Lecture: Will novels remain writers' favourite form?

China Mieville asks Will the novel remain writers' favourite narrative form?

Has the dominant literary form of the 19th and 20th centuries grown stale? Is it no longer the best means of delivering stories in the 21st century? Or does the classic literary novel remain the form best placed to deliver innovative, memorable writing? Drawing on discussions about censorship, style, politics and identity, this session, bringing Edinburgh's 2012 Conference to a close, offers an address by multi award-winning author, China Mieville with renowned author Janne Teller in the moderator's chair.

Link Round-Up: World-Building for Writers

Charmaine Clancy's W is for World Building Workshop can be read online or downloaded in .pdf format.

Denyse "Domynoe" Loeb's Alden.nu has five world-building outlines along with tons of other templates and lessons here.

Encyclopedia Mythica offers info and articles from A to Z on mythology, folklore and religion to help inspire and populate your fictional worlds.

Evidently pantsers can world-build, too, just in reverse: Kat Zhang's Backwards Worldbuilding.


For obscure words and vocabulary resources, you can't do much better online than The Phrontistery (warning, wordsmiths, highly addicting site.)

How to Draw Nice Maps

Kathy Steffen's article Jump-Start Your Imagination: Creative Writing Exercises for Worldbuilding offers a list of questions you answer about your world as building exercise.

Loren J. Miller's Mythopoets Manual covers in exquisite detail the many things writers might consider when writing the multi-cultural fictional setting.

Orion's Arm states their manifesto as "...to inspire writers, artists and thinkers. To create a vision of the future that is plausible at every level, internally consistent and abides by the accepted facts and theories in the physical, biological, and social sciences." Some decent examples for hard SF world-builders.

Stephanie Cottrell Bryant's 30 Days of World building tutorial can be read online or downloaded in several different formats, and covers a range of topics interesting to world builders. 

Quote

Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone.
- Alan Watts

Video: Ira Glass on Storytelling

[ Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 ]

Even if you’re not happy with what you’re putting out, even if your ability to execute doesn’t quite match up to your vision yet, don’t quit. This is normal. Do a lot more work and you’ll find the gap close.

Video: Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories

Interview: Margaret Atwood

BigThink is offering this great piece in which Mararet Atwood talks about technology, Twitter, Canadian humour, books, and, best of all, writing.