Build a Story World

Cities Cont’d

Another way to build history into your world, and to find great ideas, is to track a city over a long time period alongside its changes. For example, study a city that made a major transition from rugged camp conditions into a cosmopolitan world center. Or you can go into the opposite direction: a once major city is now a shadow of its former appeal. What caused the downfall—corruption or public indifference or a little of both?

If an entire city seems overwhelming, choose one neighborhood.

The fame need not be in location only, but perhaps as a center for the arts, or sports or medicine or industry. What brought it to fame and why did it lose its ‘authority’?

Give your cities a connection historically too either through education, or commerce or religion. Jerusalem is a holy city for Christians, Jews, and Muslims, but not all their holy sites are in the same location. However some are. Has the city been ‘owned’ by so many different cultures that each can claim a heritage to it. What kind of conflict can become attached to your protagonist?

Copy one facet of a famous world city across our own timeline and use it to tie your own city together. For example, Alexandria Egypt and its famous library, the architecture in Prague Czechoslovakia, or Paris France for art.

Share: Which city did you choose to study?

Build a Story World

History Cont'd  

Cities

In week one you did a freewrite and list exercise with cities. In week two you looked at building habitat with its legends and history and landmarks. Here you pull them together to decide which cities in your world are to have prominence, based on history then and history now.

Choose three cities: one modern, one middle-aged, and one ancient within your world’s timeline. What is the key historical focus of each city/town? If it lost its prominence—why? Was it once a major seaport and is now a land-locked desert?

Another approach is to look at the ‘ghost towns’ of your country. Were they bustling towns based on gold or another mineral and when they dried up everyone left? Or perhaps a new form of transportation made a once major city obsolete, like the railroads did in many countries as they bypassed some well known towns for others. In what areas did a population leave due to changes, such as many stage-coach routes lost their livelihood when the railroads took over.

Share: Which historical focus gave the strongest emotional connection?

Building a Story World

There are three main obstacles to our writing goals: Perfectionism. Fear. Procrastination. When we develop an ongoing creative process, we can sidestep all three. Our world building becomes an exciting place that we desire to spend time in, instead of an overwhelming dilemma.

Questions: Who, what, when, where, why, and how.

Exercise one: Go back to your free-write and apply these questions to the character of the city. What do you know? What don’t you know? Make a list for further research on missing parts.

Letter: Write a short letter either from your character or to your character.

Exercise two: Choose the city you loved the most from the earlier list and have your character write to a person in that city, or receive a letter from a friend visiting that city. Or make it impersonal as if a business assignment.

Application

Writing Assignment:

Choose a few details from each of your exercises, mixing and matching theme, setting, and memory. Now write up a short episode as a brief memory of your character. It can be either from the POV of this was once her home or as a visit to a strange place.

If you started with an imaginary place in the first city free-write, it now has real footprints.

If you chose a real place, it now has a personal emotional connection to a real person, and if you also added some details from another city, then you have a real place—only different.

Share: Which brainstorm techniques worked best for you? Which were the most difficult? Why?

Building a Story World

Here are a few more techniques to apply to reach the heart of your worlds instead of staying on surface description.

I strongly recommend that all the brainstorming be done by hand whenever possible. Why? For one, working by hand supposedly shifts our attention into a more creative mode. Second, more importantly, it becomes portable. Each of these methods, apart from journaling, can be done in 2 to 10 minutes. Think of them as ongoing creative breaks through your day. And if you happen to have a job/life that literally will not allow you to write every day, you can still brainstorm every day, so that when your computer time opens up you are ready to write without needing warm-up or re-entry time. Your novel stays fresh.

For those of us slow dreamers who tend to procrastinate, we will have a stack of snippets ready to develop. No lost time. It helps prevent writer’s block, because we’re not really writing—we’re exploring possibilities.

List: Make a list. Set timer if you want. Minimum two minutes, but I suggest five.

Exercise one: List ten to twenty cities that you have visited that you absolutely loved, or would love to visit if you had the chance. (Can also repeat for those you hated.)

Go back through the list, and next to each city write one word that captures that city’s memory for you—why you love it: Architecture, food, felt free, fell in love, etc.

Scratch List: Make a few categories and combine common factors under each.

Exercise two: Look at your city list so far, and see if there are any common factors. Separate accordingly. Does one category contain many and another a few? Why? Make a note of what makes two favorite cites land in different categories.

Share: How many creative breaks were you able to add into your week?