Eastgate

World Building 1

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World Building 1

Part 1 of an online seminar on Tinderbox and World Building for fiction and creative nonfiction. Join us! Email questions and suggestions to Mark Bernstein.
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Let’s get right down to work. November is almost here, and November is a short month, and there’s never enough time.

In this seminar, I’m imagining a fictional world set in late Victorian London. Our central character is Florence Smith, a young woman of great energy and ambition who has been married for about a year to Hubert, a non-entity. The Smiths are barely middle class.

At the outset, I’m imagining a romantic melodrama, an entertaining story of struggle and ultimate success. We’ll have nice costumes and some terrific meals. This will be a NeoVictorian story; I’ll try for period detail and some historical accuracy, but the character will have familiarly modern sensibilities. They’ll be free to mention things that actual Victorians would have thought unmentionable.

This might be a novel, a novella, a computer game, or a hyperfiction. I suppose it could be a film or a comic. At this point, I’ve got a sense of direction and a deadline and not much else.

What does Florence want? I don’t know, really, but she needs to want something. To get this show on the road, we’ll say Florence wants to own a truly great painting. She wants this more than anything in the world. And, with an income of perhaps three hundred pounds a year, that’s going to be a tall order.

You’ll see Florence near the center of the map above. Around her I’ve added notes about other characters that we’ll clearly need.

So, already we’ve got a growing map. Each of these notes can contain as much text as we need. We can add as many notes as we want — and we can add notes inside any note, making maps inside maps. So there’s no worry about running short of space.

Moral: write stuff down. Flesh out the cast, adding characters required by dramatic necessity (the evil Mrs. Canon-Bragg) and those whose roles are clearly required. We must have a family, a source of income, and servants; who are they? What alternatives might be acceptable, and which ones must be avoided? Write stuff down; you’ll need it later.

Questions? Alternatives? Corrections? Improvements to the story? Join the conversation: email bernstein@eastgate.com . We'll be back in a day or two with part two, in which I plan to talk about Tinderbox Prototypes.

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