How Kindergarten Applies to Creative People

Alright, this might be because I’ve read a lot of comics books. Or it might be because I’m numbered among the first generation that really took the plunge into the digital age and got exposed to things like forums and chatrooms and play by post roleplaying early enough. Or it might be just because I’m a crazy freak out of touch with reality. If I had to guess, I’d pick the last one – never let me down so far. But I’m always a bit surprised that shared world literature isn’t more popular than it is.

That link’s a little misleading because I don’t necessarily mean a series of stories in a shared setting by a number of authors – the way the EU Star Wars fiction works. But I mean any sort of common setting populated by different characters used for any series of books even those by a single author. The only requirement, though, is that each book in the series be at once self-contained and somehow part of the greater whole. Each part of the overall series can lead to any other part and, somehow, does so that a reader can start at any one part of the cycle and still have a satisfying experience. It’s decentralized, in so many words, from the rigid structure of each novel being a sequel to the previous one. And in this modern, hectic world, it would seem to me to be a smart way to develop a book series and cultivate its following – don’t require that a huge investment in order for each individual experience to pay off.

Maybe that’s because my first introduction to the idea was through Discworld. Great series, by the way, all by the same author and all dealing with the same crazy world but each book can be read completely in isolation from the others. But reading them with the other thirty odd books that have been written about the place reveals new depths and connections as you move through different viewpoints and themes. Pratchett’s a better writer than he gets credit for, I think, and far more clever. Anyone who gives the world L-space has to be doing something right, at least.

But Prachett’s not the only author doing this or the only way of going about it. I already mentioned Star War’s Expanded Universe where a controlling authority allows others into their sandbox but there’s also things like Wicked that use work that’s fallen into the public domain as a springboard. And there’s even people trying to create these things from scratch rather than from any existing intellectual properties like the Ring of Fire novels. And, well, me as I’m following the Discworld model with my Clans of the Highborn novels – which is what got me thinking of this in the first place.

But, I guess I feel as communication technology improves and the costs of distribution and dissemination get lower and lower that we’ll see more of that sort of thing. The ease and speed at which people can write is just going to improve (Not saying anything about the skill, mind). And an easy way of getting into writing would be what today we call fanfiction – just take someone else’s plots or characters or setting or whatever else you don’t have the time or talent – yet – to create and play around with them. Take others stories and tell them in your own way. Maybe even tell a few of your own one day. This isn’t anything new, after all, it’s how in times past that cultures and peoples developed what we call mythologies today. Fantastic stories that still speak to us today because even though they’re about gods and monsters and all the rest they’re still, at heart, about people. And they were made, somehow, better for not having any one author. They were told and retold and told again over the years to meet new audiences and different challenges. We could do the same today – and I’d argue, we are – but we’d just have to get authors to give up their insecurities and work together. They’d have to learn how to share.