a different colour for each category (Blue for She/He/They/I starters, red for ED Words, yellow for ING words, as an example) and use it to help you see where you may need to add some more variation! 
• This also is a great exercise to do with a published book you really enjoy or by an author you admire - it’s a great learning experience!
• Use a good mix of short, long, and medium sentences! If you find that your writing feels a bit samey or dry, even with varied openers, try changing the structure of the whole sentence itself! 
• Experimentand play around with word order and structure - free write for a few minutes every day and try something new! It’s all practice and even if it never sees the light of day in your WIP, it’s still a worthwhile thing to do! 

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I hope you’ve enjoyed this guide and/or found it useful!

If you’d like to request a particular guide, please pop into my inbox and leave a request!

writingwithfolklore:

Subtext : What We’re Not Saying

                Subtext in writing is everything characters don’t say. If you’ve been following me for a while you know one of my favourite things to say is “Characters never say what they mean” that’s subtext—it’s the implied, the unsaid, the hints picked up by readers, and it’s one of the most important parts of creating meaning in writing.

                Let me explain. A parent and their child are talking over the phone, maybe the context is the child moved out after a particularly bad argument and this is the first time they’re speaking since it happened. The kid says, “I really miss you and the rest of the family, I’m sorry for what happened, let’s not fight anymore.”

                The scene kind of falls flat. Where’s the conflict? The dynamic? The challenge? Through the child just saying exactly what they mean, we lose out on a lot of meaning—kind of ironically.

Instead, maybe they say, “They have daisies growing in the garden here, I think Clara would like them.” Better—we’re implying this kid is thinking of their sister, that they’re feeling a little homesick, or nostalgic for their old life. We’re saying they miss the family, they’re trying to connect again with Clara so they’re sorry for what happened, they’re calling because they don’t want to fight anymore.

                But without saying that, the parent can reply, “She’s into roses now.” A rejection of that connection, the portrayal that whatever that old life was has been tainted forever—it can’t just come back.

                That’s a very quick example, but there’s so much subtext you can create with the simplest of scenes. One of my favourite scenes I’ve ever written was two friends walking through a museum talking about the exhibits, but really they were talking about legacy, and their fear of their own mortality, all without ever saying that out loud.

                People never say what they mean because saying what you mean is scary. Had the child asked outright for that connection, they would have been opening up to outright rejection. Instead, the relationship can hide behind this implication—words between words. Subtext.

                Good luck!

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3 Ways to Write Scene Transitions

Moving from one scene to another in your short story or novel can be challenging. If your plot spans more than a day or a week, you’ve got plenty of time to cover.

How do you transition your scenes without jumping over crucial plot points or making the pacing feel rushed?

There are a few tips you can try when you’re facing this problem.

1. Tease What’s to Come

Let’s say you’ve started a chapter with your protagonist encountering people they don’t like while shopping at the grocery store with their exhausted two-year-old. The experience is frustrating, so your protagonist is simmering while sitting at a red light on the way home.

The main action of the chapter happens when the babysitter arrives that night, but it’s only 12 o'clock in your scene. You needed your protagonist to encounter the people that annoy them to establish motivation for the action later on.

You could jump time by teasing the action itself. Your protagonist could thrum their fingers on the steering wheel and glare at the red light.

They opened their arms to the resentment churning under their skin. It sank into their bones, morphing into electricity that kept [Protagonist] plodding through their day. The red light mocked their need to take action, but they could wait.

Because when the babysitter showed up that night, they would take their revenge out on the city.

That could be a great place for a scene break or even the end of your chapter, depending on how much you’ve written. The reader won’t mind a time jump because their interest gets piqued. They’ll want to know what revenge means for that character and what will spin out from the choices they make.

2. Switch Points of View

If you’re writing a 3rd person POV story with perspectives from at least two characters, you can also transition scenes by switching narrators.

While one character completes a plot-relevant action, the other could move the plot along by being a bit further in the future.

Consider something like this as an example:

Sarah’s heart beat wildly in her chest as the heavy words finally fell from her lips. It was just the two of them in that park, but it had felt like the whole world had watched her admit her love for Melanie in the molten gold rays of the setting sun. All she needed now was an answer.

[Scene break symbol or the start of a new chapter]

Melanie heard Sarah’s heartfelt words echo in her ears long after she had mumbled something about needing time. Time to think, to process. Sarah had been so understanding, even when she dropped Melanie off at home right afterward and skipped their usual Facetime call that night.

It wasn’t until Melanie woke up the next morning in a sweat that she realized she finally had to unearth her biggest secret—she had only started the friendship with Sarah because she’d been in love with Sarah’s older sister since the second grade.

You could make that time jump into however long you needed. Play with the scene set up in particular and then give the page or two to whoever loves to read your writing. They could talk about if it felt like a rushed scene or if the time jump felt right for that moment.

3. Wrap Up the Moment

Most of the time, I find myself struggling with a scene transition because the moment that I’m writing isn’t finished.

Recently I was writing a scene with two friends in a wagon on their way to a new city. They have a great conversation that sparks some character development in-between plot points, but I could feel that conversation coming to a lull.

It felt like the right moment to insert a transition, but something didn’t feel right.

I had to walk away from my work and come back to it to realize that I needed to wrap up the moment to move anything forward.

The solution I found was ending the conversation by making them appreciate their friendship more than before, based on what had been said, and then the protagonist ended the scene by reflecting on how they knew they could face anything in the new city with their friend by their side.

The next scene started with their wagon approaching the city walls after a night of sleeping under the stars. The reader will still understand that it took more time to reach their destination, but they don’t have to read excessive details about the cold night air or hard ground under the protagonist’s back to get to what they’re most looking forward to—the arrival at the new city.

Nothing about that night would add anything to the plot, so dropping the overnight experience at the beginning of the sentence makes for a great transition to the next scene.

Make Your Transitions Clear

Whether you end a scene with a cliffhanger, a heartfelt moment, or by switching between points of view, your transitions should always help the plot.

You can always edit them while reworking the finished draft later or ask for beta reader opinions from the people who always love reading what you write.

How to consume Writing Advice

There is so much writing advice out there lately, and I mean - a lot! On tumblr alone there are countless writing blogs full of authors and writers making remarkable efforts to provide all their own experiences and writing tips. For me, this is paradise! But I’ve definitely had that experience where it can all be a little bit overwhelming and hearing from some of our readers, so have they. So I wanted to give a little rundown about some good ideas when taking in writing advice. 

To preface, this is not in any way shutting down any of the following tips that you might have found helpful or prescribed to others yourself. The number one rule that writing is an extremely subjective experience and everyone will find different things helpful. So as part of my ‘how to’ post I’m going to tell you to simply disregard whatever tips you don’t find help you personally - including this post! 

So, let’s discuss. 

Try everything first and avoid what doesn’t work for you. See what works for you. If you hear some advice, and you are sceptical, I’d always suggest giving it a go. Similiarly, if you hear some advice many others seem to find helpful but it doesn’t work for you you by no means have to stick to it. The whole idea of ‘you should write every day’ has made writing a stressful experience and turned many amazing storytellers away from the hobby, for example. But the basis of the principle is a good one! As with most advice, routed in good intentions. It will not make you a bad writer to avoid certain pieces of advice that the majority stick too. Speaking of…

Avoid any ‘you should’ or ‘either/or’ statements put forward as if they are fact. As mentioned above, writing is hugely subjective and I tend to find any advice put forward in the form of a command or with no room for movement can be just as detrimental as it is helpful. 

Try not to let writing advice put you down. Because it can. As someone who tries to give others writing advice this is a hard pill to swallow, but check this out: here’s one example. ‘Oh, you’re having a hard time on your first draft? Well, I’m editing my second and you haven’t even started the hard work yet!’ Again, while this statement is not advice in itself it’s such a commonattitude I see in any writing community. It scares a lot of people who are just trying their best. You can’t control what tips are given to you without what hyperbole, you can’t control the actions of others - so I would advise you learn to spot it, so you can absorbing it. 

Keep in mind the country of origin of the advice given and if any dispensation has been given for International readers. The main reason for this is practicality: things like the editing process and how to get published, copyright law, and even common grammar errors might vary from country to country and I don’t want anyone getting themselves in any deep water. 

Learn to recognise negative input. One example would be the trend that tells people that they are ‘not allowed’ to write a certain topic, culture, etc, because of who they are. In my opinion, art including writing should be limitless, should be for everyone. Obviously this one depends on your own personal beliefs, but for me I would advise everyone to learn to recognise the signs of negative input. Some of these include; condescending or negative language or a presumption that the author/writer has done or is doing something wrong. 

If they want to charge you an up front fee, something’s sketchy. I’m sure there’s a lot of articles that I hope you guys have made yourselves familiar with about scummy publisher/editor practises. Please always keep these in mind! Now, it’s not the case advice will be poor if paid for, but it’s not the case it will be better, personalised to you or even given either. You don’t need money to get help, not on this internet. 

Try to avoid having someone else do your research. This one is difficult, because what really constitutes having someone else do your research? I’d say: asking one tumblr blog for a master list of links about, say, Norse mythology, and having this be the basis of your research. Research might not be everyone’s forte but it is a huge aid to the inspiration process! You would not believe the amazing things you could learn about your worlds; the things characters will just tell you stand out to them - the detail your story will bloom with if you research for yourself from many sources. Which ties into another point about cross-referencing different advice and tips given, especially when those tips are factual. 

Be vocal. Talk about your work. Talk about what has worked for you in the writing process and what hasn’t. Share sites, blogs and videos you’ve found to be helpful. Share resources. For example; for me, one piece of advice that has never worked for me is when people say ‘just skip the beginning’ of your story, start in the middle or at the end. There is so much I learn from every page and I find syncing up time lines hard enough! 

Anyhow, that’s just a few things for right now that I hope really help you guys out. This post isn’t about being down upon anyone’s advice, because really, none of us are entitled to someone else’s advice. It’s amazing that there’s such a community for writers online. I just want everyone to thrive!