This is not a hero interview

No, it’s not. It was going to be, but I’m still transcribing it. I’ll try to get it up within a few days.

In the meantime, I just read a partial adult fantasy manuscript for critique that wins the award in my lifetime for the “As you know, Bob” info dump. Which is making me think about world-building, and why many of us seem to have the impulse to create worlds almost separately from the impulse to tell stories. (Or are far better at the former than the latter.)

Is it the creative impulse rechanneled? A God complex? An intellectual exercise? Some Freudian impulse to control a world when we can’t control the one around us? Or is it just fun?

In some fantasies, it seems that worlds and histories are created and almost go begging for a character we care about who happens to be living inside it. Such a world seems to be built from the outside in, with all the structure going up but the characters sometimes missing. And in others, the character is the focus and what world-building we get is only so much as the character bounces off of — built from the inside out. I wonder if those two ends of the spectrum reflect different sorts of creators, different ways of thinking, maybe even different goals.

And in our electronic, internet age, I’m kind of surprised that there aren’t more outlets just for the world-building part. Why don’t we see universes online that you can enter and role-play in merely for the chance to learn about the world? There are plenty of people who would volunteer to create them, I think. Is it more fun to create a world than to experience someone else’s?

What do you think?

— Joni, who has a hard time imagining building a world from the outside in, instead of the inside out

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