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| 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza (right) and the 1929 Trump Building (center) (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Join us on the first Wednesday of each month in Alex J. Cavanaugh's Insecure Writer's Support Group--a forum of writers who gather to talk about writing and the writer's life. For a complete list of participants visit Alex's Blog.
Excuse me for posting a bit early for #IWSG, but I wanted to use this post to continue a series that I began last week. And this at the risk of scaring readers away from commenting. This is not my intention of course, but it seems to happen sometimes with certain topics.
If you're feeling lost about what I'm talking about I invite you to read my posts Can Trump's Border Wall Work? and Why the Border Wall Can Bring Positive Change? and please weigh in on my topics if you're willing to put your imagination to work (or play as I see it). Interestingly to me, these posts each garnered about the usual number of visits as my average posts while receiving far fewer than normal comments. There were some excellent comments to be sure, but I'm not sure my vision was conveyed to most who read these pieces.
Okay, I get this. I certainly spent more time thinking about the "Border Wall World" than most who visited those posts. This was my vision after all. Like some of you I initially thought the concept of Donald Trump's border wall that Mexico pays for was rather absurd, but hearing so much about the wall I wanted to imagine why Mexico would willfully pay for it as well as the world that might be the result if a cooperative venture were to be put into place.
But let me get away from the political controversy in order to express what it was that so enthralled me. I had begun world-building in big way and the more I dreamed it the bigger it got. Maybe if the Border Wall World were expanded as part of a story presented in a novel then more readers would start getting into as much as I began to be.
This imaginary world is a near future world or it could be a far future world. This type of world could even be set in a past time or another planet. It's an imagination creation from within my mind, perhaps not totally original if someone has done this in the past, but certainly an idea with potential for anyone else who decides to dream it.
By the way, at present I'm not intending to use this world in anything that I'm going to write so anyone who wants to use it I say go for it. I'll buy your book since I'd like to read about this kind of world. Who knows--I might get to thinking so hard about this world that a story might get inspired within me, but still a world concept like this could be a setting for an infinite number of stories.
My intention now is not to apologize for introducing a topic of controversy in my previous posts, but to explain that those posts were not to foment any political distress among readers. My primary intention was to understand a concept and in order to do that a world was created--Border Wall World (to use a convenient name that provides a description).
There are as many worlds as writers can imagine. Every fiction is a creation of some particular world even if that fictional world is based on something real. The closer to reality the world that the writer creates is, the easier it will be to convey the vision that writer wants the readers to see. The imagination is boundless; the vast array of worlds is infinite. Write your world as it is, as it could be, and as it one day might be.
Conveniently, last week as I was playing with world building, Raquel Byrnes wrote a post about rules of world-building. Check it out at 5 Core Rules for World Building.
Do you enjoy world-building? When you create a world within your mind do you ever get so excited about it that you perhaps go overboard describing it to others? Are you able to easily separate politics from possibilities?
