Science Fiction & Fantasy: Creating Unique and Powerful Worlds

The great thing about writing science fiction and fantasy is that anything can happen. The hard part is that, well, anything can happen.

This Skillshare class will go over principles and guidelines that will help you shape your fantastic worlds and wondrous characters into memorable—and unique—stories. We’ll look at some classic SF/F works like Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Game of Thrones, as well as stories that might be new to you, in order to figure out what makes them tick and how we can apply their lessons to generating our own stories.

This class is geared toward introductory writers, however, the ideas and exercises we'll go over are useful at any level. 

Topics discussed include: 

• Worldbuilding
• The ripple effects of changes to reality
• Finding new angles on classic tropes
• Getting into the POV of characters in fantastic realities

Lincoln Michel is the author of the genre-bending collection Upright Beasts and the co-editor of the science fiction anthology Gigantic Worlds and the forthcoming horror anthology Tiny Nightmares. His work appears in The Paris Review, Strange Horizons, Terraform, Granta, and elsewhere. He teaches fiction writing in the MFA programs at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College. 

(Moebius)

• Introduction
• Class Overview
• Ripple Effects
• Focused Worldbuilding
• Thematic Worldbuilding
• Worldbuilding Granularity
• Discovering Unexplored Ground
• Portals into Your Characters
• SFF without Worlds
• Finding New Story Angles
• Putting It All Together
• Conclusion