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

Develop the Habitat

Once you choose your landscape setting, start looking for the key information in the children’s section of the library. It is one of the best places to start a search for key information because the research books take habitats down to bare bones information. When you’re not sure what you actually will need, these books give great basic visual and content material to help you decide.

Next build your location up with a field guide or photo essays, travel videos and travel magazines that specialize in your particular corner. Also look for natural history writers who dig deep into their ecosystems with facts and metaphors. For example, if you need a good sense of the far north, then read Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams.

Study weather patterns. What potential storms would fit best your character’s quest? Raging rivers, tsunamis, hurricanes. Look for natural habitats that have a long history of dealing with this force of nature and place your fictional town or city in the middle.

If your character were to transform into her habitat what animal, or bird, flower or tree, body of water, type of wind would she become?

Writing Assignment

1. Choose one key habitat setting in your novel and then choose one scene.

a. In this setting make a map that charts the trajectory of your character’s emotions whenever she has been present in this place. Try color-coding if she experiences a variety and see what color is prominent.

b. Choose one scene set in this place. If you were to adapt your character’s emotions to music here what would you use? Why?

c. If you were to paint an abstract of this person here, what colors would you use?

d. What does she smell, hear, taste, and touch, here and now.

2. What is missing?

3. Rewrite the scene threading in one of these details as implicit emotional resonance.

Share. What kind of storm would best reflect your character’s emotional stress?

Building a Story World

“Stare at your world until you discover what it has to offer you,” Jack Hodgins

Landscape

The amount of detail you develop for your landscape will depend on the level of its ‘character’ you want it to be in your story. If you are writing an adventure that highlights physical endurance and challenge like the Indiana Jones series, then your setting details will be extensive. However if the bulk of your story occurs within a few city blocks, such as West Side Story, then you need the level of a background stage setting—just enough to ground your reader comfortably and realistically in location. You still need the exact specifics to match the tone and atmosphere.

You can either begin from the inside out by imagining the location of your setting visually, and finding the right pieces to fit; or you begin from a natural habitat and focus on the specifics that define your atmosphere and story questions.

For example, perhaps you have a town set on a mountain. You can either choose an existing mountain town and research its natural habitat, or you can choose a mountain, from wherever you want it to be—study its natural landscape and then transplant a town from somewhere else to reside there. The landscape will give the reality to the fiction.

The moors portray an image of beauty, wildness, danger, freedom and loneliness. Desert, ocean, forest, meadow, stream, canyon and island all have distinct characteristics. Even if your character will be interacting with all kinds of terrain there will still be one that is ‘home’ and one in particular that will seem threatening.

Exercise: Choose a key place in your setting. What natural landscape could hold common ground across centuries, and what capabilities could descendants inherit? List examples that could carry both the foundation of setting and the echo of atmosphere.

Share: What kind of terrain lures you for rest and restoration.