More Head-World Discussion

ravendroppings:

Thank you everyone who responded to my previous entry, I read them all!

First off, I didn’t think “head-world” would be that misinterpretable of a concept, but I got a few people questioning what I meant (from various places I posted this to).  Let me clarify; by “head-world” I mean a fictitious world or universe you have created characters for, stories for, environments for, etc.  For example, the entire world where George R. R. Martin’s books A Song of Ice and Fire take place are his “head-world”; the Harry Potter universe is J. K. Rowling’s “head world”; etc.

I have a few more questions for you guys (which I will answer as well):

1. What do you plan on doing with your head-world?  Why did you create it/them?  
I have two main ones and I created them because they were concepts or stories I haven’t seen, but would like to see.  They also center around topics I like to think about, are important to me, and want to discuss creatively.  I’ve thought about how I want to get them out to the public.  I would LOVE to do a comic, but I am very weak at sequential art and, more importantly, I have no time.  I’ve thought about writing a series of novels or books, but I fear my scientific writing skills murder my ability to write interestingly and creatively for fiction readers.  What I would really like to do, realistically, is spot illustrations for a written story, much in the style of The Katurran Odyssey.  However, if we disregard reality?  I’d love to see my concepts as movies or as television series!

2. Do you openly share your head-world with the public?  Why or why not?
I don’t share either of mine at the moment.  I often teeter around on whether or not I should.  I worry about a couple of things.  If I share my worlds I run the risk of my ideas being plagiarized by people who can put out media much faster than I can and therefore losing credit and control of my concepts.  However, I worry that if I don’t share my head-worlds publicly then if someone happens to converge on my ideas, and gets them “out there” before me, then I’m the one looking like the copy-cat or plagiarizer.  At the moment I feel like my concepts are sufficiently unique that I don’t have to worry about the latter, but you never know!!


How about you guys?

1. I created my head world because telling myself stories is just something I do, whether or not it has a purpose outside of myself. I seem to use worldbuilding as a general way of engaging with the world around me. There are two kinds of information: Information I came upon by surprise and think “I can use this for my world!” and information I specifically seek out to fill out my world. I come to understand personal life experiences by applying them to my world in various ways. I ponder philosophical questions and thought experiments by setting them up in my world. As for what I plan to do with it? Well My current plan is comics. It seems like the best fit for how highly story-oriented as well as how highly visually-oriented I am. Though because the world itself isn’t designed for any specific medium, it could be done in many, and I have other ideas for expressing these concepts through art. But I already have a thing to do with it, which is make more surreal illustrations, which I am always in the process of doing. I consider the paintings to be a proper expression of my work, not preliminary or anything, it’s just a poor medium to describe an important facet of it - the character stories.

2. I do openly share my world with people, though not everything. But only not everything because it’d take too long to write and draw it all out to the point where I could say YEP, SHARED EVERYTHING. Also some of it is really dry and boring and I can’t relate it in my usual manner (illustration + small story snippet/explanation) so it just doesn’t come up unless I’m directly asked by someone to explain some specific detail. If I didn’t share it I’d have nothing to do on the internet and nothing to talk to people about. o_o That’s the problem with it being all-encompassing of my work and even of my personal self - when you take it out there’s nothing left. Sounds almost pathetic put that way, doesn’t it?