worldbuilding blues
Sep. 16th, 2018 04:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2NKtiDU
The thing about worldbuilding is that there’s stuff in the real world I, as a person, don’t care about, but that doesn’t mean I can omit them from the world I’m building. I’m not into celebrity gossip, for example; it’s irrelevant to me, and disinteresting. I’m really not even that much into entertainment media of any kind. I like going to the theatre etc occasionally, I listen to music for fun, but I don’t set that much store by it, I don’t have like, a Music Scene that I’m into, and while I’ve enjoyed works because of specific actors, I really don’t particularly consider myself A Fan of them. (I like fandom communities, but honestly the source material often leaves me much colder than I pretend. It’s like being asexual but liking romance novels; I’m not literally into it, but I’m into being into it, for the sake of being into something. Like, I get why people like this so much, and I can play along for the sake of having something to do, but on an absolute level, no, I am not actually that into this.)
But like. Those are all things people are into, and if i want a well-rounded constructed world, I need to decide about those things. Like, even in a close POV story from a single person’s perspective, I need to know if she’d relate things to something she saw on whatever that world’s analogue to TV or the theater is, or if she’d be used to music being a participatory or spectator kind of deal, or what.
For some reason I’ve been more interested in how large-scale city-wide composting toilets would work than whether there’s any kind of mass-broadcast media, even if it’s only in print.
But I do need to make that choice, even if I’m not going to actually build any of that part of the world. I need to leave room for it.
Ditto religion, though I’ve managed to be interested enough to come up with an approximate framework– religion, superstition, and belief systems are super important and it’s boring if you just copy-paste your assumptions without examining them. Even if your belief system is “there is no organized religion”, listen bud, people are going to believe in stuff anyway, so you’d better have room for that.
(Your picture was not posted)
The thing about worldbuilding is that there’s stuff in the real world I, as a person, don’t care about, but that doesn’t mean I can omit them from the world I’m building. I’m not into celebrity gossip, for example; it’s irrelevant to me, and disinteresting. I’m really not even that much into entertainment media of any kind. I like going to the theatre etc occasionally, I listen to music for fun, but I don’t set that much store by it, I don’t have like, a Music Scene that I’m into, and while I’ve enjoyed works because of specific actors, I really don’t particularly consider myself A Fan of them. (I like fandom communities, but honestly the source material often leaves me much colder than I pretend. It’s like being asexual but liking romance novels; I’m not literally into it, but I’m into being into it, for the sake of being into something. Like, I get why people like this so much, and I can play along for the sake of having something to do, but on an absolute level, no, I am not actually that into this.)
But like. Those are all things people are into, and if i want a well-rounded constructed world, I need to decide about those things. Like, even in a close POV story from a single person’s perspective, I need to know if she’d relate things to something she saw on whatever that world’s analogue to TV or the theater is, or if she’d be used to music being a participatory or spectator kind of deal, or what.
For some reason I’ve been more interested in how large-scale city-wide composting toilets would work than whether there’s any kind of mass-broadcast media, even if it’s only in print.
But I do need to make that choice, even if I’m not going to actually build any of that part of the world. I need to leave room for it.
Ditto religion, though I’ve managed to be interested enough to come up with an approximate framework– religion, superstition, and belief systems are super important and it’s boring if you just copy-paste your assumptions without examining them. Even if your belief system is “there is no organized religion”, listen bud, people are going to believe in stuff anyway, so you’d better have room for that.
(Your picture was not posted)
