Working on Worldbuilding
From the practical to the theoretical.
I’m writing a book that takes up the ideas of worldbuilding, and I’m going to be using this space to keep track of and work through ideas. Back in my PhD I used to have a blog where I’d keep track of these kinds of ideas. Now, this seems like the thing.
For me this concept of worldbuilding stands between the furtive activity of creatives seeking to produce a relatable and consistent storyworld and the furrowed brows of academics thinking through just how audiences engage with storyworlds really. I teach a worldbuilding workshop as a university course, and you can get a sense of that from this public books piece I wrote.
Here are some works that co-ordinate my teaching on the subject:
Kaitlin Tremblay’s fantastic Collaborative Worldbuilding for Video Games is a major touchstone for my approach to teaching the subject. You can read some of that here: Game Developer link to Tremblay chapter. They also have a game development studio called Soft Rains (in a nod to the Ray Bradbury story?)
Marta Boni has edited an open-access edited volume on worldbuilding called World Building: Transmedia, Fans, Industries that introduces all of the key concepts off narratology and media specificity to students interested in the critical side of the topic.
In conversation with colleagues, especially Peter Burr, I’ve realized that worldbuilding is a kind of fuzzy topic (check out Peter’s work, too, while you’re at it). When some creatives talk about it, they are speaking as if we all have the same goal in mind. This is what I think of the “how to worldbuild well” discourse. The implication being that folks will want to engage with your work or that it will have some awe inspiring consistency. From a narratological vantage, storyworlds has a strong level of discourse that is so often highly technical and precise. Much of this work is based in cognitive approaches to literature. Finally, we also should consider the radical impetus of worldbuilding as work with political aims. Here, I think of Samay Arcentales Cajas’ and Kim Ninkuru’s discussion of Reparative Worldbuilding. Together they wish to draw out the creative possibilities inherent in genre fiction worldbuilding.
This starting point offers a rich map to explore. There are so many people taking up this concept in so many varied sectors and ways. My aim is to figure out if there is anything holding these uses together. If so, how so? If not, why not? What makes worldbuilding so appealing to so many? Is it as simple as the fact that our global economic system is churning through life and terrain in such a way that we all feel a pull to start the cognitive work necessary to getting beyond immiseration and debt? This answer most like holds, but I’m going to work through the different ways we might get there.
This is such an interesting question to tackle, Brent. As a writer, I feel an instinctive urge to build a coherent and compelling world for my characters to move in, and at the same time, there’s always the question in the back of my mind: how might this story and this work I’m creating help? How might it point in a good direction? How might it create a sense of possibility or hope in the reader? While my primary purpose is to entertain, there’s a definite secondary purpose that can be answered in how the characters move through their world, what they say and how they respond to challenges.
Keep going!