Worldbuilding
Carry one setting detail into a scene
Seven optional prompts. Read online or download plain text; your answers stay with you.
Download plain textOn this page
Use the invented situation or a fictional detail of your own. Answer on paper or in your own editor. You can skip, change, or stop the exercise at any point; the page does not collect your notes.
In an invented hill town, public doorways face uphill. Sera must deliver a table to the community kitchen. She measured the kitchen but did not check the steep approach. The table's legs were glued in place that morning.
Make a small working note
- State the setting detail in one sentence.
- Give a person an ordinary task affected by it.
- Which part of the detail is settled for this scene? Which part is still provisional?
- Write the person's first attempt at the task.
- Change one condition: a time, an exception, a missing fact, or someone's knowledge.
- Write the next attempt. What choice is available now?
- Keep, revise, or discard the detail. Note any fact the scene now establishes.
An optional comparison
In one version, the kitchen has a newer loading entrance. In another, it has only the uphill doorway. Neither is the correct answer. Compare the actions each version gives Sera, then keep the one you want to explore.
You can discover the detail by drafting first and writing the working note afterward. You can also leave a vivid detail decorative if that is all the scene needs.
Where this comes from
The prompts, town, table and character are original editorial material from this library's setting guides. No instructor worksheet is reproduced. Those guides separately identify the limited practitioner sources that informed their discussion. No claim is made that this procedure improves every story.