History That Never Was

A red vein Indian mallow (Abutilon striatum) plant

Now that the 2024 WriteHive Online Conference panels are available on their YouTube channel, I’m catching up on the ones I missed during the conference itself and sharing some of the things I gleaned from them here!

I watched “Rooted in Story: Cultivating the Natural World in Ink” to get some cool ideas on how I could incorporate more nature into my writing. The panelists talked about nature and characters, the aspects of nature they like to include in their stories, and more!

The idea of using nature to show aspects of a character was fascinating to me, as it’s a part of putting together a character that I don’t often think about. But by having characters interact with the natural environment, either in a positive or negative way, can tell you something about them. Some characters might observe the natural world around them and take joy in it, while others might only think about the negative aspects, like bad weather. Nature can also be a character in the story, as an unknowable force that could be a source of conflict and peril for the other characters. It can also be used to reflect something about a character or as a foil to the character–an example one panelist gave was the idea of two trees growing toward each other, and it being a foil for a character who doesn’t want to be close with others.

The panelists also talked about balancing the amount of research you’ve done on the natural world vs. the perils of an infodump of that information, giving some examples of the depth of their research for short phrases or passing comments. One panelist suggested micro-dosing the infodump, which I thought was a clever way of talking about parceling out the information without it getting overwhelming.

Finally, the panelists talked about climate change in the real world and/or speculative settings, and how you can use the information from how climate change has progressed in our world to build a speculative world that might have gone through similar (or even worse). There was a ton of information in this panel, which runs about 1 hour and 15 minutes, but you can check it out for all of the details on WriteHive’s YouTube Channel!

Tags: advice, character development, conference, craft, natural world, nature, online, panel, world building, writehive, writing

This entry was posted by dawn.vogel on Monday, February 3rd, 2025 at 6:00 am and is filed under Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.