Xandra Gregory

There’s nothing quite like the thrill I get from building a world and populating it with people, customs, situations, and a history. I know we’re supposed to focus on character, and how plot is character and all that, but I just get this pumped-up thrill at coming up with a world for the people in my head to live in. Because the people in my head, to me at least, seem like everyday, average joes. But the worlds in which they live their “just trying to get by” lives are…special. Maybe it’s the armchair anthropologist in me, but I love seeing and imagining disparate cultures encounter one another.

I hate going to the grocery store. I’m there every week (sometimes twice a week), and it’s the same thing–buy food, yadda yadda. So I play this game when I’m there. It’s basically an imaginary game. “If I were shopping for provisions in ___, this would be like ____.” Sometimes I’m an Ancient Egyptian going to the bazaar. Sometimes I’m a Greek or Roman. Lots of time, I’m shopping in an outpost planet, far from the glittering center of my galaxy, and marveling at the lack of technology. Yeah, I’m a geek…so what?

What my little exercise encourages me to do is to step outside the boundaries of reference.  By viewing common activities through a foreign frame of reference, I end up distilling the essence of the experience, and understanding the underlying commonalities that lie therein.  The exchange of items of worth for goods and services on a (somewhat) equal value.  The fact that a little slip of paper can be worth nothing (my grocery list on the back of an envelope) or save me anywhere from one to five bucks (yay double coupon days).

It also highlights the effect that setting can have on a person.  My local grocery is laid out differently than the one a few exits down on the interstate.  In my imagination, the bazaar in Thebes is a vastly different place than the provisions shop and junk spacecraft flea-mart at the waystation just outside the jumpgate to the Perflaxian system.

Setting itself can have such a significant impact on a story that it creates a whole different experience, even with the same essential characters.  I’ve been working on an SF romantic adventure (yes, with hawt secks in it, too) that has gone through several iterations in the “noodling” stage (the stage after fleshing out characters where I “audition” them in several different plot scenarios likely to show up at some point in the story).  Recently, I ripped apart the setting and placed them in their current setting.  The entire story has changed, although the characters are the same folks.  They’re reacting differently, and the relationships between them are generating different conflict.

It’s an amazing thing, this writing gig.  I’m lucky I get to do it so much.

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This entry was posted by Xandra on Friday, June 30th, 2006 at 7:47 pm and is filed under Writing, Xandra. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.