Shared Worlds camp for teens was a great lecturing experience

Last week I was a guest lecturer at the Wofford’s Shared Worlds two week workshop on building made up worlds and playing in them (see newspaper article). There were a lot of developing talents there, and it was fun to test out some new lectures/workshops I’ve created on point of view and character, triangulating off of lectures by Will Hindmarch and Jeff Vandermeer.

Of interest to me in particular was that I led a socratic dialogue about story endings on my last lecture, where the students all talked about what endings worked and what didn’t for them. I wish I’d taken the notes from the board we all created, I’d planned to take an iPhone snap of the board but forgot, because they were a couple of items I wanted to remember for myself (and if you’re a student at the camp who took good notes, I’d send you a free book in exchange for the notes from that session).

Will Hindmarch, a games designer who works for such places as White Wolf, and Jeff Vandermeer, well known author, were fun to hang out with throughout the week. Jeff and Jeremy L. Jones are something of the brains behind the operation. Will leads a lot of gaming and a game worldbuilding approach to things, which was neat to see. As different narrative conventions meld and mesh, I think multi-disciplinary approaches to story telling are more intrinsically valuable to the next generation of story tellers.

But now that I’ve been away for a week, it’s really nice to be back home to people happy to see me return, and who laugh at *all* my jokes:

Filed under the topic Journal on August 3rd 2009 at 1:25 pm. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.