a world you don't remember

weekly story work exercise

If you’re new here, paid subscribers receive Story Work exercises every Sunday night at 8 pm et. Story Work: Field Notes on Self-Discovery and Reclaiming Your Narrative is the name of my new book which is forthcoming from Broadleaf in November 2025. The term describes my signature process of reflecting, reclaiming, and reimagining the stories of our lives. It involves looking at your life experiences as creative material that you have the power to shape. For the next few weeks, our story work theme is world-building for self-discovery.

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Photo by milind bedwa on Unsplash

The impulse to tell stories is one of mankind’s primal instincts. Children are brought up by stories in the form of fairytales and fables, legends and parables. Stories reveal the emotional impact of facts and events, and the emotional truths of fiction and myth. As we leave our childhoods and venture out beyond the nest of our limited experience, we rely on stories to make sense of our surroundings and ourselves.

We have an abundance of creative materials to choose from to tell our stories: pencils and paint, fabric and textile, sculpture and pottery, found objects and natural elements—even our own voices and bodies are creative materials. We are all artists, whether our tools are plants or numbers or blueprints or businesses.

For my art, I am most drawn to words and sentences. As a vehicle for storytelling, writing allows us to process and share our ideas and experiences through language, using prose and poetry to bring our inner worlds out.

In this series, we are talking about how we build worlds with our writing.

While world-building is often associated with fiction, all writers can find opportunity and expansion by looking at their writing and zooming out to ask themselves:

What world am I building here? What are its characteristics? How does it reflect the histories, characters, relationships, atmospheres, settings, landscapes, and languages that have shaped my thoughts and experiences?

Let’s review:

• Week One: Worldbuilding for Self-Discovery - Usually, worldbuilding refers to the art of creating fantastical worlds with imagined characters, landscapes, myths, and magic. When you are writing for self-discovery, worldbuilding is a practice that leads to a multi-faceted environment where personal, emotional, cultural, and societal factors intersect to create a panoramic view of your life. This not only helps with healing as it broadens your awareness, but it also allows a reader to more deeply connect with your story. The exercise at the end will add this dimensionality to your writing.

• Week Two: Same Theme, Different World - The more we recognize the many creative choices we have to build worlds for and with our writing, the more we can see how misguided that critical inner voice is when it says ‘your story doesn’t matter. it’s all been said and done before’. How could your story have already been told? You are the only one with your voice who has lived your life. You are the only one with your unique lens and soul signature, with the background and experiences that have shaped your perspective. This week, I shared a practical example of how I differentiated my book from others on the shelves that have a similar theme.

• Week Three: Creating the Mood - Readers often choose what to read based on what mood they’re in or what mood they want to be in. As a writer, your creative choices build the world you want the reader to experience. So how do we approach mood in our creative process? We use literary devices to describe the atmosphere, to symbolize a theme, or to convey an emotion. We experiment with our voice and flow to bake mood into our sentences and immerse our readers in the worlds we’ve created. For the self-healer, there is also healing value in transmuting our emotions this way. The exercise at the end of this one offers a word association exercise as a tool for creating mood on the page.

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Okay. This week, let’s get into the world of memories.

Through creative writing, the worlds we build provide us with a certain distance that makes us feel safer when recalling memories, particularly when confronting the intensity of emotionally charged facts and feelings.

Many of us turn to writing for that very reason, to reckon with the past and reclaim our stories. But how do we reclaim stories we can’t remember?

Photo by ian dooley on Unsplash

building a world you don’t remember

As many of you know, I facilitate writing workshops on mining our memories for creative material. In these workshops, I offer generative tools that help writers identify significant memories and how they reflect different themes and seasons in their lives.

One of the most frequent topics that comes up is how we write around memory lapses:

How do I write about events, circumstances, and experiences when I don’t trust my memory?

How do we flash back to scenes from the past when we have no mental picture of what happened?

How do we recreate a world that we don’t remember?

First, let’s understand the relationship between memory and imagination. Initially, it may seem that they are each other’s opposite: Imagination is fanciful, and memory is factual.

But experts have found that imagination depends largely, if not exclusively, on memory. Likewise, “memory is a form of imagination.”¹

They have an interdependent relationship. They both involve taking the pieces we have and building a world around them. They both take aspects of our thoughts and emotions and merge them with new information and observations.

So how does this relationship help us when we are trying to build a world on the page—about our childhood, an abusive relationship, a toxic job environment, a spiritual awakening, whatever—and we don’t remember the details?

Let’s look at practical ways to encourage imagination and memory to work together to tell our stories.

First, we’ll look at a few ways that we can stimulate memories. (I consider it a win even if a few details are brought to life). Then, I will give you some tools you can experiment with to write around the gaps.