When the winds of change blow hard enough, the most trivial of things can turn into deadly projectiles.
— Despair, Inc.
Writing so much about Change this week has invited too much of it into my life. Fortunately, I’ve been able to adapt and overcome…mostly. And so, to wrap up this week of Change in World-building, I want to tackle one last thing.
Handling world-building problems with change: learn to pivot!
Look, it’s a fact of life that not everything is going to go our way all the time, and the more accepting we are of this fact, the easier things will be in general. That being said, it’s also important to have some coping skills on hand for those times.
Like any first draft, the early stages of our world-building are usually wild explosions of imaginative ideas splashed everywhere around us. This might be a metaphor or, if you’re like me, maybe your project is scattered in a dozen different places, in G-docs, in this notebook, on that napkin.
In short, it’s art. And like any other art project that we hope to bring to the public, we have to prune it and shape it and polish it. There comes a point in every world-building project where some Fundamental Truth of your world will collide with a different Absolute Law of your reality.
That’s when you need to pivot!
Either the Absolute Law must go, or the Fundamental Truth must go, or you must find some clever way of bridging the gap between the two. Sometimes, despite our best efforts, we must let go of the sunk-cost fallacy1 and scrap some idea — or even several core ideas — because we cannot find a way to make it make sense.2
Pivoting — standing in place and turning in a new direction, sometimes called a ‘hard turn’ — allows us to take stock of what is working, and easily abandon what is not. A pivot allows you to forge a new path which might even end up bringing you, by a different route, to where you wanted to be in the first place!
Let’s take a look at my world-building in Avalon, Indiana. It is a rural village, set in the middle of dense forest, and inhabited by a mixture of the forgotten living and the troubled dead.
Because I’m working in the near-real world, I have to be slow and deliberate in my world-building, which means that I’m pausing to pivot before I get stuck, not after. For instance, the article I’ve been working on today, Those Damn Scooters (vehicle), is answering the world-building prompt: A VEHICLE THAT, WHEN INTRODUCED, CAUSED SOCIAL UPHEAVAL.
Knowing that the village was established in 1717, I had a lot of history to choose from, and a lot of innovative vehicles that have been introduced in the 300 years since. Everything from roller skates and bicycles to automatic tractors and cars.
So I paused, to consider my pivotal options.
It’s a small community, so cars aren’t really necessary; pivot…
Avalon, by its very liminal nature, would be progressive about things such as bicycles and roller skates; pivot…
It’s a modern setting, so what sorts of vehicles cause a stir in a modern setting that I could place in Avalon?
Two come immediately to mind
golf carts
motorized scooters
At that point, it was simply a matter of choosing which would make the most dramatic impact. Scooters have that little extra added benefit of being not only ‘a young person’s foolhardy exercise,’ but also quite selfishly single-person occupancy.
Golf carts would have been slightly more useful, if only for the added seating, and so motorized scooter won.
I hope this example of changing direction — or choosing direction! — in world-building has been helpful to your own endeavors. If you’ve enjoyed this piece, make sure that you catch up with the entire series on Change in Worldbuilding:
The sunk-cost fallacy is when people continue investing in a failing endeavor because they’ve already invested so much. This irrational behavior ignores future losses and focuses solely on past costs. “I’ve spent soooo muuuuch time/money/energy/resources on this! I don’t want to start over, it feels like suuuuuch a waste!” It’s like chasing shadows, hoping to catch what’s already gone.
Even in absurdist settings, such as Monty Python, the world still makes sense because the ‘average bloke’ just goes along. All of the comedy is treated as though the ridiculousness is an expected part of the world. Remaining stoic while watching the Minister of Silly Walks demonstrate what it takes to properly qualify for a development grant is what sells the believability. Because these are taken in stride within the worldbuilding of each sketch, the world makes sense.