WORLD BUILDING

It is a miracle – but the miracle is storytelling — Elizabeth Knox

Still hunting down approaches to illuminate the actor’s, director’s and writer’s job of building worlds, in this Substack article I ask a novelist how she develops and produces shining new universes.

Elizabeth Knox is one of the world’s leading fantasy writers. Her novels are breathtakingly inventive and her characters are grounded in the remarkable worlds they inhabit. Her best-known books are THE VINTNER’S LUCK and the duet DREAMHUNTER and DREAMQUAKE. Her latest is THE ABSOLUTE BOOK.

Like me, Elizabeth lives in Wellington, New Zealand. She teaches World Building at Victoria University.

In this interview you will read how she has evolved a process by which she presents her group of students with a series of provocations that enable them collectively to build a world, develop characters and to write a fantasy novel as a group. Her approach is fascinatingly similar to the way a director might use improvisation to grow the …