In September I was lucky enough to be accepted to join the Do It Together Festival, hosted by the Ubele Initiative, to give a workshop about creative writing, specifically fantasy worldbuilding, for the BAME writer. The workshop had only been an hour long, so I'm taking this opportunity to build on the points we touched on, dive deeper, and build higher. Writing is intimidating enough as it is, but creating a story within a notoriously whitewashed genre as fantasy (here I mainly discussed High Fantasy and Sci-Fi Fantasy), a BAME writer can feel horribly confined by years and years worth of Euro-centric imagery, metaphor and culture. It's not their fault - so how do they build a world that doesn't direct them to whiteness, writing whiteness, and believing this whiteness was the only foundation for their story to grow from? Well, I hope this will be a little insight into how. Imagine a brick wall. That brick wall is going to become a beautiful and colourful and meaningful mural. But before we slap on the plastering and paint, we have to make sure that wall is as steady and sturdy as possible before moving on to draft, fill and create our mural. Our brick wall is the world we mean to set our story in. It needs to be strong and sure so that it is easily accessible through our storytelling. We can dip into that foundation at any time throughout our narrative and use the details we've established to really bring our writing to life. And because the culture, the history, the flesh, blood and bones of our fantasy worlds are laid out in front of us, all we have to do is write. And a great way to start is following (if loosely) this simple diagram, above, appropriately named The Hero's Journey. Here, we can track how and why our protagonist interacts with the world we've built, the points in which they would access information about the world, and how this would be used to propel their journey foward to its conclusion. From the ordinary world (the place where our protagonist is most settled or knowledgeable of i.e. the Shire for Frodo and Bilbo, or Market Chipping for Sophie Hatter in Howl's Moving Castle) the main character will be chosen, or pulled into action, by a call to adventure, beginning the chain of events that will lead the protagonist further into our fantasy world to complete their quest. Above are later variations of the same cycle - Leeming and Cousineau simplifying the steps (I'm personally most drawn to the latter as it allows for more freedom when writing) in comparison to Campbell's original journey. The steps themselves can and should be altered by our own writing - these aren't rules to command our stories by, but the guidance and direction the journey gives is invaluable, pariticularly when and how to dip into the rich worlds we've already built.
Look out for my next post for part 2 where we'll talk about soft and hard worldbuilding, and really start to understand the history of Eurocentric fantasy writing!
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