How do authors create worlds so real it feels like readers can jump into them?

Inspire your students to think like authors, and deeply consider their worlds and the way that they impact character behavior. Move beyond physical descriptions to include culture, government, as well as the characters' personal world and their closest relationships.

You can use these:

• During Planning --To generate ideas before students embark on a novel writing or short story writing project,
• During Revision --To flesh out the worlds they've made after students have a draft, if the characters are feeling a bit flat or one dimensional, or if you're having trouble visualizing what's happening in their stories.
• As part of a novel or short story unit: To help students better visualize what is happening or to help them uncover root causes of issues characters are facing.

While the questions and prompts in this lesson take students through the process of imagining the world around a fictional character, they can also be used to think about the student's own lives, if they prefer to write non-fiction.

If you're back to teaching in person, you can print out the resources and have them sketch or draw with art supplies, or if they don't like creating images of their own, they can clip pictures from magazines. The assignment can also be done digitally during class, either by using drawing features on TPT's Easel, services like NearPod or PearDeck, or even the Zoom annotate feature, or simply through cutting and pasting from online sources.

This product includes:

• 4 Interdisciplinary Worksheets that encourage drawing, collage, and writing that take students step by step from the personal to the political and historical elements of the worlds they're building.
• a Writing Prompt that brings all of the brainstorming together, with a chu-bric (checklist rubric) where students (or you) can choose what elements they're hoping to excel at.
• Detailed Lesson Plans

I hope this material inspires you and your students to create complex and multifaceted worlds out of words!

If you like this lesson plan, you may also like

the Find Your Character in the Intersections Bundle, which takes students through a character creation process using Intersectional Theory, Unleash Your Story Dragon, which helps students create plots using Story Spines (what the Pixar folks use!), and Next Level Revision, which shows students the difference between a first and final draft of a published short story.

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I'd love to hear your story! How did it work in your classroom? What can I improve on?

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