There and back again - World Building for Storytellers - The Fargoth World Building Project
July 27, 2007
Through the miracle of modern technology today, it is now possible for a story to be realized and constructed as a virtual world and this has changed the nature of the marketplace and opened up tremendous opportunities for those writers who embrace the idea of not just telling a story, but realizing entire worlds, multiple cultures and races.
Tolkien captured it best when he wrote the immortal lines of “There and back again” for they capture beautifully and simply what is at the the heart of the reader experience when they fall in love with or become immersed in a story; the desire to go somewhere other than this world, and experience what it would be like to be someone else, live in any time, any place, and under conditions far removed from the real world in which we all live. Time travel? It’s not an impossibility at all, in fact we’ve been doing it for a long time, as it has been with us through the vehicle of the story and through story we can stay in the present, visit the past or travel to the future.
Time travel is a natural phenomena of the mind. But for all the readers who have ever been entranced by a world that a writer has realized, the desire to go to that world–to be there–and live the life of that character or simply develop a life as a character is now realized through the computer generated imagery (CGI), animation and other technologies that deliver a finished product to a screen just like the one you’re looking at now.
Today there is a potential for partnership between the storyteller, illustrator, animator and programmer that has not hitherto existed in quite the same way, and this means–as many budding storytellers have already realized–that they must increase their knowledge and experience of world building in order to make the worlds they create as canvas for stories work and improve the commercial and collaborative possibilities that arise out of such attention. The world has changed. Story alone is no longer enough to maintain or have a competitive edge and professionalism demands that when one deliver the story it is ready to be developed into a viable franchise. The commercial possibilities of stories are now part of the marketing mix that an author brings to a story when they sit down to write it.
This does not mean that the story is no longer important. It is still central to, and must be the focus of the storyteller, for it is the story that is ultimately important to the development of human character and the advance of civilization. But it does mean that the attention of the storyteller to the way in which their fictional world works has taken on a new import that makes the possibility of developing a single story into a career building franchise far, far greater than a story-in-a-book alone can accomplish.
The rise of virtual gaming where groups of internet connected players take on armed forces everywhere has lead to a greater importance and competitive pressure to develop worlds where people would like to go. Who didn’t want to go to Middle Earth once they had read the story and seen the movie? Well, I did and I was born there, left for a time and am now back again.
As consequence of virtual gaming’s rise and since the advent of the internet and the ubiquity of computers in every home connected to the world by high speed broadband connections, it is now possible to travel practically anywhere in the world and even offworld, across multiple dimensions and into the multiverse itself. Virtual reality is here and it is real and getting more real every day. Virtual gaming through keyboard, monitor, mouse and joystick has made things very different, and it has had an impact on storytelling.
A few years ago when I began to develop The Helm and the Horde I realized, as many others captured and inspired by such works as The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, that if I wanted to succeed then I would have to understand the world in which my characters were living better than I did when I started writing the story. I also needed to grok the world I was describing and developing in the story so I could enrich the history of the characters, and as a result I embarked on the business of understanding how worlds function and looked for efficient ways to build them.
In my journeys I ended up on a lot of different web sites, and read a lot of books including gaming manuals, and studied all sorts of franchises, including George Lucas’s Star Wars, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and of course, The Hobbit that make up the Middle Earth franchise and most recently JK Rowling and the Harry Potter franchise to name a few most already know of [Editor's Note: The Free Articulator will be providing insight into how Creative Artists can develop such franchises in future articles]. And while these are all very good things to do, and amount to market research for a Creative Artist, the best experience of world building came from participating in an online world building project that is due to have its tenth anniversary in 2008.
I joined the Fargoth World Building Project at the turn of the New Millennium and have been privileged to be a part of developing it to the point where it is attracting and developing some stellar storytellers, who are honing their craft and exercising their imagination in ways that I am constantly astounded by and proud of, for acting as Fargoth’s Editor-in-Chief I have helped to facilitate that very condition. The caliber of the writing for those who consistently participate and contribute becomes very high, and the ideas that Fargoth’s Contributors demonstrate are forming the vanguard of a new wave of imagination that is simply astounding. Great talent finds a home at Fargoth.
In the latter part of the 20th Century, I frankly despaired of seeing such a phenomenon occur for imagination has been dying strangled by production processes that are focused on the bottom line and have little to no understanding of the purposes of art & entertainment for civilization and culture. So, I have worked at Fargoth to create a safe place to help develop the conditions by which imagination could flourish beyond the formulaic bottom-line processes that strangle creativity and stultify imagination. Read the article at Fargoth that takes a close look at definitions of fantasy to grok what I’m referring to.
Why? Because I wanted imagination to find new wings to soar and inspire the future. You can read about the principles I put in place to achieve this in the Writing Tips at Fargoth. There’s some useful information on editing for those storytellers who want to develop their craft and learn to edit, because great writers are good editors. These same principles, among others of similar utility will be presented at the Free Articulator as we move forward, though the perspectives and broader applications will achieve greater clarity for other creative disciplines also.
There is no substitute for knowing your craft, and when you do, and can edit another’s work and improve it, the gain to your own writing craft is immense. It won’t happen overnight, but over the course of a several years, you learn a lot about writing and writers. I highly commend the FWBP to writers who want to learn about world building and improve their craft and I am and will always be grateful to Paul Pishnak, Jay Stidolph and Dave Freeman, and others who participated and contributed for trusting me and providing the opportunity to work closely with them to develop the Project into what it is now. It has gone from less than 40 members when I began to over 700 at this writing. But there is more to be gained from the experience of participating in such a project.
The guys at Fargoth are also, by and large, a great group of people to work with, who have a deep love of gaming and fantasy (and a vast knowledge of it) that shows in the care and attention they bring to those who contribute and the work that is contributed and becomes a part of the world of Belandir. The atmosphere is creative, fair, inspirational and extremely supportive, while maintaining the sort of constructively critical edge that demands quality, and which are the hallmark of good work.
The resources amassed and available at Fargoth are of practial use to those who wish to develop their own worlds and they are easily adapted for that purpose to any world a storyteller wishes to develop. However, to get the most out of the material the Fargoth World Building Project freely provides, one should contribute and learn from the experience of working with an extremely cooperative and highly creative bunch of dedicated volunteers who love fantasy and the fantastic.
I’ve made friendships at Fargoth that have borne and continue to bear great creative fruit and that have resulted in the forward progress of my own projects, one of which is this very publication, the Free Articulator, whose Editor-in-Chief, Joel Falconer, I first met at Fargoth, and with whom I now am involved in many creative endeavors that span the gamut of storytelling, poetry, gaming, and songwriting with dashes of philosophy, sociology, politics, and culture all part of the mix. There are others of similar talent, intelligence, and commitment I’m working with now who have come to Fargoth and then struck up deeper creative relationships and rewarding friendships who you will be hearing about here, in the Free Articulator as their work develops and comes to fruition. So if you have not subscribed already, do. The future is just around the corner and we are going straight there.
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I still haven’t given up on Fargoth - it’s an amazing idea. Maybe one day i’ll even get back into it.
I’m sure you will Vitaliy.
You’ve probably heard the saying, “The book is better than the movie”. Well I’ve got to say that’s been my experience at Fargoth. There’s nothing like shooting dragons, escaping dungeons, or plunging your sword through a Maer’goth, and there’s no better setting than your mind to do it.