Mouldy forgotten worlds
A world emerges, bit by bit. Continents shift, cities sprout from barren land. Oceans shift and cataclysms collide. Whole histories are scribbled in weeks. A mystical force threatens it all, and once a single plucky POV sets everything right, once all the loose threads are tied, it all just stops.
It’s a persistent fear of mine; one I imagine I face alongside many other fantasy writers.
Once a work is finished; once it’s drafted and proofread and exported and all those other verbs that aren’t “published”, how does one stop their world from just decaying?
I’ve spent close to eight years drafting, honing and editing the world of Empress Witch. After creating all those lands and legends, developing the intricate motivations of nations that have never existed full of people no one will ever meet, the idea of all that going quiet just feels so lonely.
The longer a book spends in publishing limbo, the more lonely that world gets.
I’ve found this isn’t an issue when doing rewrites, revisions or when drafting sequels. It’s an issue when the author embarks on a new world entirely.
My magical realist noir, Psychopomp Blues is stylistically distant from Empress Witch. In place of years of lore, there is the blunt banality in the corpse of Blairism. Instead of the plans and machinations of powerful witches, there is only the POV’s raw battle with depression. And instead of trusty old third person omniscient, we have (gasp) first person present!
This is all to say that the two projects are very different, and my further work on Psychopomp, by nature of the text, detracts from my work on Empress.
But does it have to be that way? Can we stop an intricate, beautiful and painstakingly constructed world from collapsing when the demand for creation is no longer there.
Well, I would argue the demand for creation never really goes away. We all start writing for a reason in the first place, before deals or competitions or agents or sabbaticals become incentives. Every writer at some point decided that their thoughts and wandering daydreams were worth putting to paper, and it’s that attitude that should be carried over when the book is shut on an imagined world.
New writers, and I was no exception in my early 20s, often assume that a rich and detailed world will just be filled by an equally impressive story. In fact, the inverse might be true.
When a story is complete, I like to imagine that the setting grows continually, even without the author’s input. When I add pieces of lore or history, form one-off characters or create a map, I’m not scrambling to keep the world going, but rather just checking in. I like to think that I’m not neglecting this world, but rather just looking away from it. And when I finally look back, something new has flourished.
Some writers are builders. Others, gardeners. I like to think of myself more as a wayward chemist, letting a bizarre culture grow unfettered within a petri dish. I check on it every now and then. Maybe once in a while I’ll give it a couple drops of water, or some other peculiar liquid to make it grow stranger.
Because whether it’s read or not, I’ve created this petty universe, and whether they're read of not, there are people living inside it.
