A Way With Worlds

1. Your Main Character - Why your setting is your main character.
2. It's The Little Things That Count - What you need to know to build a good world.
3. IN THE BEGINNING . . . there was a lot of planning - Origins of worlds.
4. Intelligent Life and Culture - Who's in your setting?
5. Magic and Technology - They may work different, but setting-wise they're the same thing, and important.
6. Pyramids of Power - Influence, action, and effect in your world.
7. Getting a Vision - The warm-and-fuzzy issue of getting a feel for your world.
8. Your World Is In Danger! - The importance of preserving data in worldbuilding
9. Retcon as Continuity - Turning screw-ups into actual plots.
10. The Fanfic Rebellion - Why fanfic sometimes takes odd turns, and what you can learn from it.
11. Attitude - Except in some cases, the concept of 'attitude' can give you a bad one.
12. Finding Inspiration - When you need ideas.
13. Webbing your World #1 - A crash course in web development (somewhat dated) for putting your world and works on the web.
14. Webbing Your World #2: Getting fancy and getting involved - Going beyond simple pages (somewhat dated)
15. Webbing your World #3: What goes into your webbed world - Good page design and philosophy.
16. Writing Religion in your Continuity - Writing religion in a way that works.
17. Webbing Your World #4: The Revenge of Whoever - By popular request, a column on making your web world's design work for visitors.
18. Getting Readership for your Continuity - The evils of pandering.
19. Readership on your terms - Getting readers for your world.
20. Creating New Religions - Spirituality from scratch.
21. Timeline-Based Writing - Using timelines for inspiration and story writing. Worth reading.
22. Yin and Yang; Utopia Dystopia Cornucopia - Absolute good, absolute evil, absolute writing nightmare.
23. Sex: A completely boring discussion - Writing from biology to society.
24. Putting it All Together: Xai - My own experiences in worldbuilding.
25. World View: Evolving with Alicia Ashby - Taking a simple anime and making something new without changing it.
26. Yin and Yang: The Deadly Hero - Killer heroes, stereotypes, and bad writing
27. Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed - The largely illusionary quest for originality.
28. The Paradox of the Badass - Tough characters can be tough to write.
29. The Stakes - Know who's fighting for what and why.
30. The Persecution Rests - Bigotry, biases, persecution - and how to write them.
31. Service, Service - What's worse than Fanservice? Find out!
32. Crime and Punishment - Crime, law, punishment - and a step-by step way to review these elements and address issues.
33. More Crime and Punishment - Odds and ends on crime and punishment
34. Yin and Yang: Self-Serving Self-Sacrifice - It' isn't self-sacrifice if you do it for yourself.
35. Timeline based Writing: The Critical Axis - Further expanding on the Timeline-Based Writing column, looking at ways to find coherent storylines when you can't seem to.
36. Why Are We Doing This? - The first anniversary column of Way With Worlds, and an introspective look at creativity.
37. Cycles of Conflict - A little psychology applied to writing conflicts, and exploring using a specific theory in your stories.
38. Losing The Race - Making your own races can lead to creating stereotypes if you aren't careful.
39. Yin and Yang: Knowledge and Ignorance - Sometimes it's what your character's don't know that's important.
40. Yin and Yang: Subjectivity and Objectivity - You know what you know - or do you? And what do your characters really know?
41. The Odds - Just what are the chances of things happening in your world?
42. Normalcy - Just what is normal in your world - and just what is normal, period?
43. The March - History is happening as you write, not just when you build your world.
44. God, Darwin, History - Avoid the three biggest excuses in writing and life.
45. Parallel Earths - Alternate Earths require subtelty they don't always recieve.
46. Technology and Terminology - Beware Technobabble! A look at how characters refer to technology.
47. Communicating your World - Just because you built it doesn't mean readers will understand it.
48. Playing God - A great way to make your work less than divine.
49. Without Words - There's more to communications than just things your characters say.
50. TMI - You may have a world, but writing about it the wrong way can negatively affect your readers.
51. The Drought - Your readers need to know what's going on - don't disappoint them.
52. Aslan Meets His Match: Theme versus Setting - A look at the idea of new Narnia chapters, and what it can tell us about worlds and story themes.
53. Dark Mary Sue - There's something worse than a heroic Mary Sue - a Mary Sue villain.
54. The Realism Factor - Reality is a two-sided process - or is it one?
55. Apocalypse How - It's the end of the world, and amrageddon is a lot of work.
56. And In Closing - Way With Worlds draws to an end.

 

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