The digital technologies of the 21st century are reshaping how we experience storytelling. More than ever before, storylines from the world's most popular narratives cross from the pages of books to the movie theatre, to our television screens and in comic books series. Plots intersect and intertwine, allowing audiences many different entry points to the narratives. In this sometimes bewildering array of stories across media, one thing binds them together: their large-scale fictional world.
Collaborative Worldbuilding for Writers and Gamersdescribes how writers can co-create vast worlds for use as common settings for their own stories. Using the worlds ofStar Wars,Lord of the Rings,A Game of Thrones, andDungeons & Dragonsas models, this book guides readers through a step-by-step process of building sprawling fictional worlds complete with competing social forces that have complex histories and yet are always evolving. It also shows readers how to populate a catalog with hundreds of unique people, places, and things that grow organically from their world, which become a rich repository of story making potential.
The companion website collaborativeworldbuilding.com features links to online resources, past worldbuilding projects, and an innovative card system designed to work with this book.
Trent Hergenraderis Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology, USA. His fiction writing has appeared in such places as
Fantasy & Science Fiction,
The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk, and
Best Horror of the Year #1. He is co-editor of
Creative Writing in the Digital Age(Bloomsbury, 2015) and
Creative Writing Innovations(Bloomsbury, 2017).
If we as creative writing teachers can increase the relevance of our discipline by tackling the type of storytelling students are interested in, while simultaneously helping those students grapple with thol¾
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