Why I’m building a world, not a trilogy

One thing that has repeatedly struck me while working on Sphereworld is that I almost instinctively recoil whenever I catch myself thinking of it as “the series” (or the trilogy, or whatever shape it might eventually take). Not because I have anything against trilogies—many of my favourite fantasy works could reasonably be described as such—but because that has never really been the point.

In fact, I don’t think of Sphereworld mainly as a series. I think of it as a world. A world in which many stories happen. Sure, I’ll pick a “main” story to tell, that follows some version of the hero’s journey (because that is, to some degree, the kind of story that I want to read), but that’s not the only story I’ll pick to tell, and certainly not the only thing that happens in the world.

That might seem like little more than semantics; after all, if I end up writing several books set within the same world, then surely it is a series. In one sense that is perfectly true. But the order in which those thoughts occur matters rather more than one might initially think. The world comes first. The stories follow.

Where it all starts

Whenever I come across a particularly interesting fantasy idea - and many of Sphereworld’s ideas have begun in exactly this way - it almost always starts with the same thought:

“Wouldn’t it be interesting if…?” (or it’s egotist author cousin “I want my cool fantasy world to have…”)

Wouldn’t it be interesting if magic could be studied at a university? (What do people actually learn there? If there’s one or several universities supporting this, it must be worthwhile learning it to succeed in the job market - what does the “I studied magic” job market look like? Can anyone enroll?)

I want my cool fantasy world to have dragons. (Great, but where do they live? Are they integrated into society? Rare? What do they eat? How much do they eat? How many are there and how do we make sure they don’t eat all the other animals? And what about the existence of unicorns?)

Wouldn’t it be interesting if gods actually existed as real people? (What form do they take? What powers do they have and why? Is there a fixed roster of gods or do they change with the times? How does one become a god?)

Wouldn’t it be interesting if…

Questions upon questions assail the poor builder of worlds. But let’s face it: This is where the fun starts! Figuring out answers to these questions (and others like them) that gel well with all the other answers while also opening up potential for interesting stories to happen within the world, for interesting perspectives to open up (for example, what does the day-to-day of a god or goddess look like? Maybe an interesting side story?).

It is kind of like game design: You are designing systems that have to work well together and in the end create an interesting and fulfilling experience for the player (/reader). Ideally the player/reader does not even notice the different systems because they work together seamlessly.

The parts no one ever sees

One of the qualities I admire most in the fantasy worlds to which I keep returning is not that they contain enormous amounts of detail; it is that they consistently give the impression of containing more than I shall ever see. Someone mentions a war fought centuries ago. A traveller briefly refers to a city that never appears again. A historian argues with another historian over some long-dead king whom neither the reader nor the protagonist has ever heard of. None of these things advance the plot. In fact, one could remove almost all of them without changing the story in the slightest.

And yet I suspect the world would feel noticeably smaller without them. It would begin to resemble a theatre set: convincing from the audience, but only until one wanders backstage and discovers that the castle is little more than painted timber held upright by a surprising amount of optimism. The invisible parts of a world lend weight to the visible ones.

More than one story

It has therefore never really made sense to me to build Sphereworld around a single plot. Not because I know what all the other stories are—far from it—but because I rather hope that, if I spend enough time making the world feel alive, those stories will eventually make themselves known.

After all, every day across Sphereworld countless things happen that no reader will ever hear about. Merchants negotiate contracts. Children attend school. Kings make poor decisions (okay you might hear about this one). Scholars argue over books. Someone quietly falls in love. Someone else quietly buries a friend. Most of these stories are not worth writing. They happen anyway. And I think that is rather important.

Looking ahead

Whether Sphereworld eventually contains three books, thirty books, or only one is, in some sense, almost incidental. Naturally I hope it will be many; one does not spend this much time building a world in the hope of leaving it after a single visit. But if there is one feeling I hope readers eventually take away from these books, it is not that they have seen all there is to see. Quite the opposite.

I hope they close the final page with the comforting suspicion that, somewhere beyond it, life in Sphereworld is continuing perfectly well without them—and that, perhaps, there are still a great many stories left waiting to be told.