Worldbuilding is as much a God-given right as questioning authority, drinking too much coffee, or saying that Walking Dead has run its course and needs resolution or cancellation. People might assume that a preposterous thing to say, worldbuilding being under fire.
“Who said you can’t worldbuild…wait. What is worldbuild?” They say it through their expectations, though. From the time we received the letters E for excellent or S for satisfactory for grades, we were told to dream big. We dreamt big and made good grades. We made good grades so we could go to college. We went to college so we could earn the paper. We earned the paper so we could, hopefully, qualify for a good means of living in a good economy. If the economy was bad, then we dreamt big for naught. Many, many, many, many a child with an E-filled report card dreamt for naught.
So, no, we are not encouraged to exercise our right to worldbuild. I remember worldbuilding in school. I did it through art. I would draw a cartoon cat or a cartoon dog fighting, maybe a superhero with steroid abs that looked like a ripoff between a WWF wrestler and a hulking Wolverine. In the background was the landscape, the other planet, the ship, the secret military base, or whatever ecosystem was preferable. A rainforest where there was nothing but desert sand beneath the buttress roots? Yes. So what.
That was wrong, though. The teacher gave me detention for worldbuilding once. Once, I had to take it home and have it signed to show my mom I was worldbuilding and not paying attention.
“Pay attention.” The mantra of the correct.
Eventually, drawing evolved into musical expression. Guitar worked well. It was portable, light, aesthetically pleasing like a coffee table without the weight and with magic flowing out of its lacquered surface. The sounds of nineties alternative and hard rock allowed worldbuilding to be translated to six-note polyphonies or searing melodies with trills and bends and flutters (if you had a whammy bar). If one truly desired to worldbuild, you joined a band.
That, too, was for naught. Since digressing from this writing to expound on the things teachers say and think about high school kids who want to be in bands is a waste of good space, I’ll renege. Suffice it to say, it was frowned upon more than the doodling.
We are therefore forced to write. We are forced to something. Worldbuilding is innate, like the way a baby’s mouth cleaves to the mother’s teat like a suckerfish (sorry…I’m a new dad and find it fascinating). Our brains, creative or dulled like a pencil, build a world that exists within and without. We don't have to be creative to create. A kid on a farmhouse where yearly rotations of corn, soy, and alfalfa grass are the way of life is able to see himself waking up one morning with a pain in his gut, before realizing he is turning into a sizeable monster who leaves the farm, rampages through the school, tossing busses like toys, flinging bullies a mile away into the woods, wrecking the four walls, making his teachers piss themselves and flee, and getting the girl he likes to kiss him in front of all his friends. A girl who lives in an apartment with her single mom in the inner city projects where her brother was shot walking home one time can establish herself as the no-bullshit heroine who beats up men who beat women, becomes one of the first female Army Rangers, becomes a fighter pilot, goes to war, comes back, has a family or none, and buys her mom a house and owns a dog. Maybe there’s a girl or boy who want to just build a world where it’s still okay to get married young – and stay that way – and have kids and still make love at sixty. Maybe there's some who grow old just to die alone and love it every inch of the way. Maybe there’s even a kid who doesn’t give a hamster’s ass about those things and is content to just think about worldbuilding without being told it’s futile, fruitless, dumb, a waste of time and energy, doesn’t pay the bills, isn’t good for culture, isn’t politically correct, doesn’t line up with twentieth century thinking, or isn’t practical to math or science like it is to the Chinese who are kicking our occidental asses.
Still, we are forced to reply to such mean-spirited rebukes coming from the same world which told us to dream big from the beginning. We write because English failed us in a great irony, teaching us grammatical posture but telling us to work hard for that STEM scholarship. We found difficulty explaining why we'd rather be imagining life on another earthlike planet, since this one has politicians, climate change, and ISIS roaming its scabbed surface. I write now, not because I planned on doing it from the time I was young, but because I’ve been rerouted to do it in a way beyond my control. I like it, true; but like a circuit board of misguided data, I’m putting things into story form because the stories are not welcome in the capacitors which enabled it in the first place.
Stories are fantasy. Fantasy isn’t real. That which isn’t real is speculative. Speculation can be dangerous. Sure, it can be dangerous. But it can be fun when allowed to entertain.
Let there be a constitutional amendment to create. The right to free expression, as written, is not what it seems. In this progressive age, the freedom of expression means the right to be offended by every damned thing that’s uttered from an opposing party’s talking point. It means politics. It means religion. It does not mean real expression. It may as well be modified to mean, ‘in the absence of offenses…be offended by absence!’
Let it spell out, in plain and simple language, this thing: leave those freaks who talk dialogue to themselves while they should be doing their job alone. Tell them to do their job, but let them talk. Just because the voices talk back does not make them schizophrenic…
It means they’re alive.
Enjoy another creation...
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