World-Building 3: Historic and Mythic

[Prof. Sky Alton]

I touched on creating a sense of richness in my previous prompt. Now that you’ve populated your world with some people (or at least made a start on what kind of people you’re going to have), it’s time to think about what they believe in and why. Can you imagine our world without any of the myths and legends that have built up over the centuries? Even if you don’t believe that a bull-like monster once lived in a huge maze, you probably know the story of the labyrinth. It’s that kind of shared knowledge that gets passed on that you want for your world.

You don’t need to design an entire history or mythology for your world (unless you want to, of course), you just need to make people feel like there is one. J.R.R Tolkien once included a throw-away line about ‘the cats of Queen Beruthiel’: these cats (and indeed the queen herself) were never mentioned again but in context, it felt like the characters would all understand this reference to a well-known legend or historical figure.

Be careful though, doing this too often may just frustrate your reader if there are forever references to people they’ve never heard of. It’s best to work out a few myths, legends or famous historical events and mention them in just enough detail to be interesting: they should also be important to your character in some way so that it’s easy to drop them into the narrative without really looking like you meant to.

For this task, you can either write one legend or historical event that your characters would probably be familiar with or you could write several scraps of history or mythology that you could weave in. Remember that sayings or metaphors are often a useful way to do this.

Your piece should be at least 200 words in all. You’ll earn 20 beans for completing this prompt as well as it counting towards the chance to snag our shiny Quill and Ink award.

There is no deadline as such for these prompts but if you’d like it to count towards your chance of earning the award for a specific year, we’ll need it by the end of that school year. If you’re comfortable sharing, then post below. If not, email your story to us via hol.bookclub @ gmail.com (without the spaces). Oh and remember it’s a good idea to check through your piece carefully for spelling and grammatical errors as they make it harder for people to properly enjoy your work.