Welcome to my blog for March! Today as I edge closer to publishing my second book: ‘A Different World of School’, I would like to write about the world of Taze and how I came about creating this world. If you have read the book before you read this, you will have encountered some bizarre places and characters in the story.
When creating the world of Taze, my main idea was to make the story as exciting as possible by showing the main characters: Matty, Dodds and Lou and how the new world in which they find themselves, affected them. With Matty and Lou longing for adventure, it was important to give them plenty of challenges in this exciting world. For Dodds, a character not so brave and not so sporty, it was equally important to create an unpredictable world, in which he would face challenges out of his comfort zone, thereby adding further excitement .
The main part of Taze is the school (or prison as you might say). I refer to it in the description, as a prison, to show that it is not the safe environment that you would normally expect of a school. Furthermore, the portrayal of the detention room, the guards, the gates and general lack of freedom, is used to show how dangerous the place is. The aim is to build feelings of fear and danger for the main characters, making you, as readers, wonder how they will overcome such hurdles.
Outside of the school, in describing the rest of Taze I had to create an unpredictable environment. The forest, knights on bikes, rainbows, bridge of no thoughts and eagle hills were all created to try and give feelings of danger, mystery, unpredictability, challenge so that readers would be held in a heightened state of suspense and excitement.
How I conceived such ideas was the same way that I created my characters. I brain- stormed on paper, the types of places associated with an adventure and one by one, I was able to develop these different places. After I had considered both these different places as well as the school, I was then able to decide on the sequence of the story and which place would suit which part of the storyline. For example, when the characters wander into a big, confusing forest straight after they have left the school, they are immediately shown the extent of the challenge facing them in Taze.
As readers, I hope that you found the world of Taze as exciting as I did when I was creating it. To reflect on what I said earlier in the blog, it is important to consider the types of world and those challenges which best suited the characters within the story. In addition, a world or a place in a story can be as weird, random or crazy as you want to make it, as long as it brings the reader on a journey through the story.
Jonny Pardoe
Jonny Pardoe © March 2017
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Jonny Pardoe
