I haven’t yet figured out what the cadence of posts to this Substack will be, as it will replace a lot of my previous social media use on Facebook and Twitter. I do know that I want to post about World-Building, though. It is my greatest strength as a writer, and sharing what I’ve learned by doing over the years is fun.
I also know that a lot of people who are interested in this subject are working writers and narrative designers who are looking for craft tips and inspiration. So on World Forge Friday, I’m going to post a basic world-building prompt for your fictional setting—and after you’ve had a chance to give the prompt a try for 15-20 minutes, you can read my commentary on how to actually use it.
Prompt: Your VC’s Prepare a Meal
Pick a Viewpoint Character in your setting. In a novel, a VC is someone we might follow for a chapter, sharing their experiences and possibly having access to their thoughts and feelings. In a game, a VC is a playable character (or in a ttrpg, one or more Players).
Your VC has a mission: to prepare a meal. And it’s not just any meal! This meal is important. Something vital hinges on the chef’s success. When this food is served, the pleasure given to the diner(s) could change your VC’s life.
The three elements you have to work with are Ingredients, Tools and Talent, and Audience. Let’s assume that in all three categories, your fictional world is different from our contemporary world. You’ve gone back in time or you’re looking far into the future. You’re on a different planet, or you’re cooking for visitors from another dimension. We’re world-building here—it’s an exercise for the imagination.
What problems could arise for your Character(s) as they struggle to achieve this objective? How will they overcome these challenges?
Take 15-20 minutes to write something up. It doesn’t have to be a complete scene or narrative, just take enough time to sketch out the basics.
How to Use This World-Building Exercise
If you think of this prompt as a quest, your Character’s steps are 1) assembling the Ingredients, 2) acquiring the tools and talent to prepare the food, and 3) serving the meal properly to its intended audience.
It’s up to you how many obstacles you put in a Character’s path, and how difficult it is to achieve any of these three things. Good stories are about overcoming our problems, and good world-building is about finding opportunities to reveal our Characters and their world in interesting ways.
Ingredients
Where do the Ingredients for this meal come from? How hard will our Character have to work to acquire them? If certain Ingredients are not easy to get, what makes them inaccessible, and how does your VC beat the system?
In our modern world, even a simple dish can incorporate spices, fruits, vegetables or grains from all over the planet. These ingredients are cheaply and easily available at our local grocery stores—but in the past, a pinch of spice was the prize of a long and perilous quest to a far-distant land. Even Stone Age people travel for miles and set up long-distance trade networks to distribute ingredients like salt.
It took centuries of exploration and diaspora, war and trade, not to mention countless technological advances in transportation and preservation to create the bounty we find in a modern grocery store.
How is the food culture of your world different?
Scrounging up the ingredients for this meal presents us with all sorts of opportunities to explore our Character and their circumstances.
Are they immigrants living in a place where it’s hard to get the sauces, spices, and other critical ingredients for an authentic meal from their home country?
Are they hunters or fisherman trying to capture a rare animal for an important ritual feast?
Are they vagabonds scrounging through the post-Apocalyptic ruins for the last rusting cans of tuna fish and creamed soup to make a legendary casserole that their elders only half-remember?
Are they canny rogues who know how to bribe, blackmail and smuggle forbidden cheeses past the cargo inspectors at the docks?
The Tools and the Talent
What tools does it take to make this meal properly? What techniques are used, and how long does it take to apply them? Quickly frying something up in a pan takes minutes, and could be done in a hot shop on the corner that serves the whole community. But if something needs to be smoked? That can take hours. If it needs to be fermented in brine…we’re talking weeks, and a work-in-progress that needs to be kept undisturbed in a cold dark place.
There are conditions where acquiring the tools, time and space to cook can be really hard. The most obvious example in the modern world is prison, a place where the standard meals are such horrible, repetitive slop that inmates often improvise recipes that can be prepared in trash bags or find ways that food can be grilled by setting up a heat source underneath a metal bed.
Focusing on the Talent can also yield really interesting stories and worlds. A great chef is an artist, and all artists must defend their work and the fragile communities that support them. There have been several movies that center on the struggles of a gifted chef, and the way their talent transforms the world: Chocolat, Babette’s Feast, Fried Green Tomatoes, Like Water for Chocolate, Soul Food and Big Night all come quickly to mind, and of course the children’s classic Ratatouille.
One of my recent favorite fantasy stories about a talented chef is The Cheesemaker and the Undying King by Lina Rather, which was published in Lightspeed magazine this summer. If you can think of any other examples, please share them in the comments—I love reading about magical food!
The Audience
A lot of interesting questions arise and can be answered here. Who is the intended audience for our VC’s efforts? Why does it matter whether the diners enjoy this meal, and what criteria of judgment will be applied? This is where you explore the stakes and dig into the meaning of the meal. It’s important to know what outcome your Character hopes to achieve by embracing this challenge, and it can be fun to subvert expectations.
Examples:
A young couple tries to throw a dinner party for the boss and her wife, in order to secure a critical raise or a promotion.
A man sets the table for his attractive but elusive neighbor, who finally agrees to one date because our hero promised a “home-cooked meal”.
A young wife ties on her apron for the first time in the kitchen of her mother-in-law, who has treated her like an enemy since she arrived on her wedding day.
A bumbling crew of nobodies is forced to take the place of an experienced catering crew at the last minute, and fool a party of rich guests into thinking that everything is fine while the mansion is being robbed.
There are all sorts of ways that a VC can be punished or rewarded for the choices they’ve made along the way. Missing ingredients and unfortunate substitutions can make or break a recipe, as we all know. In our world, a batch of chocolate chip cookies prepared without chocolate is a failed dish. But what is the equivalent failure for a treat once served by an alien’s mother on a cold winter afternoon?
Thanks in part to Starbucks, the spices for pumpkin pie have become so iconic that you can add them to almost anything else to make a “pumpkin spice” version of that food or beverage. What do you put into a human’s bloodstream to create the “pumpkin spice latte” effect for a vampire or some other mystical ghoul?
That’s it for this week! I hope that this little prompt and the notes have been fun. If you have anything to share in the comments, I’d love to hear from you. And you can always request other topics.
Very happy to see the return of the world forge <3