Why Worldbuilding Matters More Than Story

Well, I thought that I’d talk about one thing that can sometimes be overlooked when it comes to creating compelling stories (whether in prose, in film etc…). I am, of course, talking about the setting, culture, atmosphere appearance and/or “world” of your story. Strange as it might sound, this is something that can actually matter more than the actual story you are trying to tell.

I ended up thinking about this when re-watching “Star Wars IV: A New Hope” recently. Even though I already knew the story of this film in advance and although it isn’t exactly the most complex or detailed story in the world, the film is still incredibly compelling and awe-inspiring thanks to everything surrounding the story. We get numerous tantalising glimpses of interesting-looking places and other brief hints of a much larger and more complex fictional “world” and it is absolutely fascinating.

Yet, part of what makes this film’s worldbuilding so effective might not be what you expect. The film knows what to leave to the audience’s imagination. In this film, we don’t get hyper-detailed explanations of everything. But, because of the sheer amount of interesting places, briefly-described backstory and unique details, the film lingers in the imagination long after the credits have rolled.

Why? Well, it all has to do with curiosity.

An even better cinematic example of this is the film “Blade Runner”. This is a sci-fi film noir that is set in a complex, visually-detailed futuristic city. There is so much visual detail that it’s perfectly possible to watch the film numerous times and still notice something new in the background every time. It is an absolutely stunning work of visual art. Yet, for all of this complex detail, the film’s “world” lingers in your imagination after the credits roll because of what you don’t see.

In “Blade Runner”, the audience only actually gets to see a couple of streets and a few indoor locations. These hyper-detailed places hint that the rest of the sprawling mega-city the film is set in will have just as much detail to it, but we never actually get to see it. As such, the viewer has to use their own imagination to try to work out what the rest of the “world” looks like. They have to think and daydream and, most crucially actually imagine either being the world itself or being someone exploring it.

By focusing on a few crucial highly-detailed locations, the film is not only able to build an interesting fictional world but also to make the audience want to explore the rest of it. It adds a level of immersion and imagination that feels a lot more “relevant” to the audience than the actual story itself. Instead of the audience just being a passive viewer, the interesting worldbuilding makes them take a more active role by prompting them to daydream about where everything takes place.

And, yes, this focus on a few highly detailed locations is one of the most important parts of good worldbuilding. For example, I recently started reading a hardboiled novel from the 1990s called “Wireless” by Jack O’ Connell (unfortunately, I seem to be losing interest in books at the moment though. So, it’s unlikely I’ll finish and review it). Although this novel contains lots of interesting locations and is set in a fascinating city called Quinsigamond that also turns up in his other novels, this novel reserves it’s best descriptive passages for a single location.

In an early part of the novel, about six and a half pages are devoted to describing a strange diner/nightclub called “Wireless”. These are some of the most compelling pages that I’ve read in a while. Not only do they talk about the history of the place, but they describe it in such vivid (yet economical) detail that it actually feels like a real place. I could read an entire novel consisting of these types of descriptions. The place has so many interesting details and is described in such a smoothly-flowing and vivid way that, when something actually happens in it a little bit later in the chapter, these story events just feel anticlimactic and/or like an annoying distraction from the awesome descriptions.

Another interesting variant on this worldbuilding technique can be found in a modern sci-fi novel called “The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet” by Becky Chambers.

One of the many innovative things this novel does is to tell a small-scale story that takes place in an absolutely gigantic, very “realistic” and intriguingly unique distant galaxy. Although we get a lot of details about interesting cultures, places, foods, languages etc… this large amount of setting information “works” because it still feels like we’re only seeing a fraction of something even more interesting (since the novel focuses on just one group of characters travelling through the story’s setting). It’s a novel that is more about worldbuilding (and characters) than story and it works 🙂

So, yes, worldbuilding and locations can often matter even more than the story itself does. Not only do fascinating places linger in the audience’s imaginations for longer than story events do, but any interesting locations will also feel like a blank canvas, a place that the audience can visit again and again in their memories and daydreams to tell their own stories in.

But, again, it is also important to remember that good worldbuilding relies on what you don’t show. If you want to use your story’s “world” to it’s fullest potential, then focus on a smaller part of it and hint at the rest. Worldbuilding is more important than story because it gives the reader’s imagination something to play with. But, if you spell out literally every detail about everything there, then there won’t be any mystery or room for the audience’s imaginations to get to work.

This, by the way, is one of the reasons why the later “Star Wars” prequel trilogy isn’t as good as “Episode IV: A New Hope” – because it takes away a lot of the mystery. It shows too much and spells too much out for the audience – meaning that daydreaming about the fictional “world” of the films becomes more about memory (and trying to remember whether details are “correct”) than about just letting the imagination run wild and freely extrapolating from intriguing hints and details.

A good story might keep the audience wanting to see what happens next – but a good fictional “world” will stay with them long after the story has finished.

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Anyway, I hope that this was useful 🙂

Creativity And Forgotten Places – A Ramble

A while before I wrote this article, I ended up reading a nostalgic online opinion article about video rental shops. This of course, made me think of all of the memories I had about these places.

For starters, there was the local video rental shop (sadly defunct since some time during the mid-2000s) which was the inspiration for the background of this retro horror movie-style painting I made a couple of years ago.

“Late Return (II)” By C. A. Brown (2016/17)

I also used this now-defunct shop (albeit with some artistic licence with regard to layout, size etc..) as the basis for this stylised gothic 1980s/1990s-style painting that will appear here in about a week and a half’s time:

This is a reduced-size preview. The full-size painting will be posted here on the 29th June.

I also have nostalgic memories about the ex-rental DVDs and VHS tapes I’d sometimes find in rental shops when I was a teenager. There was the time I watched “Shooting Fish” on rental VHS during my childhood (which was the first “12” certificate film I ever saw).

Then there was seeing the first “Saw” movie on a rental DVD (which was probably the last time I saw a rented film). I could go on but, although video rental shops weren’t really a major part of my life, they certainly seem to evoke a lot of nostalgia.

This, of course, made me think about why the best forms of nostalgia-based inspiration seem to come from places. The other classic example is the humble shopping centre. Even though, when I actually visited these places, they were just ordinary generic places which often only had 1-3 shops that were actually worth visiting, they’ve become more nostalgic these days.

This is probably due to their decline (especially over in America), which has been documented in things like Dan Bell’s “Dead Mall Series“. This has turned these humdrum places (which were often just slightly too up-market to house really interesting shops) into the modern equivalent of old gothic ruins or monuments to the memory of the 1990s/2000s.

So, of course, they’ve also been a source of literary inspiration and artistic inspiration for me during the past couple of years:

“The Forgotten Food Court” By C. A. Brown

“And Once A Palace” By C. A. Brown

But, why are forgotten places such brilliant sources of creative inspiration?

Simply put, they are almost a blank canvas. They can be the setting for almost any type of story and they can also be re-imagined and reconfigured in all sorts of interesting ways too.

In other words, taking inspiration from one of these types of places gives you enough of an idea of what to draw or write about so that you don’t feel blocked or uninspired, but it also gives you enough creative freedom to really let your imagination run wild.

In addition to this, it also allows you to express feelings of rose-tinted nostalgia in a really vivid way too. Not to mention that it also allows you to celebrate places which were just “mundane” once, but have become a lot more mysterious and mythologised after they began to disappear.

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Sorry for the short and random article, but I hope it was interesting 🙂

Getting Artistically Inspired Using Places You’ve Never Visited – A Ramble

Well, for today, I thought that I’d talk about how you can use places that you’ve never actually visited as a potent source of artistic inspiration. This is probably because, the day before I wrote this article, I found myself inspired by 1990s Los Angeles/California once again.

Although the next webcomic mini series to be posted here (which will start appearing here tomorrow night) will be set there, I also made a sci-fi painting inspired by 1990s Los Angeles that will be posted here in mid-late June. Here’s a reduced-size preview of it:

The full-size painting will appear here on the 22nd June.

And, yet, I’ve never been to America. Although I’m not really a fan of travelling these days, when I used to travel more, I never actually travelled outside of Europe. Likewise, although I was around during the 1990s and can remember a fair amount of it, I was only a young child at the time.

Plus, I’m not a fan of hot weather or large, crowded cities in real life – so, the idea of ever actually visiting a city like Los Angeles doesn’t appeal to me. Especially considering that I can probably count the number of times that I’ve visited central London (which is apparently tiny, spacious, affordable and quaint when compared to Los Angeles) on the fingers of both hands, and I still consider that to be too many times LOL!

But, I still consider 1990s Los Angeles (and 1990s California) to be highly inspirational. Why?

Well, it probably has to do with the fact that I’ve never actually been there. It probably has to do with the fact that I’ve only ever seen imaginatively stylised depictions of 1990s Los Angeles. In fact, most of the “cool” things from when I was a kid either came from or were set in 1990s California and/or Los Angeles (eg: “Buffy The Vampire Slayer”, “Duke Nukem II”/”Duke Nukem 3D”, A punk band called “The Offspring” etc..).

Likewise, although it didn’t become my favourite film until I was seventeen (despite seeing it for the first time when I was fourteen), the futuristic version of 1980s Los Angeles in Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” is probably one of my largest artistic inspirations too.

A good portion of the earliest, largest and/or most nostalgic parts of my imagination belong in 1980s/1990s Los Angeles and/or California. Because I’ve never actually been there (and don’t have a time machine), a lot of this place is still an absolute mystery to me. As such, there are a lot of gaps which my imagination has to fill whenever I make anything that is set there.

If you’ve only seen a few stylised glimpses of somewhere else, then this is fertile ground for your imagination. You can take those few glimpses and use them as the basis to build something new, interesting and imaginative. The mystery will make you wonder what the rest of the place you’re thinking about looks like, and it’ll be up to you to work it out.

Yes, some people might moan about “inaccurate” or “unrealistic” depictions of real places (rather than seeing them as imaginative creative works and/or great sources of unintentional comedy), but the whole point of imagination is that it allows us to build new versions of existing things and/or to use existing things as the basis for interesting fictional things. It allows us to escape from the boring confines of our own lives.

Imagination works by taking pre-existing things and turning them into something new and interesting. And, the more “mysterious” those things are, the more room your imagination has to work it’s magic. This is why the things that you make that are set in places that you’ve never been to often end up being more fantastical and imaginative than the things set in places that you have actually been to.

Plus, of course, it’s always amusing to see when this happens in reverse and Britain (or, more commonly, just London) is depicted in things made abroad.

Amusingly, it’s often a version of London that seems to take an American attitude towards guns (eg: in a realistic version of ’24: Live Another Day’, Jack Bauer would probably quickly get arrested for even owning a pistol, let alone carrying it in public) or it’s a version of London that sometimes looks a lot like rural or urban America/Canada ( the first and second seasons of “Nikita” have a couple of great examples of this – even if they get the ridiculous number of CCTV cameras in London absolutely right).

It’s hilarious, it’s silly, but it’s a testament to the power of imagination. It’s a testament to the fact that many different versions of real places can exist in people’s imaginations. It’s an interesting example of two cultures mixing. It’s creativity!

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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂

Small Artistic Details, Uniqueness And Places – A Ramble

Once again, although this is an article about making art (and possibly comics too), I’m going to have to start by talking about videogames and plastic bowls for a while. Yes, plastic bowls. As usual, there’s a good reason for this that I hope will become obvious later.

Anyway, a few months ago, I ended up watching a series of “Let’s Play” videos for a really interesting sci-fi/horror Playstation Four game called “Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture”. As cynical as I am about modern games, this one actually looks sort of interesting because it’s set in rural Shropshire in the 1980s.

This is the kind of setting that you’d find in classic 1970s-90s splatterpunk novels (by writers like Shaun Hutson and James Herbert), rather than in modern videogames with astonishingly realistic graphics.

That said, the most recent Playstation console that I own is a Playstation Two and – even if the game was ever ported to the PC – the graphics look like they’d be far too realistic to run on my computer. So, why am I mentioning this game?

Well, during one of the “let’s play” videos, the commentator made a really interesting observation. She pointed out that the kitchen sink in one of the houses in the game doesn’t have a large plastic bowl in it.

This is an unrealistic detail that I hadn’t really noticed, but using large plastic bowls in our kitchen sinks is apparently something that we only do in Britain. And, now that I think about it, I really don’t understand why we put plastic bowls in our sinks (I mean, sinks are made out of stainless steel, so it isn’t like the bowl has to protect it from rust). It’s just some kind of strange tradition, I guess. I mean, it’d actually feel kind of weird to use a kitchen sink that didn’t have a plastic bowl in it.

So, again, why am I mentioning this?

Well, I’m mentioning it because it illustrates how small details can either enhance the sense of place in a piece of art or how small details can become part of your own unique art style.

Whilst it’s probably fairly obvious how realistic small details can reallly make a painting or a drawing (or even a videogame) of somewhere really come alive, I thought that I’d spend the rest of this article talking briefly about how small details are also a part of your personal art style too.

To use a phrase coined by Shoo Rayner (I can’t remember which video he came up with this phrase in though), all artists have their own mental “library” of what things look like. When we draw or paint something from our imaginations, we use this mental library.

However, since this mental library is based on things that we’ve seen in real life, in movies, on TV, on the internet etc… then it’s going to be slightly different for everyone.

For everyday items, you’re probably going to base them on things that you’ve seen in real life – so, to everyone everywhere else, your ideas of what, say, a kitchen sink, or a plug socket or anything like that will look like will seem distinctive and unusual.

So, even if you don’t pay too much attention to the small details in your art (or your comic), then it’s still going to look fairly distinctive nonetheless.

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Sorry for the short (and fairly rambling) article, but I hope that this was interesting 🙂