Why I Built a World Instead of Just a Story

When I began writing The Quantum Gate, I thought I was writing a single novel. It was a story I imagined in one form or another for well over a decade. When I decided to actually put it to paper, I knew what version of the story I wanted to tell. I could see a beginning and an ending as I was writing. I had the man. I had the mystery. I had the sand and the legend buried beneath it. That was going to be it, and I believed that right up until the last couple chapters.

It spoke to me quietly. No emotion, and not all at once. It happened the way water settles in low places, a little at a time until it fills an entire field. I would answer one question on the page, or close out one plotline as I was finishing up the final act, and feel three more come up. The strange part was that these questions didn’t feel like problems. They felt like new unexplored rooms I discovered in the very thing I thought I was building from scratch. The story kept pointing past its own edges, in every direction, well past the border I’d envisioned for it.

I tried to fight it for a while. A writer is supposed to keep boundaries and finish the task in front of him before it consumes his life, or as we say in the IT business, Feature Creep. I knew that, and I tried to do it. But every time I went to seal the world off, my chest would tighten in that way it does when you’re telling yourself a small and uncomfortable lie. The world was bigger than the story. Hell, the story was bigger than the story. I could feel it sitting there — my imagination started doing what it always has done, blaze trails into new spaces, new rooms, and see an almost cinematic continuation.

I never felt like I was inventing that world. I felt like I was finding it.

To create a thing is to make it from nothing. You lay every brick, raise every stud, and drive every nail where you please. When you finish you get to call what you create yours. Finding something, however, is different. You sense a place, person, or world that already is, and your only job is to write down what’s there, just as you see it. One’s an act of intent. The other — I keep coming back to this word — is closer to listening, which is what I think imagination might be. And the deeper in I went, the less it felt like creating and the more it felt like discovering. It was like brushing dust off something that had been waiting a long time for somebody (me) to look at it.

My daily writing always began with a morning meditation, a true act of listening. It was there that inspiration found me, or so I thought. Perhaps instead, I just dusted off an artifact that inspired the next phase of my story. And by the end of The Quantum Gate, I was dusting off a lot of artifacts.

I know how this might sound. I’m absolutely not claiming some voice dictated the book to me, and I’m not pretending the work wasn’t mine. What I mean is not mysticism, and it runs straight through the center of everything I write, and believe. If memory and imagination aren’t the opposites we were handed as children, if the mind actually reaches in both directions at once, then maybe some of what we call making things up is really a kind of remembering. Maybe a world can feel found because, in a way, which I can’t prove to you, it was.

This one idea changes what I think a story is even for. A story woven out of nothing entertains you, and then it lets you go back to your life. A world you can return to does something else entirely. It turns into a place. A real place that keeps us. We carry them around. We slip back into them in our daydreams, and they seem to have gone on living while we were away.

I’ve been thinking about the worlds that did that to me, back before I ever tried to make one myself. For me it was Middle-earth, and I was a kid. I used to read The Lord of the Rings everywhere I could, in the evening long after I was supposed to be asleep, or in the school library between classes. The honest truth is I did not want to come back. Out there were chores, homework, and more school. In here there were mountains, Elves, Dwarves, and a road that went ever on, and I would have stayed if they’d let me.

You have a world like that too. I’d bet money on it. Some place from a book or a film, that felt, against all good sense, like something familiar, or even somewhere you had actually been. Not a movie you admired, but a somewhere, with people and weather and a life that kept running even if you weren’t watching.

If one just came to mind for you, I’d genuinely love to know which one it was, and why it kept its grip on you all this time. Hit reply and tell me. I read every letter that comes back, and this is one question I never get tired of asking.

Because I’ve come to believe the worlds that feel most made up are the ones we’re quietly remembering. A real world isn’t one you finish. It’s one you keep going back to, and find — every single time — that it went right on growing while you were gone.