How to turn the world "alive"?
I'm writing a novel with a fictional world in it. I've already planned many events and the history of its nations, but I feel that there is missing something for it as I write the chapters.
In my vision, the way we turn the world more active and alive is by making impact over the character's psychology. Their beliefs, their morals, their opinions and how they act upon that. The world builds the character and the character builds the world.
If you guys have know a way of how could I enhance this weight of the world in the characters and their actions and/or if you guys have an alternate view of how to turn the world more alive, I would like to hear it.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/28058. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
Worlds and their histories are abstractions. People don't live in worlds and they don't live in history. They live in a particular neighborhood at a particular time. Their horizons are small. Only their local bubble is known by direct experience. The wider world is known largely through stories, which have an utterly different texture from common experience.
Consider how the world of LOTR is developed. It starts not even in the Shire, but in a single Hobbit Hole. Harry Potter begins in Privet Lane. Wind in the Willows begins with a particularly lovely descriptions of the riverbank. Brideshead Revisited begins with a bank of roadside flowers. Cannery Row begins with the particular sights and sounds of Monterrey, California.
Just as all politics is local, so all experience is local. You cannot make a universe come alive for the reader. The scale it too great. But you can make a place, come alive, a house, a street, a riverbank, a town. Once the reader accepts the liveliness of the local, that liveliness will lend life to the wider world, in the same seen-from-a-distance way in which we accept the liveliness of the things that dot our horizons in the real world. But if the things close to us are made of canvas and paint, then we will assume the distant scene is canvas and paint as well.
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