World Building Exercise

Angels Falls by Gilbert Williams

The past couple of weeks I’ve been deep inside a flare of ongoing health issues that has been particularly intense. After a year of actively pursuing new treatments and spending an inordinate amount of time “working” on my health, it is humbling when everything collapses. It’s easy to feel like despite my efforts, nothing has been achieved.

Most days the pain exceeds my baseline ability to function normally. But then again when our country is executing ICU nurses in the street and sending babies to internment camps, when genocides continue day after day the globe over, what does it really mean to function normally? (STOP ICE AND STRIKE WITH ME ON JANUARY 30TH).

I don’t know.

I do know that when I feel this bad the only thing that helps is creating stories. And creating worlds.

I’ve been deep at work on a project that has no representation, no publisher, no track forward. It is a world that I am building to save myself. So that I can get stronger and help other people too in more practical ways.

Maybe that story will see the light of day someday.

But I want to offer to all those struggling right now that it is powerful magic when we imagine worlds rather than individual characters. When we imagine characters as sensory worlds themselves, holding many different conflicting species and storylines. It is that type of imaginative muscularity we need to bring to our current imperio-fascist paradigm.

I don’t need a new hero. A new democratic candidate. I need new worlds. New models. New narrative shapes.

I’m sharing an exercise below I’ve offered in writing workshops I’ve taught in the past for those attempting to write fiction and fantasy/sci-fi.