Tuesday, June 29th, 1999

A World-Building Exercise

Since there were no stories to critique, Judith had us do a world-building exercise for the four hours of class. She split us up into groups, one of which built the basics of the planet (including gravity, mineral resources, climate and major land masses), one of which worked on the cultures, and one of which developed creatures and various animals. I was in the cultural group and was very amused by how often we had to revise something based on input from the planetary people. The absolute basics of culture is economics. Once you know what rsources you have at your disposal, the cultures that you develop become better defined.

I had never done large-scale world building before and found it a fascinating exercise. I still prefer researching existing or historical settings to building my own, though. There is far more strangeness in reality than anything that I could invent in fiction.

Hmm