Burning Memories as Fuel for Worldbuilding (Part III)

February 24, 2025

In this final post, Creative Writing lecturer and Barbican author Edmund Hurst concludes his reflection on Fantasy, memory and fiction worldbuilding. We venture now into adulthood and discover how the consequences of our actions help shape our story’s beginning.

Burning your Adulthood

‘We burn. Reality remains.’

When was the first time you found out that actions have consequences? Real, lifetime consequences. The moment you realised that a childhood spent inside reading books did not in fact equip you for that future of the millionaire sports-star you just kind of assumed you’d be? We don’t get a do-over.

It is cliché to the point of glibness to write that stories are forged in cause-and-effect. But it is that sense of consequence that allows our worlds to become believable. To become real in the eyes of the reader. We all know that there are consequences for our actions. Reactions and results. Just because we are making it all up, doesn’t mean we have any less responsibility.

In fact, we might have more.

It is a rare story that starts at the moment of creation (though those do exist). However, for every story that doesn’t, they are beginning instead with a consequence. The result of something that happened before the story began.

Arx: City of Broken Minds begins with Caelan stabbing his fingers, desperate to remember something more than the five fragments he’s managed to cobble together from the tatters of his shredded psyche. Even a past entirely forgotten has consequences – and it is at the point that these consequences break open that our story often begins.

Exercise 3

How was your world first created? You can go back as far as you like with this. Perhaps your universe also included a Big Bang? Or a set of Creators who forged the land into its current existence? Or maybe it doesn’t matter – and the first time your city existed is when someone set the first boundary stone and called it home.

What happened next? Map it out – each new sentence connected by a forward arrow, leading all the way to that symbol from Exercise 1. How did we get there?

These events are not connected with ‘and then…’ They are inextricably linked to one another. Each moment should be connected via one of two words – ‘therefore’ or ‘however.’

When you reach the moment your symbol is created – you have one more step. Because you know that there is a lie embedded right in the heart of this object. And lies have wonderful consequences.

So do one more effect from this cause. The moment that lie breaks open and threatens to shatter the existence of your world itself.

That’s the moment your story begins. Write the first line.

Ed’s book Arx: City of Broken Minds is available now.

Images courtesy of Yasser Mokhtarzadeh, Georg Eiermann and Natalia Ventskovskaya via Unsplash.