World builder. What an incredible responsibility. To take a bunch of words, images, or both and toss them about, piece them together, and create a place that for a limited amount of time, one can inhabit. And to create this place over and over with different situations, different results, different realms is exhilarating, and humbling.
The possibilities can be endless. The outcomes of those possibilities can also be endless. A man sets out on a journey and on each leg he finds obstacles, setbacks, or opportunity. His road diverges and the story somehow changes. A car spins out of control, crashes into a guardrail, and over an embankment. Do the occupants live? Do they die? What trauma might exist for the survivor or the family of the deceased? A woman is offered a new job in a newsroom with a large viewership at the same time she is promoted to editor of her small town newspaper. Does she accept the new big city job or does she become editor making a difference in her own hometown?
Each fictional writing is a world all its own. When opening a book’s pages, images form through eyes cast toward each written word. Separate, words convey their own meaning, but together they form a concept. And in a novel, they create a level of existence apart from its physical surroundings. Being taken to anyplace other than the here and now is magical or it can be. It all depends on which way the words take us. Will the castle fall? The heroine conquer her fears? Will the end be as satisfying as the beginning?
World building. What an incredible responsibility.
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