Meta Notes | A World That Stands on Its Own - YouTube

I recently found this fantasy map I drew when I was 14, and was surprised to find that I had come up

with the idea of having a giant wall in the north years before I read "A Song of Ice and Fire,"

though I'm pretty sure that my wall was a solid slab of rock.

I started writing fantasy stories around a year before then, when I was 13.

And ten years after that, I started drawing a fantasy webcomic.

But I still always say that I got into worldbuilding just a few years ago, because the thing I'm doing now

does not feel like the thing I was doing before.

When I started writing the script for my webcomic, I set down some ground rules for my fantasy world,

and then I just made stuff up as I went along, often just throwing things in

as I was drawing the page.

And it worked perfectly well, because in a story, every aspect of a world is there to

further the plot, or explore character, or set the mood, or any combination of those.

Every single thing that exists in that world is ultimately there in service of the story.

Though in a visual medium like a comic, making for a pretty visual also works,

except that those pretty visuals are also, ultimately, there in service of the story.

But just as a drawing doesn't have to be there for the sake of a story, and can be appreciated

as a work of art that stands on its own, a world doesn't have to be shackled to anything

either, be that thing a novel, a comic, a game, or something else.

But I've seen people say that a world with no story is pointless, that nobody really

cares about worlds.

That a world as a whole is this cold impersonal thing that excites no emotion and creates

no attachment.

That nobody cares about anybody's cool new worldbuilding idea, so they should just go

write a story to make people care.

But I know that this cannot be true, because I've read fantasy novels where those stories

that were supposed to be the thing I actually cared about left me feeling completely unimpressed,

but I loved their settings and all the awesome ideas they contained.

Worlds, in and of themselves, are interesting and are worthwhile.

And worlds grab people's imaginations and make them write their own stories all the time.

And just as the considerations that go into a stand-alone drawing are different from the

considerations that go into an individual comic panel, building a world that is meant

to be able to stand on its own two legs is very different from creating a setting for

a fantasy story.

Fantasy and sci-fi writers are constantly warned against falling too deep into the worldbuilding

rabbit-hole, since it often ends up distracting them from writing the story itself.

Before I got into worldbuilding just for the sake of building a world, I had no issue avoiding

all those rabbit-holes, but now I dive straight into them instead, because the change in goals

changed the nature of the activity itself.

So I don't say that I got into worldbuilding in my early teens, because those rabbit-holes

held no interest to me back then.

I was excited about my characters and their cool adventures, not about staple crops,

timber frame houses, and convoluted family arrangements.

In the first video on this channel, I start creating a temperate rainforest island by

creating 50 species of fungi, because when building a world is the thing you're out to do,

fungi are really just one of the many rabbit-holes you dive into.

And the number of those rabbit-holes is countless!

Which makes me very excited, because every single one of them is a wonderful opportunity

for exercising creativity, and a fascinating new avenue to explore.

There are no limits to imagination,

and that fact just leaves me in awe.