A Way With Worlds
World Creation Column
 
 
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All works copyright 1999-2001 by Steven Savage unless otherwise noted

 
Columns by Subject
WORLDBUILDING:
  1. Your Main Character - Why your setting is your main character.
  2. It's The Little Things That Count - What you need to know to build a good world.
  3. IN THE BEGINNING . . . there was a lot of planning - Origins of worlds.
  4. Intelligent Life and Culture - Who's in your setting?
  5. Magic and Technology - They may work different, but setting-wise they're the same thing, and important.
  6. Crime and Punishment - Crime, law, punishment - and a step-by step way to review these elements and address issues.
  7. More Crime and Punishment - Odds and ends on crime and punishment.
  8. Cycles of Conflict - A little psychology applied to writing conflicts, and exploring using a specific theory in your stories.
  9. Losing The Race - Making your own races can lead to creating stereotypes if you aren't careful.
  10. Yin and Yang: Knowledge and Ignorance - Sometimes it's what your character's don't know that's important.
  11. The Odds - Just what are the chances of things happening in your world?
  12. Normalcy - Just what is normal in your world - and just what is normal, period?
  13. God, Darwin, History - Avoid the three biggest excuses in writing and life.
  14. Parallel Earths - Alternate Earths require subtelty they don't always recieve.
  15. Technology and Terminology - Beware Technobabble! A look at how characters refer to technology.
  16. Without Words - There's more to communications than just things your characters say.
  17. The Realism Factor - Reality is a two-sided process - or is it one?
  18. Apocalypse How - It's the end of the world, and amrageddon is a lot of work.

HEROES:

  1. Yin and Yang: The Deadly Hero - Killer heroes, stereotypes, and bad writing
  2. The Paradox of the Badass - Tough characters can be tough to write.
  3. Yin and Yang: Self-Serving Self-Sacrifice - It' isn't self-sacrifice if you do it for yourself.

INSPIRATION AND TECHNIQUE:

  1. Getting a Vision - The warm-and-fuzzy issue of getting a feel for your world.
  2. Finding Inspiration - When you need ideas.
  3. Timeline-Based Writing - Using timelines for inspiration and story writing. Worth reading.
  4. Timeline based Writing: The Critical Axis - Further expanding on the Timeline-Based Writing column, looking at ways to find coherent storylines when you can't seem to.
  5. Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed - The largely illusionary quest for originality.
  6. Why Are We Doing This? - The first anniversary column of Way With Worlds, and an introspective look at creativity.
  7. The March - History is happening as you write, not just when you build your world.
  8. Communicating your World - Just because you built it doesn't mean readers will understand it.
  9. Playing God - A great way to make your work less than divine.
  10. TMI - You may have a world, but writing about it the wrong way can negatively affect your readers.
  11. The Drought - Your readers need to know what's going on - don't disappoint them.
  12. Aslan Meets His Match: Theme versus Setting - A look at the idea of new Narnia chapters, and what it can tell us about worlds and story themes.
  13. Dark Mary Sue - There's something worse than a heroic Mary Sue - a Mary Sue villain.

READERSHIP:

  1. Getting Readership for your Continuity - The evils of pandering.
  2. Readership on your terms - Getting readers for your world.
  3. Service, Service - What's worse than Fanservice? Find out!

REAL-LIFE EXAMPLES:

  1. Putting it All Together: Xai - My own experiences in worldbuilding.
  2. World View: Evolving with Alicia Ashby - Taking a simple anime and making something new without changing it.

RELIGION:

  1. Writing Religion in your Continuity - Writing religion in a way that works.
  2. Creating New Religions - Spirituality from scratch.

WEB DESIGN:

  1. Webbing your World #1 - A crash course in web development (somewhat dated) for putting your world and works on the web.
  2. Webbing Your World #2: Getting fancy and getting involved - Going beyond simple pages (somewhat dated)
  3. Webbing your World #3: What goes into your webbed world - Good page design and philosophy.
  4. Webbing Your World #4: The Revenge of Whoever - By popular request, a column on making your web world's design work for visitors.

YIN AND YANG:

  1. Yin and Yang; Utopia Dystopia Cornucopia - Absolute good, absolute evil, absolute writing nightmare.
  2. Yin and Yang: The Deadly Hero - Killer heroes, stereotypes, and bad writing .
  3. Yin and Yang: Self-Serving Self-Sacrifice - It' isn't self-sacrifice if you do it for yourself.
  4. Yin and Yang: Knowledge and Ignorance - Sometimes it's what your character's don't know that's important.
  5. Yin and Yang: Subjectivity and Objectivity - You know what you know - or do you? And what do your characters really know?