Community Articles:
Writing How-To’s 

It is a rare and wonderful thing when a book doesn’t merely tell a story but creates a world—one with weather and texture, with strange currencies and stranger creatures, and above all, with a human pulse. The most enduring works of fantasy, indeed of all fiction, don’t shout at us to suspend disbelief—they quietly seduce us into belief by making that belief
unnecessary. We are not so much convinced as converted.

What are the tools of such literary enchantment? Worldbuilding, such an unfashionable and overused word, isn’t just the domain of epic sagas and sprawling trilogies. It is the craft of orchestrating a reality so resonant that we know what a character might dream, or even how a pine branch might snap underfoot. It begins, always, with character.

Consider Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, a novel of theological daring that introduces us to Lyra Belacqua, as recalcitrant and vivid a heroine as literature has known. Lyra is not merely a protagonist—she is a cosmology. Her slang, her swagger, her intelligence—each aspect fleshes out the rules of her universe. The daemons, those intimate animal companions, are not mere window dressing. They are psychological truths made of fur and feather. Pullman doesn’t ask us to imagine another world. He insists we’re already in it.

But character alone cannot hold the scaffolding. A world must smell of smoke and stone, must have a horizon and a season. Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea novels are a master class in atmosphere. She sketches islands with an anthropologist’s eye and a poet’s restraint. Ogion’s hut smells of herbs and silence. The language of magic is Old Speech, not simply to exoticize, but to remind us that names have weight and that language is power. Her archipelago is as sensuous as it is symbolic—each tide and shadow metabolized into meaning.

And what ties these elements together, what makes them not a quilt but a living organism, is dialogue. No one understood this better than Terry Pratchett, especially in the Tiffany Aching novels. His characters speak as real people do—shrewd and often funny in a way that exposes as much as it conceals. Dialogue here is not just talk—it’s traction. It moves us through the story while rooting us in the soil of the narrative world. Granny Weatherwax doesn’t explain magic; she talks about its effects. She says, “The thing about [learning} witchcraft is that it’s not like school at all. First, you get the test, and then you spend years findin’ out if you passed it.” And in those few words we see power, wit, and affection.

These three—character, setting, and dialogue—are not separate tools but more like tuning forks. When struck together, they resonate, creating a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Worldbuilding, then, is not about creating things. It is about inventing truth. And the best writers remind us that immersive worlds are not just escape hatches, but mirrors held at just the right slant.

Noel Seif, a former writing instructor and an avid reader, has published several short stories, most notably in The Awakenings Review and Cicada Magazine. She is currently at work on a novel. She lives with her husband and cat in Lowell, Michigan.

We all know the symptoms: a lack of inspiration, restlessness, anxiety. Experimenting with a new font. Researching the science of why cats knead our stomachs and other soft surfaces. An expert-level urge to clean.

Yes, we’ve all had writer’s block.

Writer’s block—that despised nemesis—has many causes (trust me; I’ve researched them when I was supposed to be writing). One common cause is overthinking, which happens when the prefrontal cortex goes into overdrive and launches us into repetitive, unhelpful thought cycles. But creative sensory activities can shift neural activity away from this analysis paralysis and spark the default mode network, a network of brain regions associated with imagination, daydreaming, and idea association—just what writers need!

So, how can we fan our creative sparks? 

1. Soundscaping: Close your eyes and listen to ambient sounds—in real life or via YouTube. Listen to the waves, or the band warming up, or the traffic, or children shouting, and then let your mind wander to a scene, emotion, or character based on what you hear.

2. Doodling: Create gesture drawing in five-minute doodles: quick sketches of imagined characters, places, or abstract shapes. Don’t worry about the finished product; the focus is untethering your creative instincts.

3. Creatively moving: Move your body to embody a mood or a character. Try an angry march, a sneaky creep, a joyful bounce, an exhausted stagger, a surreptitious skulk. 

4. Talking: Deliver a one-minute monologue. Choose a random emotion or situation and speak as though you were a character experiencing it. No pressure to be polished; simply talk for 60 seconds about aversion or astonishment or delight or loathing or tenderness—or about realizing too late that your tour guide is your ex, or trying to sneak out of a meeting unnoticed, or showing up at what you thought was a costume party but really is just a regular party, or encountering your long-lost childhood friend while on vacation.

5. Smelling: Prepare a bag of fragrances (spices, essential oil, new crayons, cat food, mint, rubbing alcohol, etc.). Breathe in each scent, and imagine a location associated with each.

6. Touching: Prepare a bag of different textures (cotton, burlap, sandpaper, gummy worms, etc.). Feel each texture and imagine who or what is associated with each.

7. Repurposing: Choose an object—a pencil, for example, or a flipflop—and come up with ten other identities for that object. For example, the pencil is a walking stick for a bunny or a pole vault for an action figure. The flipflop is a mouse raft or the world’s smallest trampoline. This exercise works well individually or with a partner.

The next time overthinking hampers your progress, try one of these creative exercises—or invent your own. Not only are they more fun than succumbing to the expert-level urge to clean, but they’re much more likely to uncork your creativity. So, grab a drawing pad or a pinch of lavender or a scrap of sandpaper, and write on!

Laura Reinders Stormo was winner of the 2023 Scriptoria Fiction Award. She lives in Grand Rapids with her husband, two teenage sons, and chubby orange pandemic cat. She is the testing coordinator at Calvin University and loves to read, write, paint, do crafts, garden, attend Scriptoria, and spend time with friends.

I returned home from Scriptoria 2024 traumatized.

Oh, I loved what I learned about writing as I rubbed elbows with fellow writers and writing experts and dancing in the tents of language with people who love words and stories as much as I do.

But what I learned from editors and agents crushed me. My book concept fell short. Its potential readers—conservative Christians grieving the death of a loved one who didn’t fit the standard criteria for entering heaven—was a small and difficult-to-reach market.

I also concluded I did not qualify for a traditional book contract. For that I needed either fame or thousands of social media followers.
I could boast neither.

I especially grieved the need for preexisting fame. I didn’t blame publishing companies. They contracted my earlier books during their golden years with less competition and easier sales. In a now-crowded world of fewer sales, online competition, and self-published books, many conventional publishers can no longer gamble on a nobody. Their writers must carry much of the marketing load. Since those golden years, I have self-published several books to local acclaim but limited sales. This time I had a greater goal — reach more readers. But I didn’t know how to market in the electronic age. Could I actually learn that skill?

Despite my slough of despond, I doggedly continued a weekly Substack column, “Notes from the Prairie.” I began freewriting 1,000 words each morning as both therapy and writing discipline. I resisted learning to grow my platform or researching online marketing. 

One fall morning, a Facebook ad for a free PDF about book marketing sparked my interest. For the first time, I acknowledged that regardless of how I eventually publish my next book, I need to learn online marketing skills. I clicked, provided my email address, and received the free guide. I didn’t immediately take action, but I tucked it in an electronic folder, “Free Facebook Author Help.”

Facebook’s algorithms instantly clicked in, and soon I was inundated dozens of offers for free PDFs about online book marketing and for free online seminars. I attended a dozen free seminars, and my author-help folder is now stuffed with 70+ freebies.

So far, I have heeded some of the advice by:

• Creating an author website using a template from an online company

• Launching a private Facebook group, “Growing After 50”

• Researching the felt needs of 50-year-olds as they face the coming decades

• Creating a Free PDF “Strengthen Your Memory” for people over 50 who provide me their email address

• Shifting the focus of my weekly Substack column toward aging

• Trading guest posts with other writers who have older readers

Still waiting in that folder are 60 additional PDFs which include instructions for:

• Creating reader demand before launching a book

• Writing a book title, subtitle, description, and author biography

• Building a launch team to click into action on publication day

• Snagging podcast bookings—and more

My brain and folder overflowing, I have now returned to my first love: research, organizing, interviewing, and writing, but for each stage I am better prepared to attract readers.

If that’s your writing goal, perhaps my experience can provide a first step for you.

Carol Van Klompenburg has played and worked with words ever since her first-grade poem won a blue ribbon. In adulthood she has published nonfiction books, articles, and a few poems. Her attempt at writing sparkling fiction fizzled to death in its first chapter.