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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/28065
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/28065
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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.

Original score: 7