Today we have another of our roundtables and we’re focusing on one of the hardest things for an author to get right: world building. Because this issue is so complex, I’m doing two world building roundtables, one for writers working on historical fiction and today for writers who are trying to establish place in a location that the reader might not know about, either in the real world or in the speculative one. In this case, how complicated does that speculative world need to be to be truly convincing? Or is simplicity the key, working through implication instead of information? And if the book is released in U.S., what is the writers responsibility for providing context for non-U.S. locales? Any at all? Maybe the reader should do the work. We’ll talk about these questions and a whole lot more with our four authors: Julie Carrick Dalton, Juliet Faithful, Shalene Gupta, and Desmond Hall.

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A former organic farmer and beekeeper, Julie Carrick Dalton is the author of The Last Beekeeper, currently a nominee for the NH People’s Choice Award for Best Novel, as well as Waiting for the Night Song, and a forthcoming third novel, The Forest Becomes Her. She’s part of the core faculty at Drexel University’s MFA program.

Shalene Gupta is the author of The Cycle: Confronting the Pain of Periods and PMDD (Flatiron, 2024) and the co-author of The Power of Trust: How Companies Build It, Lose It, Regain It (Public Affairs, 2021). She’s the staff editor at Fast Company and is currently revising her first novel with her agent.

Juliet Faithfull is a Spanish-British-American writer who grew up in Brazil. Liar’s Dice, her first novel which will be released in April, was a winner of the 2024 Irish Writers Centre’s Novel Fair and a semifinalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship.

Desmond Hall is the author of two award-winning YA novels, including most recently Better Must Come, which was a top ten In the Margins book pick, CariCon Award for best Caribbean YA novel, and won honors for the Massachusetts Book Award.

Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash

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