Episode 7: Powers of Ten
“If it flies and eats bread, I’m calling it a duck”
If a storyteller breaks too many rules, a world becomes indecipherable. Even in an alien world with creatures of all shapes and sizes, there ideally is an underlying reason for their appearance, culture and rule of action that we can relate to.
As a primer for this conversation we watched Charles & Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten video, which explores humanity at all scales. This notion is applied to the art of systematic world building in order to tell a story with enough context to support its characters.
The macro scale of world building includes the “character-less” aspects of a world from the laws of science, the technology available, the basic values of a civilization and more. Once that world is established, the characters are free to interact within those bounds. And ultimately, it is up to the storyteller to structure how these actions are presented.
Our guest host, Sean Konig, is crafting his own narrative with his ongoing work: Readers and Deceivers.
