Kitty's Writing Toolbox
   


Last section! Congratulations on making it this far! There's one more planning exercise to go, and then the rest of the exercises are geared towards helping you move around in the world, feeling at the edges, making sure you've got everything and making sure you're comfortable writing in it after all that work.


46. Flora and Fauna
47. Historical Accounts
48. Short Sketches
49. Visuals
50. Outline
51. A Day In The Life
52. Finishing Up
46. Flora and Fauna

This is one of those things that could either be a huge section or could be the length of a paragraph. Also one of those sections you might decide you want to go back to and enlarge, enhance, etc, later. Right now, all you need to do is go through your notes and write down one to three sentences of description in every location where a plant or an animal might be significant (say, if a particular store has seeds or seedlings for sale, or if a particular place sells pets or pet items too, or items for farm animals) and the same for every character who might have an animal or grow a plant in their home. If your society as you've built it so far is heavily dependent on work animals, expand that to a paragraph per animal or plant: what kind of uses do they have, both in general and specific to the character. How difficult is the upkeep. Etc.
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47. Historical Accounts

Now for some fun exercises! Go back in your timeline and write at least two 500 word newspaper articles, historical accounts (such as by a scholar), or some other similar piece of documentary writing about two different events that happened in your world's past. Then write two more articles about the same event, but from a different point of view, any different point of view. How would a writer for the Daily Prophet cover the Arab Spring? What would a person's diary entry from Tatooine look like at the height of the Rebellion, as opposed to someone on Coruscant? They don't have to be opposing points of view, just different enough for you to get a good contrast.

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48. Short Sketches

Write five short pieces of fiction, dialogue heavy, from the following list: buying groceries, researching an unfamiliar topic at a library, making a large purchase (house or vehicle), enrolling in a class either academic or vocational, dealing with a crisis involving emergency services (this may include religious figures), revealing a secret to a/several friends or relatives, discussing plans for the future with a spouse(s) or lover(s), talking through a personal crisis of love or faith, courting a person, interviewing for auditioning or a job or apprenticeship or other similar position. These don't need to be from the point of view of a main character, it's just to give you an example of what a person in your world would talk like or do in any of these situations. The emphasis on dialogue is to keep it focused on the characters, but if you want to focus more on the setting (or use the setting as a character, which a number of well-crafted works of fiction have done) you can, too.

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49. Visuals

One for the visual learners! Make at least two pictures sketching out two everyday scenes in your world OR two establishing scenes in your work. Not action scenes or plot-heavy scenes, establishing scenes where you're setting out the most prominent characteristics of your protagonists, antagonists, or settings. Sketch, use photoshop, cut out magazine pictures and make a collage if you want to. Just do something visual, so you have that to go back and look at. You can do more than two, but at least do a couple.

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50. Biography

Write ten biographies of roughly 250-500 words of significant persons in your world, past or present. In this case, pretend you're writing a wiki article rather than writing from the point of view of someone who lives within the world because, depending on what literacy and technology level your world has in general, there might not be so many significant persons in the world and/or writing biographies might not necessarily be a Thing. Political figures, entertainers, scientists or magicians, people who were simply there on a day to catalyze an event. Serial killers. Revolutionaries. Innovators. Ten biographies, from various points in your world's history. Go!

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51. A Day In The Life

This one doesn't have to go permanently in your binder at all, it's just an exercise. Try to write an up-to-1,000 word short story about a day in the life of your characters for your main, antagonist, and three bit characters in your novel. Is your world fleshed out enough so that you can do this easily? Which parts did you get stuck on?

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52. Finishing up

Re-read. Go through outlines and bios, make sure everything fits and logically follows. Add in anything you may have learned from the writing exercises you did subsequent to the questionnaire. Organize it into a form you are comfortable with, and if you have to rewrite the whole thing, it'll help to solidify it in your mind. Because beyond that, you're done! Yay!

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