Foundations of World-Building: Bringing Your Fictional Worlds to Life is a comprehensive course designed to help writers create rich, immersive worlds that enhance their stories across all genres—fantasy, sci-fi, historical, contemporary fiction, and more.

From crafting realistic geography and diverse cultures to developing political systems, histories, myth and lore, language, showing rather than telling, and finally, integrating world-building into your fiction, this course covers all the key elements of world-building.

The Activities and Practice components in the Foundations of World-Building course offer you the opportunity to get to work on your world-building. Each lesson module includes relevant and creative exercises designed to reinforce that specific topic.

These hands-on exercises are designed to help you apply world-building principles directly to your story.

In the Reflection Questions sections of Foundations of World-Building course, I encourage you to take a step back and critically evaluate the work you’ve done throughout this module. The reflection questions are designed to help you think more deeply about the choices you've made (or will make) in building your world—whether you're working on geography, cultures, magic systems, language, or integrating world-building into your narrative.

Each set of reflection questions is designed to help you assess the consistency, impact, and depth of your world-building. Through them, you can examine how well your world interacts with your characters and plot, and how the details you’ve developed contribute to the larger story. These questions are meant to guide you in planning and refining your world so it feels immersive, coherent, and essential to the narrative without overwhelming it.

By answering these questions thoughtfully, you’ll gain insight into areas where your world-building could be strengthened and how your creative choices affect the overall flow and engagement of your story. I hope you enjoy the process!

By the end of the course, you’ll have completed a series of foundational activities that form the basis of your world, ready to be expanded upon and integrated into your writing. I hope you will experiment, explore, and refine your world-building skills.

Let's get started!