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World building for fiction – when is enough, enough?

As I mentioned in the previous post, I’m compiling a new page on this site which I call the Intergalactic Guidebook.  I decided a little while ago that it would be fun to create some kind of encyclopaedia of The Lilean Chronicles.  In it I would write a kind of mini wiki all about the worlds and peoples we meet in the series.  This is going to be a herculean task, as I’m finding out but it’s fun to do and I don’t mind it taking a while.  I’m uploading each page when it’s complete and will blog when there’s a new page for you all to peruse.

It’s called world building or rather in my case, galaxy building and I actually did this when I wrote the books.  I built the words, the galaxy as I wrote each volume of the series.  What I’m doing now is putting all that information together in one place, but I’m finding that something interesting is happening as I’m putting it all together.

I know the worlds contained within The Lilean Chronicles very well.  I spent a year writing with my characters and I know all about their worlds, their culture etc so writing it all down again for the guidebook is not hard.  What I’m finding though, is that I’m actually writing stuff I never wrote in the books.  There are things in the guidebook that you won’t read about in the series at all.  The back stories in the guidebook are way more comprehensive and complete than the information in the novels is.  This got me to wondering why I’m feeling the urge to go so much further with these back stories, when some of the information isn’t in the books.

The answer is simple really.  I love doing it.  World building is such huge fun and it’s a total pleasure to invent a whole world, a race of people, their beliefs and culture, even their diseases and sports.   I also feel that the fuller the back story is, the more believable the novel becomes.  When you can find out everything about the world a character comes from, it helps you identify with them more closely and understand them more deeply.  Besides, it’s interesting shit to read..!

So how much is too much?  Should I go so far as to include geological information about the composition of the land masses?  Should I document the changes to air purity over the past thousand years and cross reference this with a graph showing the increase in population perhaps?  Maybe I need to include a political history, complete with list of the last 10 years worth of import and export figures?

No, I think not.  For one thing, it would bore me rigid to write and therefore, probably bore readers too and secondly, it teeters on the edge of OCD.  Readers have enough imagination and sense to know that stuff isn’t necessary for a work of fiction.  Yes it would make it totally comprehensive but it wouldn’t add anything to the story as a whole.

I’d love to one day publish the Intergalactic Guidebook as an actual book to accompany the series but it would involve massive amounts of artwork and I don’t have the money to pay my hugely talented art guys enough to cover the time they would need to devote to such a project.  Who knows what the future holds though; I may win the lotto one day and then I’ll be emailing them..!

I’ll never join the screaming hoard.

My mother is staying with me at the moment.  She lives in Cornwall and I’m in Hampshire, so we don’t get to see each other that often.  A chance conversation just now has sparked a train of thought that is interesting – to me anyway, as someone who’s ‘into’ people and what makes them tick.

I’m a huge fan of Vin Diesel and more accurately, his character Riddick.  Mother knows this and humours me, although she loves the Fast & Furious series herself.  Anyway, Vin and ‘the crew’ are over here in London at the moment, filming the latest in the FF series – number 6.  One of my facebook contacts lives and works in London and he commented that the set is besieged by hoards of screaming females and this sparked a conversation between mother and I.

Much as I love the big guy, I would never travel to join a throng of a thousand screaming females, be stuck at the back and only see him from half a mile away, not be noticed by him anyway and never get to meet and chat with him at the end of it.  Why?  There are several reasons.  Firstly there’s no point if I can’t get near enough to have a chat, get an autograph or a photo and the slim possibility of seeing my hero as big as a pin head from the back of a crowd of screaming women, really doesn’t blow my skirt up.  Secondly, the fact that I would never get anywhere near would disappoint me if I’d made all the effort to get there and who wants to go and see their hero, only to return feeling disappointment?  Third, and most pertinent of all, I worry that meeting him for real would entail me finding out he’s not worthy of my admiration after all.

Over the time I’ve been a fan, there have been times when Vin’s well publicised behaviour has annoyed and disappointed me and back when facebook pages allowed comments and threads and he interacted with us there, when he behaved like a dick, I told him so.  I have already had my admiration for another male actor smashed to pieces by his own behaviour and I don’t want to lose my love for Riddick by seeing Vin ignoring those of his fans who aren’t seventeen and scantily clad and generally behaving like a arrogant prick.

I’ll stick with my photos and dvd’s and my own vivid imagination – the place where everyone does as I want them to, where I am beautiful and loved.

Bespoke blog post

As a writer, I feel it’s very important to strive to better my writing and I’m always trying to figure out ways to do that.  I hit on the brilliant idea of asking someone else to give me a subject to blog about and this is what I was given.

“Your opinions on your life where you life; the physical conditions and how you feel about them.  How do they affect you?”

Okay, let me illustrate the environment in which I live.  I live on the outskirts of a large town, which itself is a suburb of a huge city on the south coast of England.  My home is a rented two bedroomed flat on the first floor in a small cul-de-sac.  My front windows look out across a wide green verge with trees, to a busy main road.  A housing estate is situated on the other side of this road, with a forest beyond.  Although I live on the first floor, the first floor is the top floor, so I have just one downstairs neighbour and one at the side; my flat is on the end of the block so no neighbour one side.

My flat is actually not bad as far as rented accommodation goes; I’ve lived in far worse places.  I rent from the local housing association and although the rent is high, I get housing benefit which pays it all.  I have my own little patch of garden at the front to keep as I please, whereas the rear is all communal grass and washing lines.  Being on the top floor means I get the loft space, which is useful for storing some of my lesser needed crap that I can’t yet bear to part with, but as I’m the opposite of a hoarder, I doubt it will ever get filled.  My front door is painted black and I have a gooseberry bush growing in the garden which gave me its first ever crop this summer.  I enjoyed gooseberry crumble a few weeks ago and can’t wait for next summer to have it again.

It’s all very nice here.  It’s relatively crime free apart from occasional smashed wing mirrors and sometimes the wheelie bins take a stroll down the road overnight.  It could be so much worse and I count my blessings every day.  The trouble is it’s boring and bland and oh so middle class.  The same elderly ladies walk the same little dogs along the path every day and the same health conscious joggers jog along the main road.  The ice cream van turns up at six thirty every summer evening and the bins are emptied every Monday.  Life in surburia is boring and although it’s safe here, I do find myself wondering about maybe getting an exchange and moving somewhere else.

The people here are friendly, kind of.  Not the always in your place for coffee type of friendly but the smile and hello when you pass in the street kind.  I’m glad about this actually; I hate it when neighbours spend more time around your home than at their own so that you can never get anything done and they always want to know your business.  I like a little detachment from neighbours but not to the point of being anti social or unfriendly.  I do find myself wondering about them though; what they do in the privacy of their own homes and what their secrets might be.  I guess everyone does this but being a writer and therefore creatively developed, my imaginings can be quite complex, serious, funny and strange.

Within two miles we have a good shopping centre, a railway station, a bus station and an airport, which means from here you can get to anywhere in the world.  It’s a useful place to live despite its blandness.  There’s even countryside within a few miles if you want to escape any time.  Despite all of the benefits of living here, it’s not the first place I’d choose if I could.  I have all sorts of daydreams about where and how I’d like to live if I won the lottery and they range from deep in the countryside with no neighbours for five miles in every direction, to a one thousand year old haunted manor house, to a swanky pad on the outskirts of Los Angeles or an upmarket area of Florida, depending on my mood.

I’m one of those people who forms an emotional attachment to the building in which I live.  It’s a part of me, an expression of me and a representation of what I’m all about.  I’m autistic and a bit agoraphobic and I live alone so I spend all my time that I’m not at work, here at home alone so it’s important to me that I feel safe and relaxed here.  It’s my safe place, my panic room and my rubber cell all rolled into one and as I change, it changes.  I can’t change it as much or as often as I’d like; I’m destitute (hey I’m a writer) so I can’t bring all my imaginings into being, but I do okay.  If all else fails, I move the furniture around to make the place feel different.

My home has become a sort of living being.  It has my energy within its walls.  It’s experienced my joys and despairs alongside me and when I’m away from it, I look forward to returning to it.  At the same time though, it’s lonely here and I’m very aware of how alone I am and I often imagine how it would feel to have a ‘significant other’ around the place.  These four walls have been with me through some of the toughest times of my life.  I’ve had many christmases and birthdays here alone with my walls; they know me better than anyone else and if walls could talk, I’d be worried.

Perhaps I’m setting the seeds for my own future haunting of the place by putting so much of myself emotionally and mentally into this flat.  Perhaps this connection will bring me back for hundreds of years on the anniversary of my death, to walk the hallway in the dead of night and maybe, in a hundred years from now, the resident will often hear the faint tap, tap, tap as if some invisible writer were sat at a keyboard..!

Having said all that though, if I won the lottery I’d move without hesitation.