World Building: Child's Play

I was about twelve when my dad told me that I reminded him of the Brontë sisters. Having never come across their works, I was curious. I checked their joint biography out of the library and read it, realizing at that point what my dad meant. He was talking about Animal World.

(Cue the nostalgic music that indicates a flashback within a flashback.) I was probably four or so when I got my first set of plastic farm animals. My older sister had some already, and we ended up merging the sets, though like any other children close in age, we all knew exactly which ones belonged to whom. We named them all: names like Wilbur and Gloria, Jennifer and Snowball, Zanzibar and Cornflower. My sisters played with them, but I was the one who loved them most. Over the course of years, my parents gave more plastic animals to the set, mostly to me. Zoo animals infiltrated the farm, and even animals that were of significantly different sizes due to not being made for a set were integrated into the whole.

Gradually, we started to develop a world around these animals. We were all very close in age, and though I was the youngest, by seven or eight I had begun to come up with a lot of the creative ideas for play (my sisters, however, determined how we were to play them). The exception was the creation we had begun to call Animal World. Animal World was mine.

Every new animal, every new prop or toy that I acquired became part of the fabric of this world, from farm fences to the junk plastic pieces that some of the farm chickens had been attached to. An old pepper grinder became a tool for dispensing magical flying powder; unused microfiche spools were everything from statue bases to feast tables. The government was carefully laid out: it consisted of a king and three queens (one of whom was my protagonist), a president, a governor, and a mayor. Two of the queens, having cross species relationships, were also married to other husbands, with whom they had children.

There were villains (Lion and Cheetah and their cronies) and there was magic. Magic could make animals fly and bring them back to life when they were killed by the bad animals. Magic made the animals able to talk. Animals were fitted to jobs they were suited for: the giraffe was the Guardian of the Flag, the skunks were the police force, the elephants the fire department. Complex cultural mores differed from species to species: for instance, the President was a bull (well, the animal was a cow, but it was bigger than most of the others, so we decided it was a bull) and was married to literally all of the cows. Adventures of all sorts could be counted upon: an addition of dinosaurs to the batch required an adventure to explain how they were found and became part of the world. There was an adventure to free animals on a regular farm in the human world. And Lion and Cheetah were always there to bedevil Jennifer the Queen Horse of Animal World.

But what I loved most was the mythology. The king, Thunderbolt, the horse king, had an ambiguous origin. His mother had been a phantom horse of some sort, and had abandoned him as a colt; we were not entirely sure who and what she was, but there was an ineffable mystery to her and to her son that a mysterious past, and had married a horse who had vanished without a trace; the implication was that Thunderbolt and Jennifer were probably half-siblings (not something that bothered me at all when I was nine or ten, especially as I had read more Greek mythology than most kids). Animal World itself had been settled by fleeing farm animals, and had later drawn more creatures to it, but the world I know now that many of these elements came from the collective unconscious, and were honed by my own reading of fantasy and mythology.

You may see where I am going with this. My early experience in worldbuilding informed my later worlds, especially the elaborate one I started in seventh grade and worked on throughout my junior high and high school years, and even a bit into my college time. That science fiction world had everything from quirky spaceship designs; computer innovations (I invented the touch screen long before it was in general usage, or even in general awareness); crystalline structures for rocks that didn’t exist; star charts; complex maps of everything from terrain to population to rainfall; a repeating numerical system based on the number thirteen; and most ambitiously, an entirely new language (that was the part I worked at when I was getting my B.A. in Linguistics, since I had new tools to work with and was able to restructure a lot of what I had gotten wrong in my earlier years). I wrote reams of poetry and songs for this world, mapped out genealogies – and of course, wrote stories.

In other words, I was engaged in worldbuilding.

It’s a term that gets bandied about frequently in speculative fiction. Generally it means creating a plausible world that is (hopefully) consistent, and also (hopefully) unique. But when do we learn this? When we start writing? Or maybe much further back than that.

Children are world builders, not simply in their imaginations, but in reality. Everything a child learns goes into their growing picture of the world around them. They make connections, often correct, often incorrect, about how all these pieces of information fit and work together to make sense. In a way, their constantly changing picture of the world is their own unique creation. Of course, that’s somewhat true for adults as well, but adults generally have stopped adding to their picture in a big way that would completely change it, and are also more prone to bowing to consensus reality. But a child’s world is very much self-constructed, and so individual that not one of the other billions of children on our planet would ever see things in exactly that way. They are creating a world for themselves.

It’s not surprising, then, that children find creative play another way to indulge their hardwired need to create worlds. I have friends who created elaborate fantasy worlds with Barbies: many, like my sisters and myself, who dreamed up plays and histories; ones who recreated abuse and trauma in their play. For children, creative play is as integral to their development as is language. Storytelling is in our genes, because that is our first understanding of the universe. As a result, creativity and storytelling is vital to all of us. Our first understanding of story is necessarily the stories we tell ourselves. The first world we build is our own.

Writers, instead of seeing “child’s play” as something infantile or inferior, keep that understanding that a world must be built in order to tell the right story. Worldbuilding is not simply something that we, as writers, do as prelude to providing an entertaining tale, though is certainly that as well, but a process that begins with the discovery of self, and continues until we grow old enough that we think our world is complete. And even when a story is written and cut loose, the story continues with the reader’s interpretations, the way they integrate a writer’s story with their own common experiences. That world may become very big indeed.

So the next time you see a child playing, remember: someday their story may cross yours. Their world may become a part of your own. And even if it doesn’t, they and you have engaged in that most human of activities: building the world around you.