Writing

Why I Wrote It: Way With Worlds 1 and 2

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

Way With Worlds, both the core books and the minibooks, have their origins in the murky early days of the internet.

We’re going back to fanfiction.net and sffworld.com and the rest. Strap into the Wayback machine.

So way, way early in the internet days, I think maybe 2000 or something, I became aware of the sheer talent in fandom. The internet jacked everything up to 11 and you just saw so much power, especially for writers. Fanfiction, original fiction, AUs, all of it was exploding across the internet (as well as freaking out some company’s legal offices).

Now I’d always been big on Worldbuilding from my ‘zine and RPG days. I love making a good setting and was developing original works myself. I’d also been on one major shared-universe project as an editor, and that taught me a lot about setting creation. Seeing so many people creating made me think I should share some advice.

So Way With Worlds started on Fanfiction.net. Then it spread to sffworld.com. And I wrote.

And kept writing.

And kept writing.

Even when I stopped, I posted the old works up at www.SeventhSanctum.com, my generator website. I would get emails about it now and then, over the years.

I can’t say they were the best written thing. Some were great. Some were just rants in organized forms. But they did reach a lot of people, and that was important; my goal was to empower people.

But if they weren’t the best written, they obviously reached people. Still, one learns over time, and if people still wrote me about Way With Worlds why not improve it . . .

Thus I set forth a project to rewrite Way With Worlds, I think around 2014. I would improve and expand upon them, and update them for modern times where more and more people were self-publishing. As I recall, it took at least a year to do – and it gave me even more feedback from my readers.

That feedback also included memories and thanks from previous readers. That’s when I realized there was one more step – people should be able to get my columns in an even more refined form – books.

I was literally thinking about rewriting and rewrite to put it in another form. That seemed weird to me, but then I realized this made a lot of sense. A book is easy for some people to read as opposed to a bunch of blog posts. A book is a way to present select columns and expand on them. A book also let me update all the stuff I learned in an update.

Thus I rewrote the rewrite and turned it into two books. This was educational.

Remember how I said a book presented data differently and gave you options? Yeah, its a totally different mindset. I had to ask how columns were associated with each other. I had to ask how they did and didn’t work together. A book is curated and I had to curate my own work into a more formal format.

I gained a lot more respect for people who blog-then-book. I could see how it helped, but also required transforming works in different ways.

Thus in 2016 the first book came out, where I expounded on my basic philosophy. Book 1 is a fun, tight, interesting read that helps people adapt a mindset appropriate to worldbuilding. In retrospective, it was a bit like the way Agile discusses both Philosophy and Method.

But there were also tons of columns left over! Good ones! So I created Book 2 to round up deep dives on certain subjects (not as specific as others, hang in there). They paired nicely – core philosophy, then deep dives on important subjects. It was a great two-book series.

On top of that, I had killer book covers, great editors, and they were quality product. They really were a different animal than the columns, and I felt like I’d evolved my work to a final state. I guess it was sort of Pokemon of writing.

But it wasn’t over yet.

Some years before I did Fan To Pro I’d kicked around ideas about writing career guides that coached people with friendly questions – kind of like sitting in a coffee shop with me. I came up with the idea to do this for Worldbuilding subjects, especially ones that were important to me. I would use them as fun tie-ins to the core books.

They took off like crazy. People loved the idea of personal, coaching, deep looks at specific subjects. I also enjoyed writing them, so . . . now I write one every few months. People keep reading them.

So that’s how it began. Early internet posts re-evolved to modern times. Modern rewrites evolved into books. These books inspired simple tie-ins that became their own thing.

Everything evolved, often surprisingly. It was also totally worth it.

So what lessons are there for you:

  • Feedback matters. Give it to inspire and direct people. Take it to remember your work matters to people – and it can be better.
  • It’s worth updating old posts if they help people. You evolve and change, people do, so update your best advice to be better.
  • Blog-to-book or columns-to-book is very legitimate (and has been done for decades). It also gives you options and direction that blog-style writing doesn’t. Converting something to a book makes you think.
  • Experiment with your writing, including things you publish. It gives you feedback, and you may find paths you never expected.
  • You never know 100% what’s going to happen. So be open to new ideas.

So that’s the story. Will I ever re-re-rewrite them? Probably not. I might update the core books with some tweaks, or polish or correct some things in the minibooks, but they’re pretty stable. Of course they’re stable because I learned so much from rewriting . . .

Steven Savage

Sharing Your Work And That One Person

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

We want our creative works to reach people – to inspire, to guide, to entertain, to salve pains. We want to change the world in our own way. So do many other people.

Being a creative puts us in a curious position of feeling like we’re competing. If you had someone say they wished to feed the hungry, they wouldn’t worry about competition. If you knew someone who wished to clean up the environment, they’d welcome all comers. But creative works tend to make us competitive because people have limited attention.

There is rarely a shortage of the poor. There are no shortage of environmental challenges. But when we wish for attention, well, that’s a limited resource.

Which is why, if we want to make people laugh, educate, and overthrow tyrants, we have to rethink how we reach out.

We have to think “how can I help.” If our creative work has value – and let us assume it does – then the real question is how do you help people out.

How do you get the right people to read your book, appreciate your art, and change the world because of a single poem? There’s no right answer, because every work is different. But asking that question of “how do I help” is important.

(If creativity is your career, “how do I help and make a living” ramps up the challenge).

However, there is one thing to consider – have you reached one person and changed their lives?

Many an author or artist or musicians knows this experience. There’s that one person that follows your book, hung up your art, or told you your song got you through a tough time. That single moment is valuable, unshakeable, and powerfully personal.

Those are the moments to look into. How did you reach them? Why did you make a difference? What happened?

Then you can ask how to repeat this moment. How do you repeat that success in having your comic or game get into the right hands? That one person may be the key to transforming the world.

Sadly, you may not be able to find a lesson. Many of we creatives keep shambling forward and trying. But consider the following:

Even if you reach only that one person, there’s hope you can find out how to reach more.

Even if you reach only that one person, that’s one work. Your next work may reach a million.

Even if you reach only that one person, if you reach the right person, they change the world.

That one person is your sign to not give up. After all, that person didn’t give up on you . . .

Steven Savage

Why I Wrote It: Magic, Technology, and Worldbuilding

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

This was the second book in my “Way WIth Worlds” Minibooks. Why I wrote it is twofold.

On the larger level, this was me wanting to try out writing a series of focused worldbuilding books. I’d decided to work on six at first to try it out, originally as tie-ins to my Way With Worlds books. Later, as I’ve noted before, I found these were valid on their own and began writing them regularly.

But that’s the general thing. Let’s talk why I focused on Magic and Technology – together.

Because for your worldbuilding magic and technology are the same thing. I’ve said it many times, and I gave myself an entire book to talk about it. So it was kind of cathartic.

See, Magic and Technology are how characters work with and change the world. Rituals and coding, spell gestures and wiring, are all just “I want to do X so Y happens.” For the sake of worldbuilding, they’re almost always the same.

This is important because we so often focus on the differences between magic and technology. This leads us down the path of focusing on the differences between them. We ask what the magic system is like. We ask how probable the technology is in our world.

But these differences are only a small percentage of all the questions we should ask bout a world.

How does this work? What is the impact? Who teaches it? What is the effect? Once we decide on a magic or technology, the major worldbuilding questions dwarf the questions of “how many necromancers can dance on the head of a hard drive.”

Putting this in book form felt great. Here’s the hard questions to ask about magic or technology. Here’s the social impacts to think about. Here’s all these questions without getting lost in differences.

If I hadn’t done the Way With Worlds series, this probably would have come back as another work, perhaps a larger book. Instead it got to be part of the larger picture.

This will always have a special place for me, because of this.

And that’s why I wrote it.

Steven Savage