Building Worlds: Crafting Immersive Settings Across Genres with Mathangi Subramanian— Feb. 8

Learn how immersive worlds help drive plot in our novels, memoirs, and essays.

In fiction and nonfiction, setting is everything: the context, the rules, the senses, and the stakes. Learn how to build worlds across genres with techniques that you can use to infuse your work with sensory details, structure the rules of a world, and work with characters within that world.

All levels welcome!

What you will learn

• Creating the rules of a world

• Generating sensory details

• Avoiding "narrative lumps" by using imagery to describe a world

• Seeing a world through different characters' eyes

• Understanding power and privilege in real and imagined worlds

Workshop takeaways

Students will come away from this course with the ability to spell out the rules of the world and to bring a world alive with images steeped in sensory details. They will learn how world building applies to nonfiction, and how their world can drive their plot. Finally, they'll learn how a power analysis of their world can lead to stronger characterization and conflict. 

Additional info

If you can't attend this class live, it will be recorded! Students will receive a recording the day after the class, and it will be available for 30 days.

About the Instructor

Mathangi Subramanian, Ed.D. is a neurodiverse South Asian American writer and educator who uses she / they pronouns. Her novel A People's History of Heaven was long listed for the PEN / Faulkner and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Her middle grade book Dear Mrs. Naidu won the South Asia Book Award, and her picture book A Butterfly Smile was inducted into the Nobel Museum by economics laureate Dr. Esther Duflo. A Fulbright Fellow and a trained educator, she holds a doctorate in education from Columbia Teachers College. She currently lives with her husband, kid, and a couple of gerbils who are surprisingly supportive of her creative life.