Last week I mentioned Patricia C Wrede, her fantasy novels, and their brilliant world-building. If you’re an author, let me recommend her advice on writing and world-building.
But I also want to talk about world-building from a different perspective. In creating Caldryn Parliament and its Realm I deliberately set about building a safe space. There is danger in it, as well as heartbreak and grief. Nonetheless, it is a space removed from real life; one where I can guarantee a happy ever after.
The intriguing aspect of a created safe space is that it becomes a place where we can play. Novels are where we safely explore and test ideas. In reading we become different people in different worlds making courageous decisions and surviving (at least in my books) to go on to new adventures.
Underpinning this concept of a safe space is Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, of “other spaces”.
Writing this post I took a deep breath, and then, opted for the sensible decision of providing you with a link to his thoughts on heterotopia rather than trying and failing to summarise them. This isn’t just intellectual inability or laziness on my part. The article I’m linking to gives so many jumping off points for understanding how the setting we choose for a novel frames the otherness of the story and contributes to what we explore.
So, thank you to MIT for sharing the article. It is a pdf and will probably download automatically, so please be aware of this before clicking the link: https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf
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