World Building
A variety of things can inspire people to write. Lately, I’ve started to encounter more and more people who are self-publishing books related to their own life stories or beliefs. The nature of the modern industry seems to have given everyone a voice if they are willing and able to translate that voice into written word. In those cases, the inspiration is obvious. The writers want to share what they know or have experienced with hopes of helping or inspiring others. That’s certainly a positive reason for writing.
My inspiration is nothing so noble. In fact, for the longest, I wasn’t even sure I’d ever share my stories with anyone. My mind was simply filled with them, and I felt compelled to get them out. Having them bouncing around in my head didn’t mesh well with my ADD. At inopportune times, I found myself being distracted by thoughts related to plot details, characters, settings, and other related concepts.
For me, the inspiration to write was less of a factor than what the writing would allow me to do - build my own world. Writers aren’t God. We spark a functioning universe into existence using nothing but our thoughts, but we can create. From something as simple as a little town where a plucky group of kids get into daily hijinx to a war-torn galaxy where hundreds of interstellar societies vie for supremacy, our imaginations can enable us to produce magnificent worlds. Each of those worlds can serve as the setting for countless tales. The sky is the limit.
I’m sure many writers come up with their stories first, and their worlds grow as the stories are fleshed out. For me, it was the opposite. My first major work was a mythology for Zeal, the world in which all my future stories would take place. Some of the most fun I’ve had writing came in developing that world. Nothing can get your creative juices flowing more than building a world from scratch. How old is it? How big is it? Is it purely physical in nature, or does magic exist? What kind of characters live in it? Is it a reflection of the real world or something completely different? There’s so much to consider. Creating a world can be like solving a puzzle, and as such, can be very rewarding when you manage to figure it out.
Sometimes the worlds we create can speak to the readers just as much as the story itself. Maybe your world will remove some of the ills we see in the real world and give readers a glimpse of the paradise our world could be if we worked together to eliminate our problems. Maybe you want to go the opposite route and show a world where the bad rules, making it a cautionary example of what could be if we aren’t careful. Or maybe, you don’t want to deliver a message at all. Maybe you just want to give your readers a fun place to which they can escape when the real world is dragging them down.
If a story is the journey, then the world is the scenery. Often times the amount of joy you get from one depends on how much you can take from the other. That’s true for books and for life.
