[Steven Lake]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

My Onuissance Cells stories were formulated around a "builder world," the stories intended to showcase various elements of that world. Most series, especially for episodic TV and such, are essentially created that way: Develop your setting first, then create stories to fit. It's a different kind of writing, sort of approaching stories from another direction, but it's just as useful and valid as starting with the story, and building your characters and setting to fit that.

Now that you mention it, the builder world idea is in fact very similar to what they do with television and movie writing. As for myself, I've actually found it a lot easier to build the world first, then the characters, then the story, as the story evolves out of the world and the characters in it. I guess, as you pointed out, not everyone does that, and instead are more comfortable going the other way with their writing, in which point they wouldn't have a builder world, as they wouldn't need one. In their case they'd have foundation characters on which everything is built.

Originally Posted by JoeKeppler

You know, Steven, I think I've been doing that for years now and just never knew that there was existing terminology associated with it. So thank you for introducing me to the right verbage!

I write about what I know and what I've had the most experience in, which is home building... and at any given time and place in this country and all over the world, there are hundreds of absolutely mind blowing stories of confrontations, deceit, physical harm and other equally crazy things going on at once.

And because I "fictionalize" the events and experiences that I've had within this world for so many years, I'd say yes, I've developed and am now working on several story-lines that came to me when putting my mind in the overall world of home building.

There's just so much going on and there are so many thrilling ideas to mine, that yes, I'd say I've built a separate "builder world" (in this case, almost literally) that I've used to cultivate different story ideas.

Thanks for sharing!

heh. You're welcome. Honestly, I hadn't even realized either that what I was doing was of a specific "type" of story writing or construction. It wasn't until I started constructing my "Imperial Colonies" saga that I realized what I was actually doing to it was the same thing I did to other stories as well. IE, I built a story out of my builder world.