worldbuilding for self-discovery
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 last eight weeks, our theme was life as a creative process. For the next five weeks, our theme is world building for self-discovery.
Before we get into our new theme, I want to remind you that on Sunday, March 23, from 2 - 3:30 pm et, I will be facilitating a Zoom session to go over the eight concepts we covered in the life as a creative process series. I will answer questions and do some live coaching to wrap things up. The objective is for you to come away with empowered action steps that support you in building a creative process that is so intertwined with healing, self-care, and growth that it becomes a sustainable and prioritized part of your lifestyle, helping you stay committed to your intentions throughout the year.
The session will be open to paid Substack subscribers and Inner Story members. If you have been following along but are missing the guidance and community that could help you take your creative journey to the next level, I invite you to join us for the session. You can RSVP here. (If you are not a paid subscriber but followed along with the free parts of the series and would like to attend, message me and I will send you the link to register. No questions asked.)
If you are seeking a deeper commitment to your creative callings this spring, I am offering 20% discounts on annual Substack subscriptions and annual Inner Story memberships. The sale ends tonight at 11:59 pm et. If you have questions about these offerings, feel free to reach out by responding to this email or contacting me here.
To write is to be a witness.
A big part of our responsibility as writers is to be observant. Our work is to notice and describe the details of life as we see it, as we experience it, as we envision it.
When I started writing to heal, I was mostly observing my inner landscape, trying to find words for emotions I had ignored and suppressed for years. It was confessional and cathartic, and at first, it felt good. Over time, writing about pain and sadness got old, and I found myself stuck in a loop of defeated narratives.
To enrich my writing and expand my perspective, I started looking outside myself to the context of my surroundings. Going beyond my feelings to observe what happened, not just to me, but before me, and around me. What characters, settings, and environments created the world that I came to experience? What factors affected my rock bottoms, breakthroughs, evolutions, and transformations?
How could I not consider the external world when trying to make sense of my internal world? I realized that zooming out is part of the healing process, too.
This shift also helped me clarify the lane I wanted to occupy as a self-help author and memoirist. To go from blogging and self-publishing to pitching publications and securing book deals, I needed to move past writing solely about my feelings to providing context and story. I wanted to write essays and books that compel a reader to feel my struggle with me, then learn and grow with me.
This is why I insist that understanding your why is such an important part of cultivating your voice and style, choosing where and how to publish your work, connecting with the right audience, and finding endless inspiration to write and heal and connect in your own unique way.
I am still most comfortable writing my thoughts, feelings, fears, passions, and that is where I usually start. But I continue to evolve in healing and in craft by challenging myself to zoom out and include how the world around me impacts my experience. I think of all my projects, from my books to my coaching programs, as worlds that I am building.
There are many ways to build a world for your writing and to build worlds with your writing.
Usually worldbuilding refers to the art of creating a fictional world with imagined characters, landscapes, myths, and magic. Right away, your mind might go to the elaborate worlds we explore through Star Wars, Harry Potter, or Children of Blood and Bone.
But every writer, no matter the genre, has the challenge and the opportunity to share their stories and ideas through the worlds they build on the page. Worlds with histories, characters, relationships, atmospheres, settings, landscapes, and languages. You don’t have to create a futuristic or fantastical world, or even a fictional world in order to recognize the choices you have in framing your real-life experiences.
The worlds we build around our intimate details differentiate us and highlight how much each individual story matters.
How many books talk about mental illness and healing from unaddressed trauma? Too many to count, but each book describes that author’s world in their voice, with their details and artistic choices.
In Story Work, I write about the core wound of growing up with an untreated, mentally ill mother and eventually becoming estranged from her. There are a myriad of ways that I could have shaped and shared this story. I could have taken a linear path to show you my childhood growing up in Pittsburgh, my young adulthood in Baltimore, and my parenting years in Montgomery County. I could have written a collection of poetry where I gave everything a slant or a metaphor to protect my family’s privacy. I could have written a series of letters to versions of myself or to my mother.
But ultimately my lens as a self-healer, teacher, and gamechanger informed the world I created. A world shaped my memories, reflections, snapshots, research, lessons, and prompts, reflecting my worldview of life as a classroom, our experiences as teachers, and writing as a tool for healing.
The world that a writer builds is what makes each piece of expression one of a kind, even when the theme is universal and there is a sea of other stories about that topic.
The more we take care to build worlds with our writing, the more we awaken our creativity and discover new pathways to reclaiming our stories.
When I was writing Story Work, it gave me the opportunity to really sit and consider all the factors that led to my struggles. Why my family handled my mother’s mental illness the way they did. The cultural environment. The silence that prevented us from getting help. The love and devotion that persisted in spite of all the dysfunction. The seeds that were planted that grew into opportunities that led to new choices and possibilities. The choices I made to describe this journey allowed me to bring the reader into my world and experience the context of my circumstances.
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 but also allows a reader to connect deeply with your story.
Over the next few weeks, we will look at worldbuilding from different angles and explore ways to utilize it in our writing.
Exercise:
Self-discovery
Make a list of the major themes that often show up in your writing and self-reflection.
Examples: identity, love, grief, wellness, spirituality, parenthood, mental health, etc.
Choose one of the themes that is particularly active in your mind right now and in a couple of sentences, describe what is going on.
Examples: a challenging relationship with a loved one, a crisis of faith, a health struggle, a career transition
What else is going on in the world that is affecting this situation? What factors are impacting your experience and could provide insightful context?
Examples: physical surroundings, time/place/climate, social dynamics, cultural/political context, systems/frameworks, beliefs/philosophies, etc.
Storytelling
To practice worldbuilding, use whatever form you like (fiction, nonfiction, poem, letter, etc.) to write about the topic with a holistic view in mind and highlight the various factors that are affecting the complexity of the situation.
Action
Share with us in the comments or in the subscriber chat any discoveries or reflections that come up for you from this exercise!
