It’s really enjoyable to create brand new worlds that have never before been explored. It’s great fun to populate them with the strangest types of residents you can think of, and then set them off to see what they’ll get up to.
It’s a process you can totally get lost in. You can forget your daily troubles, and all the things that are wrong with the world, as you immerse yourself in a brand new world of your own creation. A world where everything can be as good as you want it to be. A world where all the problems of the real world are things of no concern at all.
Except that you can’t. Or at least I can’t.
No matter how hard I try in a world of fantasy, I always find that the real world has followed me there. No matter how I create my perfect little world, I find that the flaws of the real world will be there, often twisted or amplified in unexpected ways. And no matter how original I try to make my characters, they always end up with characteristics or flaws that are all too recognisable from those in the real world.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully escape the real world and hide out in the world of fantasy, I can never avoid what is happening around the “real” me, and I can’t stop it bleeding into my stories. And, when I think about it, that’s a big part of the fun. It’s a way I can sort out my own thoughts and feelings for what is happening around me, and try to come to terms with things that are otherwise too complicated to understand.
At least that’s what I try to do as a writer. As a reader, the experience may be completely different. I suppose that’s part of the fun too.
Posted by Jonathan Gould and tagged as