Tuesday 7 February 2017

Ink Blog Tour: World Building and How Alice Created Her World

I have heard AMAZING things about Alice Broadway's Ink - published last week by Scholastic - especially the brilliance of her world building, so I'm hugely excited to have her on the blog today to talk about how she created the world!



JIM! Thank you so much for letting me visit today! It’s so good to be able to talk about Ink – and so weird too; it all feels quite unreal. I loved creating the world for Ink and lots of aspects existed before any real story had developed.

Ink is set in a world where all your significant actions and life-events are tattooed onto your skin. The aim of a person’s life is to be worthy of having their tattoos preserved and turned into a skin-book so that, when they die, the person can be remembered forever.

One of the first things I did was to track down a book on ancient Egypt that I remembered reading at school, and I wallowed in that world for a while. Ancient Egypt is perfect inspiration for evoking a world where death is still part of life and the dead are treated with huge respect.

For me, a lot of world-building is dreaming, drawing and scribbling random notes. The tricky part, for me, is making sure it all works coherently and ensuring everything I write sticks to the rules. When I was asked whether I wanted a map in Ink I was so excited, but then I realized I wasn’t sure exactly where everything was! I wish I was a very organized thinker, but my passion lies with people’s emotions and thoughts.

I know the idea of skin-books sounds morbid and grotesque to some people, but creating the world of Ink has made me think much more about how to honour loved ones when they die. I’m not sure I’d like a skin-book, but I think most of us, deep down, have the desire for our name and our story to be told and remembered.





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