Fantasy Writing

This workbook turns the Fantasy Writing course into hands-on building of your own world, magic system, structure, and scenes. Each section maps to a course module and pairs exercises, fill-in worksheets, and checklists you can run against your work in progress, plus editable templates for a world bible, a magic-system rulebook, a hero's journey beat sheet, and a scene-and-stakes tracker. Work one section per module, keep a running project file, and use the action plan to take a single story from idea to a fully outlined draft.

Build your setting from geography outward so cultures, economies, and conflicts feel inevitable rather than bolted on.

Sketch a rough map of your story's main region by hand. Place mountains, then draw rivers flowing downhill from them to the sea, merging rather than splitting. Mark the rain shadow (lush windward side, dry leeward side). Then place every town and city only where water, food, or trade makes it inevitable. Finally, circle the chokepoints (passes, fords, harbors) where conflict and stories will naturally happen.

Pick your story's most important culture. Name the single scarcest resource where they live (water, metal, timber, safe land). Then derive at least three cultural features directly from that scarcity: a value, a ritual or law, and a source of conflict. Resist inventing culture for its own sake; everything should trace back to the constraint.

Fill this in for each major culture so it reads as a society with internal variety, not a single-trait stereotype.

Design a magic system with clear rules, real limits, and a steep cost, and follow its consequences into society.

Write one paragraph defining where your magic sits between hard (explicit, rule-based like Mistborn Allomancy) and soft (mysterious, undefined like Gandalf). Then apply Sanderson's First Law: list every plot problem magic will help solve, and confirm the reader will understand the relevant rules before that moment. Flag any place magic rescues the hero with a power the reader has not seen.

Apply Sanderson's Second Law. For your magic, write one of each: a limitation (something it simply cannot do), a weakness (a vulnerability or side effect using it creates), and a cost (a price paid every time, physical, emotional, social, moral, or resource-based). Then put your protagonist in their worst moment and check whether magic makes escape too easy. If it does, raise the cost until escaping would cost them something they do not want to lose.

Complete this one-page rulebook so your magic stays consistent across the whole manuscript.

Structure your plot on the hero's journey and the MICE quotient, build the middle with try-fail cycles, and hold a consistent POV.

Map your rough plot onto Vogler's twelve stages (Ordinary World through Return with the Elixir). For the three or four stages your story actually uses most, name the predictable cliché version (chosen-one prophecy, dying bearded mentor, motiveless dark lord) and deliberately replace it with a specific alternative drawn from your own world and characters. Keep the emotional function; throw out the worn furniture.

Identify your dominant MICE thread (Milieu, Inquiry, Character, or Event) and any secondary threads. Write the order they open, then confirm they close in reverse order, like nested brackets, so nothing dangles. Next, take your story's middle and rewrite three key beats as try-fail cycles using yes-but or no-and so each attempt complicates the situation.

Fill this in before drafting so your POV is deliberate and consistent.

Pace scenes with scene-and-sequel, escalate personal stakes with ticking clocks and dilemmas, and handle clichés deliberately.

Take one important action scene from your draft or outline. Rebuild it on Swain's scene structure: a clear goal, escalating conflict, and an ending disaster (a setback or a costly win, never a clean victory). Then write the sequel that follows it: reaction (emotional fallout), dilemma (a hard choice among bad options), and decision (which sets up the next scene's goal).

Write down your story's biggest external stake (the kingdom, the world). Then anchor it to one specific person the hero loves, so the world is at risk but the scene is about saving this one person. Add a ticking clock (a hard deadline) and confirm that each act makes the danger greater and the hero's options fewer.

Run your draft against the common fantasy tropes and decide, for each one present, how you will handle it: subvert, deepen, or earn.