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Hey folks, I've stumbled upon a new method for worldbuilding that has helped bypass the blocks in my mind and increase my overall output, so I thought I'd share it to see if others wanted to try it out. For context, I have always struggled with worldbuilding. I get bored and distracted too quickly, so I don't like sitting down and working out accurate timelines, historical events, lineages and things like that. I am far stronger with my character work and find it far easier to present information through the eyes of a character. Enter epistolary worldbuilding. I've found that I work far faster and have more fun by detailing such things in small fragments of text written in-world by various characters. These are usually only a sentence or two long, and I typically don't attribute them to anyone specific or assign a date to them. They're just fun little snippets of character voice witnessing or reflecting on events I'm imagining in my head but am struggling to detail accurately. Part of the fun for me is headhopping through a bunch of different viewpoints and trying to convey a strong sense of character and setting in just a few lines. On their own, each fragment doesn't mean a lot, but when you read a couple at a time you get a larger sense of what is going on in the world that I think feels much more human and character-driven than a dry description of events and dates. Obviously this leaves a deficit of any objective information, as each viewpoint is biased, but I think this is a more accurate representation of history within a world. It can even just help for the original genesis of a sequence of events and then it is simple enough to add dates and create objectivity as needed. But personally it has been a while since I've been worried about objective truths within my writing. So far I've only really used this for worldbuilding history, but I can highly recommend it to others that are more comfortable writing character than doing worldbuilding. I don't think such a process would work to figure out the metaphysics or magic system of a world, but I'm curious to see if it is effective in other contexts. Give it a try. Let me know what you think. We can share examples in this thread.
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