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This is just Fantasy Main Menu This is Just Fantasy Preface Intro Choose Your Fantasy What's your world? What's Up People? Creating your races So You Want to Play With Magic? Developing and refining magic systems What Makes Us Who We Are Creating your main character All Together Now Final project-combining all the parts to make a scene Metacognition Works Cited

Enlarging Your World

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So now you've got the broad setting of what your story will be. Now it's time to start actually putting it together, going from thinking about the concept behind the world to the aspects of the world itself.
Something that quite often makes fantasy unique is the setting. More than other genres the setting can have more effect on everything because we can do anything with the world, change all the aspects of reality to fit our desires. This is true even about Urban Fantasy as quite often there is a magical world where all of the fantastical creatures dwell that has its own rules and form connected to Earth (though this isn't always and isn't necessary. Having a separate but connected realm does have benefits in giving a clear way that the fantastical has always existed on Earth without detection [because the fantastical creatures don't actually live on Earth itself).
However, the more fantastical your world is the more work you need to do to bring it to life. This is because the audience will have less of a frame of reference for what you're creating and so the work is on you to bring it to existence.
In order to do this, it would be good to review how to do descriptive writing here and to look over this guide on how to "show, don't tell" (and when you think you have a grasp of that, read the linked article at the end of the guide. One of the key lessons I've taken to heart is "Once you know the rules, then you can break them." There are always times where it might have greater effect to break the rules purposefully, but before you try to do this you need to make sure you have an understanding of what the rule is, its purpose, and the effects of breaking them).
Some fun to keep in mind, remember that everything can be messed with, space, time, gravity, the limits are your imagination.
Activity: Write out a description of the setting your scene is in using descriptive language and show don't tell
Example:
"The city took what humans consider to be facts of reality and turned them on their heads. It was a city where a building of stone was coaxed into the shape of a tree, and where a tree was shaped to be a home that looked like a rock formation with ever-growing outcroppings. Clear glass, glittering gold, gleaming silver, refracting crystal, added on wherever the creators of the buildings decided they’d look pretty in places and ways that no human craftsman could put with tools. Some houses obviously started out as white trees but were formed into unique shapes, still growing and rooted even as they provided shelter, often large enough that the tree should fall over, accentuated with metals at random locations to give the wood some shine and glass windows seeming to be naturally part of the structure. Other buildings were made out of stone that seemed to naturally come out of the ground below like a natural rock formation. They could see that even gravity was disregarded, with paths to the buildings around them growing to match entrances that opened to the sides or even the ceilings of buildings as often as they allowed people in at the floor. Many of the paths scorned convenience in favor of whimsy, going in curves, circles, and even upside down before they reached their destinations. Despite the variety, one thing was consistent: the fog that was the city’s namesake enveloped everything. It wasn't thick enough to hide anything, instead leaving it all with a somewhat pleasant blur. Occasionally colors-deep blues, verdant greens, blood reds, and occasional glints of many others-would ripple throughout, with no apparent source. The colors refracted through the crystal, went through the glass.

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This is Just Fantasy Garrett Winters
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What Makes Us Who We Are We're almost to writing, but there's the slightly large detail of who your main character or characters are going to be. I'm putting this last because all of the other parts matter in creating your character. With a grasp of everything else, let's sit down and figure out who they are and their purpose in this scene of your story (if you need to refresh yourselves about what the task was or your answers, each part's title is a note, clicking on it will pull up the text on that slide, pressing go to note on the bottom will bring you back to that part so you can review your activity).
In Choose Your Fantasy, you chose the mood of their journey and lives.
In Enlarging Your World, you figured out the location and description of this place which helps determine their purpose being here.
In What's Up, People, you figured out their culture, appearance, and roots (for the purpose of this part if you did a different race there because you're using an actual human race and aren't creating anything for your main character, do focus on your main character to describe them).
In So You Want To Play With Magic, you created the magic system and how a magic user would wield it or how a non-magic user might respond to people who do use it.
Now let's combine all the info that we put together and describe our characters.
Activity: Basing off of all the data put together a description of your character (later on in the semester we'll put much more focus into character development, this is just to build within the scene).

Example: Alex is a seemingly stereotypical muscle man from Greece with a dark past. In Greece he was a sailor with his partner as part of a fishing crew. However, out in the seas they ran across the sirens, whose enchanting song lured everyone to their deaths except Alex who remembered how Odysseus and his crew were told to plug their ears with beeswax. Lacking beeswax he put his earbuds in and blasted music at max volume so he couldn't hear the sirens...only to watch as all of his friends and the man he loved jumped off the edge of the boat to follow the song and drowned. After seeing how the presence of the Gods and their monsters caused such death, when Atsa came telling him of an opportunity to seal them away again he jumped for the chance so nobody else would suffer like he did. Because homophobia is rather rampant in Greece he doesn't reveal he isn't straight, so being tall, tan, and muscular from hard work sailing leads to women fawning over him which makes him deeply uncomfortable. He's trapped in Ceo because after Jon, a character who had most of his mind erased by the force opposing the Gods that Alex thinks they should ditch to be able to better save the world, said fae once which brings their attention Alex decided in his rather rash nature to say fuck it and repeat the word multiple times leading to the fae picking them up because they were actually willing to forgive Jon and not take them but Alex basically made them want to teach him a lesson. Because his first exposure to mythology coming back to the world was death of the guy he loved he's highly distrustful of the magic and everything else that came back with the Return.

This page references:

Urban Fantasy