The Writer’s Playground Series – A Day in the Life

A Day in the Life

• Objective: To understand a fictional world from multiple, everyday perspectives.
• How to Play:
  1. The group agrees on a specific, interesting setting (e.g., “a magical university,” “a generation ship traveling between stars,” “a city built on the back of a giant creature”).
  2. Each person secretly chooses a mundane profession or role within that setting (e.g., cook, janitor, librarian, stable hand, junior technician).
  3. Everyone has 15 minutes to write a short journal entry from their character’s point of view, des-cribing a typical problem or observation from their day. For example, the janitor at the magical university might complain about cleaning up ecto-plasm stains.
  4. Reading them aloud provides a textured, ground-level view of the world.
• Best for: Making a setting feel lived-in and real, character voice.

This list contains high-concept, imaginative locations. The challenge for the writer is to imagine the practical realities of daily life within them. Choose one of these, or imagine your own:

• A city carved into the heart of a colossal, living tree.
• A deep-sea research station built around a mysterious, glowing coral reef.
• A monastery where monks catalog and train mythical creatures.
• A bustling spaceport at the crossroads of a hundred alien empires.
• A subterranean city illuminated entirely by phosphor-escent fungi and crystals.
• A vertical city where the wealthy live in sunlit towers and the poor in the perpetual smog below.
• A generation ship on a thousand-year journey between stars.
• A fortified settlement built inside the ruins of a massive sports stadium.
• A society where dreams can be recorded, bought, and sold.
• A Victorian London powered by steam-punk automatons.
• The legendary city of Atlantis, in the final hours before the cataclysm.
• A nomadic society that lives on massive, constantly moving land-crawlers.
• A library that contains every book that was ever imagined but never written.
• A grand hotel whose guests are gods, monsters, and myths on vacation.
• A city built within the colossal skeletal remains of a fallen god.
• A terraforming colony on Mars during its first, difficult generation.
• A floating marketplace that drifts on the clouds between mountaintop kingdoms.
• An Old West town populated entirely by sentient robots.
• The last sanctuary of humanity, a single biodome pro-tected from a toxic world.
• A Silk Road trading post where magic is a common, and often faulty, commodity.
• A city where gravity is inconsistent, requiring citizens to tether down their belongings.
• A circus that functions as a sovereign nation, traveling the globe.
• A university where students major in disciplines like alchemy, time travel, and ghost-hunting.
• A town where every citizen is legally required to wear a mask.
• A peaceful, isolated society that lives on the back of a giant, continent-sized turtle.

These are some everyday, essential jobs. The creative magic happens when you place one of these roles within one of the fantastical settings above.