Afterwords Literary Festival: Workshop with Thea Lim

Worldbuilding is for Everyone with Thea Lim

The AfterWords Literary Festival was co-founded by Ryan Turner and Stephanie Domet, and in the fall of 2019, AfterWords held its inaugural edition.  In 2020, due to Covid-19, the festival will host live events online between September 30th and October 4th. AfterWords is primarily interested in presenting (and being in the audience for) conversations among writers about the ideas that push them forward, the experiences that formed them into writers, and what writing can tell us about how to be human. Our mission is to give those writers who choose to join us the very best experience that Halifax has to offer.

We will offer live captioning upon request to all of our online events. 

We celebrate our festival on the unceded and traditional homeland of the Mi’kmaq People. We do land acknowledgements as a part of the reconciliation process. In order for this festival to exist, for Canadians to enjoy the lives that they have, Indigenous people were removed, displaced, and killed. This truth is an uncomfortable one, but one that is necessary to face if we, as fellow Canadians, are to understand our whole history. We honour the Mi’kmaq, whose stories have been shaped by Mi’kma’ki.

How do authors build believable worlds? The term “worldbuilding” is usually associated with science fiction and fantasy, but the first job for any story is to convince the reader that the world is real. While also, of course, starting the plot, revealing the characters, painting emotion…This workshop will teach you the basic rules of launching a world, with max economy and multitasking, for any genre and any writer. Plus, we’ll also talk about how worlds that don’t make space for readers from marginalized groups, are 95% of the time also badly built.