A moment of Silence for the fics I will never write

Welcome to a new series for Back shift writer and Writers and Worldbuilders. Writers and Worldbuilders is a Facebook group and collaboration project of a good friend of mine. W&W hit 500 followers, and one of the things tossed around was the idea of looking at media properties such as Star Wars and Trek to look at their world Building influences. There are several YouTube and other documentaries about those mythologies, so I went looking at other possible sources and broadened my scope to Tv, Film, novels, and comics.

Over the course of the next few months, I will be discussing various mythologies, their influences, how they built their worlds, what works, what doesn’t, fan theories, and any criticisms of the mythology in a larger social context.

Considering the scope of the mythologies I will be discussing, the articles will have several parts. The first part will discuss the world itself and the inspiration, cultural influences, and history. The second article will discuss interpretations taken by the mythology as it grew, in cases of bigger commercial projects, what happens when other writers get involved (especially the case in TV and movies), adaptations and how they handled the product. The third part will discuss social issues, criticisms levelled against the properties and mythology, how the writers might have done better, and what ongoing issues, concerns there might be. During this phase, I’ll be discussing the broader applications of the fandoms created around the products, no matter how small.

This is a big project, likely to be media intensive and I’m looking forward to really delving into some different mythologies. So often when we talk about world-building, the writing world lands on the influences of Tolkien for fantasy, Star Wars and Star Trek for Science Fiction, and while the mythologies are massive and do have broad applications and influences, there’s more out there.

I’m always looking for other mythologies to research, here are the ones I’m tackling first.

• Supernatural — Worldbuilding through Episodic Story Telling
  The Sandman — Non-Linear world building or How to build a world when Reality doesn’t exist
  The Dresden Files — Build it up, Make it worse, tear it down, Build it better
  Guy Gavriel Kay Novels — Subtle World through History
  The Hobbit — Cinematic Verse
  More to Come

Mirrored from BackshiftWriter.