Build­ing a world has forced me to con­cen­trate on some­thing closely. The issue I have with my writ­ing endeav­ours is that I don’t get into them enough to fully feel com­fort­able and con­fi­dent. I tend to imag­ine great things and then loose my place and grip as they seem too big to under­take, or I make up an excuse to not do it: time, kids, lack of imag­i­na­tion. These things are great dis­trac­tions, but some­times I feel I rely on their pres­ence to for­give myself for not writing.

This lit­tle WBM exer­cise has given me the tenac­ity and inter­est to fol­low some­thing up and build upon it, and for that I thank it. But that’s not to say I don’t have a few reservations.

The way I approached this was to take a frame put in place some time ago, throw shit at it and see what sticks. I didn’t expect much, but over time things began to fall into place quite neatly. That for me has been world build­ing in it’s purest form: I built a world from basi­cally nothing.

Now reg­u­lar read­ers (haha, all one of you) know that I am not so keen on super-detailing what I cre­ate. This is sim­ply a mish­mash of tak­ing some­thing and run­ning with it — leav­ing some details to find their place — and the sim­ple fact that I have seen my fair share of pro­cras­ti­na­tion by cre­ation and there’s noth­ing quite like cre­at­ing a plethora of details and not actu­ally doing any­thing with them, or even worse, suf­fo­cat­ing the reader with so much infor­ma­tion they have noth­ing to cre­ate themselves.

I think this brings me to my one gripe with WBM and the worlds I have seen. Sim­ply put, there seems to be way too much foun­da­tion to some. Don’t get me wrong, it’s required that we — as writ­ers — cre­ate a sup­port­ive frame­work and colour it to some degree, but to put in place so many rules and erro­neous ‘facts’ that noth­ing is left to think about appears a lit­tle to con­stric­tive to me.

I’ve men­tioned before, I have cre­ated pen­cil maps and given names to every­one and every­thing from the top to the bot­tom, but It never seemed to work to cre­ate any­thing but an intel­lec­tual prop­erty akin to Lord of the Rings. Do we really need to know the double-barreled, or hyphen­ated sur­name of every main char­ac­ter? Is it nec­es­sary to draw a map and geo­graph­i­cal loca­tions of every­thing includ­ing Mr. Cob­ble­pots cabin on the Hukka­nar Shores and the Kingdom’s sta­bles in the lowlands?

A lot of this to me seems like romance. The writer is falling in love with their world so much that it inter­ests them more than us. What do we have to do when the author has already done every­thing? Surely we’re just along for the ride, but for­get imag­in­ing your own ver­sion — this one has been illus­trated in an Adobe suite and stuck inside the main cover so you can refer to it every ten pages. Want to know what kind of birds cir­cle the King’s tower in Far Far Away? Flick to the index of the com­pan­ion (which you had to buy sep­a­rately) and give it an eyeball.

Some­body will be offended, but that’s fine. I’m sure I could be accused of doing pretty much noth­ing and how my style of cre­ation is ques­tion­able in com­par­i­son to the boat­loads of notes and fold­ers and cab­i­nets of those who are writ­ing their sev­enth book in a set of ten.

This also hints at some­thing else I noticed dur­ing WBM. There seems to be a lot of worlds built already. I know I’ve cre­ated pools of shad­ows in respect to some indi­vid­u­als and there mono­liths, but I have cre­ated it all here. You can see where I started and where it goes. When I browse the oth­ers tak­ing part I notice a lot of ‘copy-pasting’ — where writ­ers are sim­ply show­cas­ing the worlds they cre­ated a mil­len­nia ago, and not actu­ally build­ing anything.

Call me opin­ion­ated and tell me to shut the fuck up. That’s okay, nobody every had a point of view agreed upon by every­one. But, when I read this ‘Exam’ via Cirellio’s blog, it made me chuckle a lit­tle. I think J.R.R. Tolkien’s influ­ence has stretched far and wide, but when I see the amount of work put into the worlds I see, I won­der how much he put into his… some­how I don’t see him spend­ing all his time cre­at­ing worlds and details and names, but writ­ing.

Some thing’s need to be left to the imag­i­na­tion and no writer should fall in love with their words. I would hate for tal­ented indi­vid­u­als to get buried under all these ulti­mately hol­low details with­out ever shar­ing the mean­ing, or teach­ings of what lies behind their story. A happy medium, I guess is what would be my point. Jan­Van­Hove seems to have found that in his Return to Old Earth, as in read­ing his entries I find myself intrigued, but not over­bur­dened by alien names and space ship designs. There are no pic­tures of what humans look like in the 30th Cen­tury — I get to imag­ine that myself.

As writ­ers, I feel we should cre­ate the worlds, but let the read­ers live in them.