Today the Austin Writers Group had a workshop (first in a serirs of four) all about world-building – how to flesh out the world of your stories so that they take place in a living, breathing, dynamic world. This includes everything from plate tectonics to architecture to mythology to the weave of the local cloth, etc. There are levels and levels.
The exercise we worked on today was in creating a word garden, just to get ideas flowing and create a kind of snapshot of one specific part of that world. A place, or a scene. You’d start with one word, then for a few mintues write down any other word or phrase that came to mind off of that first. Then you cut them up into seperate cards, and draw a few. Choose 3 or 5 or however many (depending on how specific you want to be) and create a world or scene off of those words. We were then to write a paragraph or so about this new place.
My 5 words/phrases were: blazing sun, stone, horses, canyon, isolated.
And here is the paragraph I came up with:
The sun blazes down across the Outlands, heating the stones until the air above shimmers, mirage-like. The horses’ hooves strike sparks as they gallop down into the canyon. They know it’s their only hope of shade in this stark countryside. He watches from above, isolated and content, his rocky perch a brief shadow against the sun. He does this every year, when the wild horses come through – seeks them out, watches them. The older horses always guide the young ones along this same path, and he’s now worn a kind of seat into the rock, shifting his weight to keep limbs from sleeping, but never approaching closer. He knows he could catch them if he wanted to, tame them, break them; he has the skills. He would never. It is enough for him to simply know of their existence, and partake, however distantly, of a bit of their wildness and beauty. That memory, that knowledge keeps his soul afloat through the rest of the long year. It is his secret and his joy. It is also his deepest despair, for one day his masters will catch scent of his secret, and when they learn of the wild ones they will destroy them. Not kill them, no, but take them and turn them into sad mockeries of the beauty born of freedom. Make him do it, for harboring this treasure. The thought makes his chest ache. The sun beats down on his uncovered head, warning him of the hour, judging him for his future betrayal. He wants to explain that he’ll have no choice. But the sun isn’t interested in mercy today; it lowers itself to the horizon in exacting degrees. He sighs, fingering the stone collar on his neck, looking down on the horses now resting in the shade of the canyon walls. Their time is almost up.
Jonathan Westerfield says:
This really did blow me away. You do such a great job of creating an atmosphere here, one that really sets a tone for the work and creates the all-important “hook.” Nice job establishing a ticking clock.
You had better expand this otherwise I will come after you!
July 19th, 2009 at 4:00 pm