As in the last workshop, we played some word association games to come up with a supply of words to use for inspiration, this time focusing on the highest level of world-building, that of the actual world (rather than culture, or the individual). Then we drew a bunch of those words out of the mix and used 3 or 5 of them as the inspiration for a short piece, building the world of the story with the details we’d drawn.
We did this exercise twice today.
For the first round, my words were: fossils, depth, age, strata, and erosion. Here is the paragraph I came up with:
The ancient river had done the work for us over the eons. By the time our crew arrived on the scene, the water had long ago moved on, leaving behind bits of bone peeking out from their rock encasings. They gleamed like fine china amongst the dusky patina of the cliffs. We marveled at how clearly this planet had notated its history; each layer in the rock, each age, had its own telltale tint of color, changes in the proportion of minerals over time adjusting the earthy palette.
And for the second round, which dipped a tad into the cultural level of world-building: map-making, varied traits, new species. Here is the snippet born from that:
Being a biocartographer isn’t as easy as you might think, especially when you’re plunked down in a strange land not your own for the assignment. There are always new species popping up that need to be designated in spaces you’ve already filled, because heavens, it’s already diverse enough and you didn’t think the particular ecosystem could support another such-and-such. But lo and behold, it does. And subspecies! Egad, the trouble they cause. You mark out one area as inhabited by the blue-toed hornback, and then see another almost identical creature in the same place. Except this one has toes of a more purple hue. Is this just a exaggerated trait of the blue-toed hornback, or a separate branch of the family tree, so to speak? So then you have to halt everything to figure out that hiccup, putting you behind schedule. Again, since that happens fairly often. You can see why it takes years to accurately map even a small area.
Don’t even bring up migration, my blood pressure can’t handle it.