Building Blocks
On World Building, Myth, and Lego
Image Credit @EndlessAges on Deviant Art
Do you remember playing with Lego? Whether child, teen, or adult there is something special about the feeling of clicking blocks together to create, that is near impossible to replicate.
When I was younger I used to love playing with Lego. I would spend hours, clicking pieces together, building, and breaking. I adored the simple action, the ability to create something physical from the ideas that bounced about in my mind.
And that's the magic of Lego, isn't it?
It's the childish joy that grips us even still when we're given the chance to have a go. This sense of creation, something that can be built and unbuilt as often as needs must. For me, more oft than not, the well-constructed sets would have their instructions discarded until at last, I wanted it all back together again. Then came the search, which was fun and nearly impossible.
Bionicles were my favourite.
Their clip-in limbs and tiny cogs. The way each piece could be manipulated and reused, creating mechanisms that allowed them to collapse, shoot or even snap. I spent hours fiddling with them, often ignoring the instructions altogether. The creatures I created were different; all spiky limbs and pointed corners. Looking back now, that may even be where the Inquisitors came from. The spider-like bodies, mishappen limbs and ludicrous levels of blades are still clear in my mind's eye. Whether or not that is the case, however, Lego and Bionicles, fuelled my want to create, helping me to realise imagined ideas in a medium that encourages creativity. Love of Lego can spawn many career paths, from crafts workers through to architects, but for me, it formed an altogether different foundation.
Lego was where I first started to World Build.
Many writers think of world-building in the abstract. We like to imagine ourselves as all-powerful creators, omnipotent. We are the who, the what, the when, and the why. And it's easy to fall into this trap. After all, writers build the world we write in. We create mountains and rivers, spawn creatures, people, places, and things.
We are Gods and Goddesses building the universe in six days and taking the seventh for a well-deserved nap.
But this kind of world-building is a fantasy. The reality is quite a bit different.
In my experience, World Building is a continuous and ever-changing process. It incorporates aspects from various different media, memories, and even from the weirdest of places. I still laugh when I think about how much influence a short course in psychology, I did at age 16 has had on the foundations of Spirit Science.
It boggles the mind exactly what the writing forges will choose to use for wordsmithing.
But, I am drawn once more to my experience of Lego. Back then I would take pieces from branded sets and mash them together. A little bit of Harry Potter could mesh with some Star Wars. Bionicle bits could snap into random shapes, and terrorise the newly muddled townsfolk. It was madness, brilliant fun and it served as a foundation for what would later become something more. This act of melding, of taking old ideas and reworking them isn’t new. I’ll take a more in-depth look at my inspirations in a different post, but for now, I ask you to take me at my word, or at least Roland Barthes’s.
No text is anything but a tissue of quotations.
The Celts believed this; in fact, they loathed the idea of a solid text. Everything to them was fluid, living. It changed with the times, the location, the storyteller, and the listener. This belief is what makes their mythos so difficult to pin to one place. A tale was told, never written down and it is only through the work of the Christian Monks that we have anything of it to look at today. What makes this so interesting is that it directly combats the modern way of thinking.
We return to the writer as a God. All knowing, all powerful and well, all limiting.
The writing Canon is useful in allowing writers to own their own work, but it creates a kind of problem that we choose to ignore. Mythos. When it comes down to it, there are only so many stories out there, and looking at myth, they’ve all already been told. From Fairytale to Mythic Epic, the world is packed full of tales that host all the same tropes, twists, and turns. We know them, we love them.
But I hear you asking; what does this have to do with Lego?
The Lego method, as I like to call it, is a form of world-building and writing in general, that forgoes the idea of Canon. Everything has already been written so why not take from what you love? Embracing this ideal freed me from the bounds of originality and instead let me create something completely new from a whole lot of very old. My world is a sum of my experiences, my reading habits, my life, and my hobbies. It steals from aesthetics I adore and twists in colour from unusual places. It builds houses from a mishmash of branded bricks and random ideas. It expands and encapsulates a whole universe of possible stories. And in the end, through this structureless insanity, I have built something that lives and breathes with me.
Embracing the Lego method helped me to bring my world to life. It became something more than simply words on a page.
And now, as I attempt to examine these unseen places I have so unknowingly affected in my work, I continue to discover new aspects of the world I created. I am as much a traveller in this space as any of my readers, and I love the feeling. So come on, build some Lego with me. I can’t wait to see what we create.