Tool:
Star of the universes
When telling stories and crafting scenarios, a great starting point is to create the universe or world where the story unfolds. Defining an entire world might seem daunting, but this tool can help you draw the first defining lines in a fun and intuitive manner.
Understanding the model
This model or tool involves answering five simple questions, which combined gives you an overall image of a world or universe. The star shape of the model indicates that each of the five spikes or questions are all part of the whole.
The five questions are:
- How? What is the style or aesthetic of the world you are creating?
- Why? What values, morals, world views, or themes dominate in this world?
- When? What historical context or period frames the world or universe you are imagining?
- Who? What existences, characters or entities play central roles in this world?
- Where? What are the geographical or spatial boundaries of the world you are building?
How to use the tool
You can, off course, just throw yourself into answering these questions one by one, writing your answers on the poster as you go along. You can also use the picture and word cards available for download below to stimulate your creativity and imagination. Words often carry different meaning for different people, so combining pictures and words can uncover new meanings, mental images, and ideas, particularly when working in groups.
If it is difficult to get started, then ask someone to come up with a character, a time period or ethical point of view etc, and place that as a locked answer on the poster, and ask the other question in relation to that fixed answer. Sometimes our creativity needs restrictions to think out of the box.
When you have answered all the questions, and you have a shared mental image of the world you will be telling your stories from, you can start defining plots, story characters, storylines etc. Building a universe or world this can inspire to all sorts of storytelling, being films, novels, videogames, tv shows, designscenarios.
If you are curious about this approach, get your hands on the book ‘Håndbog i universskabelse’ of Jakob Ion Wille, Simon Jon Andreasen og Gunnar Wille (for now only in Danish)
