Find out everything you need to know about building a world from scratch. Learn about where to start, pitfalls to avoid, and tricks for creating a world that feels real.
Magic is more than window dressing, and we’ll help you to think through the impact adding magic to a world has on its people, its technology, its cultures, and the lives of your characters.
Worldbuilding: Landscape Science for Worldbuilders
Summary:
Get a geologist’s perspectives on regional natural settings to help bring your own world to life.
Description:
Get a geologist’s perspectives on regional natural settings to help bring your own world to life. We’ll focus on terrain variability, continental placement, key terrain issues, and distinctive sources of conflict. Topics include deserts, mountains, lowlands, tropical islands, and volcanic areas, with time for follow-up questions. Scott Rice-Snow is a professor of Geological Sciences at Ball State University in Indiana.
Worldbuilding: Landscapes Our Feet Can't Tread - But What if They Could?
Summary:
Most parts of volcanoes, glaciers, and the sea floor are closed to us, but what would they be like if we had the ability to explore them first-hand?
Description:
Most parts of volcanoes, glaciers, and the sea floor are closed to us, but what would they be like if we had the ability to explore them first-hand? How would our experience of terrain shift if we bypassed constraints of mass, time, and scale?
Scott Rice-Snow is a professor of Geological Sciences at Ball State University in Indiana.
Find out what it takes to truly master the written form. From point-of-view and punctuation to dialogue tags and scene breaks, learn the basic techniques that will help you to succeed as a writer.
Writer's Craft: Avoiding the Exxon Valdez Infodump
Summary:
The infodump! Dreaded bane of interesting SF/F... or is it? Learn how to throw huge amounts of information at your audience elegantly, naturally, and subtly.
Description:
The INFODUMP... that infamous scene where characters lecture the reader for fifty pages on everything they'll ever need to know in case they want a PhD in the writer's work. Spare your readers-- there's a better, easier way to feed them clues! This presentation will explore a variety of techniques for worldbuilding and information presentation that can give your reader massive amounts of painless knowledge, often without them even realizing it...
Find out how to put your characters through the proverbial (or perhaps literal) ringer in a way that pushes them to their limits but doesn’t feel like unnecessary abuse.
Examine different approaches to creating backstories for your characters, and find out just how much time and effort you need to put into fleshing out your characters before you start writing.
Characters will give you everything else, they bring their own world and plot. How do you come up with ones that are interesting and not cliches? An interactive workshop.
Description:
A man comes through the door with a gun! Wait, what kind of man? An old man? A child? A woman? A white man? A black man? A man with zebra stripes? An alien? An elf? A man in a wheelchair? An old elf in a wheelchair comes through the door with a gun -- why, this story is more interesting already! A fun interactive workshop. Bring your imagination and come prepared to put it to work.