Cover Photo: This photograph shows a blue miniature Lego Doctor Who TARDIS sitting on a patch of grass. It's a bright sunny day and the sky behind the TARDIS is clear and blue.
Photograph by sinepax/Pixabay

Creating Scenes for Discovery

Storytelling is like the TARDIS in ‘Doctor Who’—the narrower and more specific we get on the outside, the bigger it gets on the inside.

Step one:

Step two:

Step three:

Try this exercise with as many of the spaces on the list that call to you. Which expanded spaces feel like they could be a good fit for a longer work, like a novel or an entryway into a memoir? Which feel better-suited to a shorter narrative? Why?

A. E. Osworth is part-time Faculty at The New School, where they teach undergraduates the art of digital storytelling. Their novel, We Are Watching Eliza Bright, about a game developer dealing with harassment (and narrated collectively by a fictional subreddit) was long listed for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. They have an eight-year freelancing career and you can find their work on Autostraddle, Guernica, Quartz, Electric Lit, Paper Darts, Mashable, and drDoctor, among others.