The winner of the Hugo Award for three consecutive years for her Broken Earth Trilogy, N. K. Jemisin has sold millions of books and created new cultures and histories. Now the acclaimed science fiction and fantasy writer is teaching you how to create a world from scratch, develop compelling characters, and get published. Build your craft and share your voice with inclusive fiction that reflects your experience.

Syllabus

Meet Your Instructor: N. K. Jemisin

N. K. Jemisin—Nora Keita Jemisin—is the three-time Hugo Award–winning author of The Broken Earth Trilogy. She opens by talking about genres of science fiction and fantasy, her personal journey, and what you’ll learn in her class.

Elements of Worldbuilding

Nora shares her methodology and framework for building a rich and believable world.

Macro-worldbuilding Exercise: Build Your World

To build your world, start by creating the physical environment where your culture and story will take place, from the planetary level to a specific location. Then add the “Element X” that will affect everything.

Micro-worldbuilding: Conceiving the Culture and People

Nora continues to break down worldbuilding by discussing how to create a new, believable, and engrossing structure of humanity.

Micro-worldbuilding: Power Dynamics and Cultural Appropriation

Learn how to create a believable structure by thinking about who has the power in your society, how different people adopt specific roles, and how to avoid inappropriate cultural appropriation.

Worldbuilding: Inventing Science and Magic

Nora challenges the definitions of science fiction and fantasy and gives you the tools to create plausible, otherworldly science and magic.

Worldbuilding: Research

Learn how to live life as a writer, absorbing and interpreting the world for your audience. Nora also shares how to incorporate research.

Immersing Your Reader: Choosing a POV

Nora teaches you about her immersion pyramid and how to choose a point of view to allow your reader to learn your world.

The Psychology of Characters

Nora draws on her education in psychology to help you rethink your ideas about people and human behavior.

Forget the Rugged Individual Archetype

Find out how to give yourself freedom in the kind of stories you tell and create characters that reflect the world you live in.

The Hierarchy of Characterization: Demographics, Outer Life, and Inner Life

Adapting Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Nora teaches you how to create a believable character.

The Hierarchy of Characterization: The Character Arc

Nora continues the discussion of character development by adapting the classic story arc structure to create externally driven and internally driven character arcs.