Worldbuilding is creative resilience

In World Building, Danco argued that yes, everything is sales, but sales isn’t enough. You need to build worlds. In a world of “abundant narrative and complex choices… You need to build a world so rich and captivating that others will want to spend time in it, even if you’re not there.”

Worlding is the art of devising a World: by choosing its dysfunctional present, maintaining its habitable past, aiming at its transformative future, and ultimately, letting it outlive your authorial control.

Worldbuilding satisfies the desire to “be a real maker,” J.R.R. Tolkien remarked in his 1947 essay “On Fairy Stories.” The creator should “hope that he is drawing on reality,” for the qualities of the world should aim to capture some truth, some essence of reality.

It’s funny you say that, because I also often try to write about utopia, or towards utopia, or think about ideas of paradise sought, found, and lost. So if I’m attracted to anything, it’s the oscillation between utopia and dystopia, paradise and catastrophe, and the mechanics that move us in one direction or another, as well as the experiences of i... See more