Books — Collaborative Worldbuilding for Writers and Gamers

As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered. 

Collaborative Worldbuilding for Writers and Gamers

Trent Hergenrader, Bloomsbury Academic (2019)

Find the book here. Check out Hergenrader’s website here. And you can find the books we edited together with our friend Joe here and here.

Few ideas have influenced my creative writing instruction around the concept of setting more than those that have come in conversation with my friend and long-time co-editor Trent. Specifically, he is the number one apologist of the effectiveness of collaborative world building as an element of teaching and nurturing the creative process of writers at all levels.

A little backstory: when we were grad students together, Trent took a huge risk—at least in the eyes of the norm core English department establishment—and tied his critical studies to elements of RPG and video game theory.

Then he convinced the powers-that-be of course assignment to allow him to pilot what I would call a radical departure from the traditional creative writing course set up, rolling out a worldbuilding-based course that led his students creating a sprawling, post-apocalyptic version of Milwaukee replete with rules, characters, context, and guiding world principles from which thousands of stories could be written. 

In short, he did what good teachers do: he made the normal strange and the strange a way back to what his students thought they knew. And, in that class, was the seed that became his book Collaborative Worldbuilding for Writers and Gamers. Having seen this idea develop almost since its inception, it was really fun to tear into it while away on sabbatical.

Part teaching manual, part transmedia universe theory, and part idea generator for creating richer, deeper worlds for stories and campaigns alike, Trent’s book is a practical balance of philosophical notions of how settings operate and pragmatic explorations of how to get the most out of hashing out the rules of an environment shared by a writer and her audience or a group of gamers gathered to play Dungeons & Dragons complete with a worldbuilding card deck.

Bigger, though, he makes the case for how immensely helpful it is to re-conceive preparing to tell new stories in this way:   

“Imagine the collaborative worldbuilding process as the creation of an enormous story-generating machine. In this view, the act of worldbuilding is distinct and separate from conventional storytelling” (6).

And, along with being a helpful guide to opening up the creative process, the text also helps readers consider how the limitations to expressing their own worlds most effectively might lie within their own assumptions.

“Worlds are deceptively complex and we must be aware that our natural inclination is to generalize lived experiences….How we distinguish between worlds, what we identify as the rules of different worlds, and how social forces operate in a given world are all matters of importance” (16).

That’s why I suggest this book to my students; it benefits their art and their character in ways they probably aren’t expecting when they fold back the cover.

You mean I HAVE to go to San Diego for research?

As far as locations that need to be studied go, the hometown is not half bad.

This the third installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

A lot of the work that I was able to accomplish toward my novel was doing extended research on a number of subjects I needed to have pulled together in my mind in order to finally push the story (and the stories that make it up) forward. 

Sometime about halfway through May, a friend asked me what I was spending my time learning about and after I listed several of the subjects in my browser tabs and the books I’d read, she looked at me like I was spouting gibberish. I stopped and thought about it outside of the context of my novel and had to laugh.

My research for the novel includes delving into:

·      Postal network art;

·      Suicide as performance art;

·      Podcast production;

·      Terminology connected with the creation of eight separate forms of art;

·      Security procedures at a decommissioned nuclear reactor;

·      Military supply clerking norms and duties;

·      Portable barricade technology;

·      Police investigative procedure;

·      The history of the Hillcrest neighborhood in San Diego;

·      Ray Johnson;

·      The relative differences between various forms of suicide bombs;

·      Remittances;

·      Marine recruitment procedures;

·      Crime scene photography;

·      Currency markets and trading;

·      About 30 other topics…

This doesn’t include the trips I took to San Diego so I could walk routes and take pictures of where the characters in my story exist in the moments I depict them. Add to this the overlay of the cultural, spiritual, moral, and regional frameworks of it all as my characters range from a day trader to a high school dropout-turned Marine recruit to a journalist just to name a few. To say there are a lot of moving parts in my head would be a massive understatement.  

A key location in my manuscript, in reflection.

Part of a Hillcrest mural that made it onto the page in a later draft.

To combat the near-constant sense of overwhelmedness I felt, I started charting and mapping my storylines, trying to figure out where all of this was taking me. As you can see in the pictures included with this post, even exerting that level of external on it all left a lot to deal with.

With 12 separate first-person perspectives and a shared narrative that absents it’s central figure, some of those charts got complicated pretty quickly.

An early map of the neighborhood where most of the story takes place. Sure, I could have used Maps and dropped pins in various locations. Sure, most of these details have changed. Sure, this is evidence of why I’m not a visual artist. But I wanted a sense of co-creation in these notes.

Graphing paper was really helpful in picturing the exact size and spacing of an important location in the story. This is one of 24 charts of the space I made.

But this work also began to clarify matters I hadn’t been able to get at before. And while I can’t claim I see it all yet, I can see where I’m headed…at least until the next unexpected divergence in the road…

From one of my walking tours of the neighborhood, this seemed like the cliched thing to do.